Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism) (African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora) 3030999432, 9783030999438

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Theory of Racelessness, a Methodological and Pedagogical Framework
Introduction
Race(ism) Under Construction
Philosophizing “Race”
The Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Anti-race(ism)
Looking Forward
Bibliography
Chapter 2: African American Literature and Anti-Racism Practices
Bibliography
Chapter 3: The Theory of Racelessness in Literary Studies: The Literal Absence of “Race” Versus the Figurative Presence of Color
Introduction
She’s Tragic (Mulatta)
Racelessness as Trope
The Literal Absence of “Race” Versus the Figurative Presence of Color
Beyond and Against Race(ism) Into Home
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Toni Morrison’s Marathon Run Home to Racelessness in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise
Bibliography
Chapter 5: The Theory of Racelessness: Cutting Through the Madness of Race(ism)
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Imagining a Post-Racist Nation
Index

Citation preview

AFRICAN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Theory of Racelessness A Case for Antirace(ism)

Sheena Michele Mason

African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora Series Editors Jacoby Adeshei Carter Department of Philosophy Howard University Washington, DC, USA Leonard Harris Purdue University West Lafayette, IN, USA

The African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora Series publishes high quality work that considers philosophically the experiences of African descendant peoples in the United States and the Americas. Featuring sing-authored manuscripts and anthologies of original essays, this collection of books advance the philosophical understanding of the problems that black people have faced and continue to face in the Western Hemisphere. Building on the work of pioneering black intellectuals, the series explores the philosophical issues of race, ethnicity, identity, liberation, subjugation, political struggles, and socio-economic conditions as they pertain to black experiences throughout the Americas. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14377

Sheena Michele Mason

Theory of Racelessness A Case for Antirace(ism)

Sheena Michele Mason SUNY Oneonta Oneonta, NY, USA

ISSN 2945-5995     ISSN 2945-6002 (electronic) African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora ISBN 978-3-030-99943-8    ISBN 978-3-030-99944-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99944-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Contributor: Brain light / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Lakisha, Tatiana, Skyler, Josiah, and Tyrese.

Acknowledgments

As the saying goes, “It takes a village.” In that spirit, I want to take a moment to thank the members of my village. In 2002, I had to sign myself out of high school. It was my senior year. I was an AP honors student and was taking college economics and English courses. I was a varsity athlete, a flutist, and an alto in my school’s selective choir set apart from the general chorus. It should have been the best year of my life. Instead, I found myself escaping the abusive and neglectful house of my adoptive parents, preferring homelessness over remaining in that house that was not, as it goes, ever home. My honors teachers expressed concern that I would become a “statistic” and never return to school. However, Kathy Frasier, my social worker at the school, told them, “She will return and complete her diploma. It’s just a matter of when.” That memory of Mrs Frasier and her response is forever emblazoned onto my mind. I remembered her and that moment when I doubted my abilities over the years. I always knew that I was destined for more. Additionally, I wish to thank Dana Williams, Yasmin DeGout, Christopher Shinn, and Jacoby Adeshei Carter, at Howard University, and Gene Jarrett, at Princeton University. Your consistent support and conversation remain invaluable. Jacoby, your sincere engagement with and clear rearticulation of my ideas helped make my first book infinitely better. You underestimate just how much I learn from you. Thank you for investing in me.

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Praise for Theory of Racelessness “Those of us who have grown proud of our ability to do anti-racist work in the classroom will find humility encountering Sheena Mason’s Theory of Racelessness. Mason asks us to throw out the familiar script and join in a conversation that is suddenly fresher, broader, and even more challenging. This is absolutely necessary reading.” —George Hovis, Professor of English, SUNY Oneonta, USA “This is how the world becomes a better place. Dr. Mason joins a growing number of thinkers issuing a clarion call to see past the restrictive and divisive boundaries of the racial worldview in order to truly and finally overcome racism. Her insights and arguments invite everyone with an open mind and a true desire to overcome racism to resist the ways we’ve been socialized to orient our sense of self based on a malicious myth, and to consider how we can preserve pride in overcoming oppression without continuing to reify and perpetuate the false divisions that enable oppression. Dr. Mason reminds us that race is an inherently nebulous and nefarious concept, and she urges us to act on that truth by making the necessary effort to eliminate it from the ways we understand and define human identity. Race is an inherited idea, not a feature of immutable heredity. Dr. Mason invites us to interrogate the bad idea of race and move towards a world made better by its absence.” —Carlos Hoyt, Author of The Arch of a Bad Idea “Sheena M. Mason advances the bold claim that racism is a crazy-making regime that inspires jaundiced categorizations of American life in a foolish attempt to order things by ‘race.’ Theory of Racelessness represents an unapologetic commitment to the elimination of racism and the corresponding belief in race. It is an unwavering attempt to wrestle squarely with the historical and contemporary facts of racism, without making the mistake of reifying common beliefs about race. Mason displays an incredible synergistic and critical comprehension of philosophical theories and arguments about race, and the relevance of each to grounding a new interpretive methodology and pedagogy of African American literature. Mason artfully reframes the supposition that race is real and matters with the more astute contention that racism is real and matters. Mason’s text emerges at the intersection of philosophy of race and African American literary studies, offering a scathing critique of disciplinary suppositions that clears the way for a prescient understanding of African American literature.” —Jacoby Adeshei Carter, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Howard University, USA

“Dr. Sheena Mason’s Theory of Racelessness offers a 21st century thesaurus for explaining and grappling with the issue of racism. It highlights the need for a selfreflective approach to addressing racism—one that does not reify but, instead, eliminates the conceptual machinery that maintains racism. Dr. Mason’s book voyages beyond the superficial ecosystem that many of her contemporaries are playing in, and arrives at the very heart of the racism issue—the exact place we need to be if we are to get anywhere close to ridding the human family of this malignant plague. In the globalized, connected landscape that we currently occupy, it goes without saying that history will look at Dr. Mason’s Theory with a smile.” —Eric Ehigie, Corporate Law Student at the National University of Ireland Galway, Podcaster, and the Politics Coordinator at “Black and Irish” “Dr. Sheena Mason’s book is a doorway into a revelatory way of thinking about race and racism. Her subject is African American literature from its earliest times through Toni Morrison and even more contemporary writers. Her objective is to excavate the way these people who have always been Americans in the truest sense have both confronted and confounded the conceptual prisons they have been invited into, as we all are, still. We learn how nuanced and varied have been the ways that African Americans have seen the ‘race craft’ of racialization throughout our history. I imagine other readers riding the beautiful curves of Mason’s imaginal landscape as she surveys the work of some truly brilliant writers, in a topic that has bedeviled us, so badly, and finding ‘a worldview in which one can be liberated from certain forms of madness.’ This is an incredibly satisfying, highly intriguing, and it may not be too much to say, historic book.” —Daniel Sperry, Composer/Producer “Mason’s Theory of Racelessness offers a refreshing and much needed (re)analysis on the concept of ‘race.’ Likewise, while she challenges previous notions of ‘race,’ she puts forward a humanity focused future in which ‘race’ is understood, but not intrinsic to one’s being.” —Mamobo Ogoro, Social Psychologist, University of Limerick, Ireland “This well-argued and revolutionary penned book confirms Mason’s position as an epistemic revolutionary and decolonial thinker with a massive potential to globally shift mindsets from the enslavement of pro-race (racist) lenses to the liberation of racelessness. It should be a compulsory read for every human so that we can free ourselves from the limiting identity boxes that stem from racialization and ultimately end racism with its micro and macro complexities.” —Shayla S. Dube, MSW, RSW, Identity Based Trauma & Racial Trauma Expert, Langa Decolonial Healing Inc.

“Systems do not make themselves, individuals and their corresponding beliefs make up systems. I find Dr. Sheena Mason’s Theory of Racelessness to be both a call to action and a practical approach, that offers a unique perspective on the belief based ideology of race. TOR gives the reader a rational framework from within which the belief in race can be confronted and eliminated. A must read for individuals serious about eliminating racism.” —Ogie Iyamu, Registered Social Worker, Edmonton, Alberta “Mason’s book offers a unique and timely view of the historical and ongoing field of African American literary theory and criticism. Mason’s book deftly argues that the field has largely conflated race with the content and structure of African American literary practice resulting in both race(ism) and raci(al/ist) views of African American literature. In reconstituting African American literary theory, Mason’s book establishes a new perspective of African American literary theory and criticism and works to expand the canon, in the process rereading the entire history of African American literary practice.” —James Haile III, Associate Professor of Philosophy & Literature, University of Rhode Island, USA

Contents

1 Introduction: The Theory of Racelessness, a Methodological and Pedagogical Framework  1 Introduction   1 Race(ism) Under Construction   8 Philosophizing “Race”  19 The Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Anti-race(ism)  30 Looking Forward  34 Bibliography  38 2 African American Literature and Anti-Racism Practices 41 Bibliography  66 3 The Theory of Racelessness in Literary Studies: The Literal Absence of “Race” Versus the Figurative Presence of Color 69 Introduction  69 She’s Tragic (Mulatta)  77 Racelessness as Trope  80 The Literal Absence of “Race” Versus the Figurative Presence of Color  84 Beyond and Against Race(ism) Into Home 107 Bibliography 108

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4 Toni Morrison’s Marathon Run Home to Racelessness in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise111 Bibliography 157 5 The Theory of Racelessness: Cutting Through the Madness of Race(ism)159 Bibliography 211 6 Conclusion: Imagining a Post-Racist Nation217 Index221

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Theory of Racelessness, a Methodological and Pedagogical Framework

Introduction The theory of racelessness is a methodological and pedagogical framework for analysis that illustrates how the undoing of racism requires the undoing of “race,” inspires a more astute identification and analysis of racism, and stops unintentionally reifying racism by upholding race ideology and its corresponding language. Theory of racelessness is also a philosophy of race, ethnicity, culture, and class that extends and explores the boundaries of racial skepticism and delineates clearer paths toward racial eliminativism, which I interpret as enabling us to finally transcend racism.1 The theory of racelessness reflects two philosophical positions on “race” that are uncommonly taught and commonly misunderstood: skepticism—the belief that race does not exist in nature—and eliminativism—the position that the concept of race, whatever it is, should be eradicated from human society. It demands simultaneously the recognition that human beings are already raceless in some ways (i.e., racial skepticism) and, consequently, the abolition of the category of race to undo racism (i.e., racial eliminativism). It is a call for the truth about the persistence of race and its corresponding -ism in the US.  The core tenets of the  theory of 1  The words race and racial throughout this book should always be understood to be within quotation marks. I am only using quotation marks here to improve readability.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. M. Mason, Theory of Racelessness, African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99944-5_1

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racelessness are as follows: Race does not exist in nature. Race does not exist as a social construction. Everyone is raceless. Racism includes the belief in race as biological or a construction and the practice of racialization. Racism is not everywhere and is not the cause for every perceived “racial” disparity or negative interaction. Racism can be overcome. Race does not exist in nature. Racial naturalists believe that race exists in nature. It is biological. I argue that what people translate into race or evidence of race as biological, like skin color, ancestry, IQ disparities, diseases, and DNA, indicates a conceptual error. Racial realism, as it pertains to biology, presumes that divvying people up into various “races” is a meaningful and inevitable way to divide human beings, which misplaces an inordinate amount of utility and benefit onto the categorization. DNA, ancestry, and skin complexion reflect one’s ethnicity, not race. There is a plethora of ethnicities that do not transfer neatly into the handful of “racial” categories argued to exist given human migration patterns. As for conceptions of “racial” IQ disparities or the impact of diseases and medicines on different “racial” groups, environment is often more predictive than genomes. The belief in race leads to its corresponding racism, which impacts how people are treated in medicine and schools, for example. How people are treated can result in notable disparities that appear “racial” but are symptoms of the impact of racism or something else entirely. Race does not exist as a social construction. Therefore, when “race” is present in discourse, media, history, literature, and anywhere else, one must translate the corresponding race language into more precise and accurate language, like that of social or economic class, culture, ethnicity, racism, and so on. In the  theory of racelessness, racial antirealism can include some forms of racial social constructionism, as many constructionists contend that race is not biologically real but that it manifests as a socially real phenomenon. In other words, constructionists can have a fair amount of skepticism as to the realness of race. Constructionists will make statements such as “Race is not real. It was completely made up to subjugate groups of people.” Further inquiry and reflection illuminate that what some people mean when they make such assertions is that race is not biologically real. It was conjured to demarcate certain groups of people from each other. In that way, race has been made real. It has real consequences and benefits. Through the theory of racelessness, I interpret this to say that race is not real in any way. People misname racism, culture, class, or ethnicity and call those social constructions “race.” But that people believe in race does not satisfy my conception of its realness. Racism is real. It has real consequences.

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Racial reconstructionists assert that “race” can be refashioned to inflict less harm. By my philosophical positionality, the effort to reconstruct race is truly an effort to reconstruct racism, as evidenced by the consistent refashioning of how race and racism have been defined, or to correct people’s understanding of race. In some ways, the theory of racelessness works to more fruitfully correct and expand how one thinks of racism with the express purpose of aiding society to finally transcend it by discarding the belief in race, stopping racism in its tracks. Both skepticism and eliminativism involve forms of reconstruction. Importantly,  the theory of racelessness seeks to undo, not reconstruct, racism by undoing the corresponding belief in race. If we continue to misdirect the focus away from racism toward race to, ironically, examine racism, then we continue to allow the problem to persist. Throughout this book, I deploy one of the theory of racelessness’ most helpful tools of application: the race translator. The translator renders clearer the nonexistence of race, the persistence of racism through race(ism), a term I define shortly, and the necessity of undoing race to undo racism. In this book, I focus primarily on translating “race” into race(ism) to highlight the frequent sameness and the need to stop misdirecting discourse and solutions. Although racial skepticism of the type I have named is a vital aspect of the theory of racelessness, it is not a deal breaker. Many constructionists are or can be eliminativists. This theory helps constructionists avoid the ideological pitfalls often associated with the belief in “race” that then translate into usually well-intended but woefully unhelpful anti-racist efforts. Everyone is raceless, including the writers and characters analyzed in this book. Using the theory, I examine the historical and contemporary instances of racism without reifying the idea of race and do so from outside of the confines created by both the belief in race and the conflation of race with racism,  class, ethnicity, or culture. This theory of race avoids upholding racism by perpetuating race and is, by extension, truly anti-­ race(ist). The thing called “race” does not exist, but people imagine it does, and this sustains it, meaning racism is sustained. The belief in “race” needs to be abolished. To abolish race from a position of skepticism is a radical act of acknowledging our current racelessness: our existence outside the bounds of racism, our rejection of a nonsensical means of subjugation and elevation that has no positive or forward-moving value even if it has had practical utility for various groups across time and place. In addition to the race translator, I coined terms to avoid inadvertently upholding race and, thereby, racism and make clearer the unavoidable linkage between the concept of race, a symptom, and the practice of racism, the root cause of “race.” To the extent possible, I will use my conventional

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usage of words when applying my theory. I will use the standard convention when describing someone else’s position. Toward the goals of liberation and avoiding unintentional reification of race, I coined the terms “race(ism),” “race(ist),” “raci(al/st), “anti-­ race(ist),” “race(ism)less,” and “anti-race(ism).” The point of these coinings is to highlight the deep reciprocal causal connections between things typically thought to be distinct. Most Americans tacitly believe that race exists independently of any racism or racist attitudes. They presuppose that there are inherent “racial” features of humans and that “racism” and “racist” beliefs and actions are biased against these so-called racial features. The point of my coinings is that, instead, seeing our fellow humans in racial terms—seeing them as “raced”—actually creates “race.” That is, understanding human differences (which are attributable to culture, ethnicity, class, and other factors) in either benignly “racial” or malignantly “racist” ways creates and maintains “race.” Hence “race(ism)” and my other novel terms keep before our eyes the fact that racism creates the fiction of race and needs our continued belief to persist. Eliminating racism means eliminating the belief in race. Racism includes the belief in race as biological or a construction and the practice of racialization. It is systemic because many of us teach and learn “race” at virtually every stage of our lives. Often, the teaching and receiving of race(ism) into our lives comes guised as innocuous, a form of resistance, empowering, and liberatory. “Race” gets formulated and reconstructed to be conflated with everything positive or negative, sometimes a mixture, but infrequently are we inspired to see ourselves outside of it, as able to overcome its nefarious nature, as better off without it in its entirety. Race(ism) is part of a system of knowledge that must be uprooted and interrogated at its roots if we are sincere in our anti-racist efforts. Race(ism) involves the belief that human beings are naturally born, for better or worse, into separate and distinct categories or “races.” This belief often includes an assumption of a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority among the so-called races. This assumption of hierarchy is bound to perpetuate racism, for it precludes all people racialized as not “white” from being “racist” in the context of the US. In this way, too, race(ism) festers and persists. Because I look as I do, I can say anything I want to you, mistreat you, lambast you, and yet not be “racist.” In turn, if you look like me, you can mistreat me because I do not conform to the box you create for yourself based on race(ism), and you cannot be racist. People who take this view of racism

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define it as “prejudice plus institutional power.”2 As a result, in the context of the US, people not racialized as white cannot be racist. Within the theory of racelessness, because I define racism as including the belief in race as biological or a construction, anyone who holds the belief in “race” is race(ist). The ethics typically ascribed to what it means to be racist get moved to the backburner, as moral suasion against racism has taken us as far as it can. It is more a matter of fact, which, along with the tenet of racelessness, helps lessen the emotional hinderances that have interfered with solution-making and self-liberation. Racism is not everywhere and is not the cause for every “racial” disparity or negative interaction. Though the belief in race would have us also see and feel race(ism) at every turn since we can witness or learn a person’s prejudices, class, ethnicity, and cultural inclinations, the theory of racelessness requires participants to question everything. Disparities and differences exist in human societies. Not all such differences and disparities neatly translate into racism or other forms of oppression even though some uphold racist ideas about certain racialized people. The fact that American society, for example, persists in collecting data based on the belief in race, however well intended, is part of the machinery of race(ism) and its systemic nature. The design of studies around “race” provides and confirms the optics required to maintain the belief. The outcome of many studies inevitably shows some level of disparity. The disparities themselves get interpreted in ways that uphold race(ism). That also then results in a continued belief in said race(ism). All of this matters since unequal access to opportunities plague some communities. Those communities remain largely ignored or even negatively impacted by the misdirection of discourse and solutionmaking and the obscuring of the race-racism evasion. We need to be more precise to identify problems. We need to be increasingly cleareyed about what race(ism) is and how it negatively impacts all believers in race. Racism can be overcome. It is not a permanent state. To best engage with this book, I invite you to step into your racelessness. See yourself as unracialized. See yourself with your culture, ethnicity, and class. Only remove the nefariousness caused by race(ism). Imagine that you are you but without “race,” without racism. Race is not real, not in nature, and not as a construction. Racism is real. Racism is the belief in 2  See Patricia Bidol-Padva’s chapter in Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism, Verso, 1990, p. 99 and Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp. 54–70.

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race as a social construction or as something in nature. The hierarchy is race, rendering other definitions redundant (i.e., those with the words inferior/superior, etc.). If we remain serious about transcending racism, the difference matters. So long as race(ism) and other meaningful human differences and similarities continue to camouflage themselves as race, too many people will see racism everywhere they imagine “race” and see color. In other words, people see color, a proxy for race, and validate the existence of race, which then encourages people to see racism everywhere there are presupposed “racial” differences. Whereas sometimes “race” is culture, class, or ethnicity camouflaging itself, the occasional sameness of race and racism manifests in the language we use: “Race matters. I want you to see my race. Racism is real,” and so it goes. The following quote by Toni Morrison alternates the words: “There is no such thing as race. There’s just the human race, scientifically. Racism is a construct, a social construct. And it has its benefits…. But race can only be defined as a human being” (emphasis added, “57 Seconds”), she told Stephen Colbert. Notice the “it” with benefits is “racism.” And racism is the social construct, not “race.” Yet, the frequent sameness of “race” and racism allows some people to gloss over such assertions as saying what many of us hear or suppose is correct: Race is real, has benefits, and is a social construction. The common sameness of the two, though, and the fact that the ideas of race and “racial difference” are perceived as evidence of racism has many people misdirecting solutions for race(ism) and misidentifying the problem. We have not yet gotten to the roots but have fooled ourselves into thinking we have with all the “race” talk happening now around the world. Morrison’s evolving philosophy of race that illustrates her skeptical eliminativism remains largely overlooked within African American literary studies and elsewhere, probably because some people remain unsure of what she means and how to reconcile their identifications of “black” culture in her writings with her thoughts about “race.” The theory of racelessness explores the breadth of her work and thoughts on “race” and opens the door to more accurate interpretations of her work and that of others. Importantly, nothing but racism gets removed with the removal of one’s self-ascribed or societally assigned race, a fact that Morrison seemed to know. There is nothing inherently or inheritably positive about being racialized. In fact, the converse is true. All forms of racialization oppress. That is what makes Leonard Harris’, a philosopher and Alaine Locke scholar, theorization of necro-being incredibly profound for me, as it speaks to a living death of all of us who believe in the apparition of race. However, that is not

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how he initially imagined the term being understood. Racism is something that happens to an individual. It is also something that happens within to detrimental effect. Necro-being, according to Harris, “is always that which makes living a kind of death—life that is simultaneously being robbed of its sheer potential physical being as well as non-being, the unborn” (274). Racism causes a living kind of death for everyone who exists within a society that elevates the symptom of racism—the belief in race. As Harris says, “Kill necro-being by race; cast its memory into the dustbin of absolutely forgotten history” (299). The belief in race (i.e., racism) precludes many people from seeing themselves in each other and, in many ways, from seeing themselves more fully. Whereas racelessness when properly understood necessitates the centering of humanity in all its complexity and a proliferated understanding of class, culture, and ethnicity, much like the kind Édouard Glissant describes in Poetics of Relation, raci(al/st) ideology— that which is racial and racist—requires the decentering of our individual humanity and the obscuring of other people’s humanity. In this book, I theorize racelessness and translate “race,” as it appears, to render clearer how race(ism) manifests in traditional to contemporary discourse. The theory of racelessness is an interpretive methodological way to read a body of work, a pedagogical way to teach a body of work, and a conceptual framework for teaching, talking about, and solving, resolving, and preventing racism from persisting. The theory of racelessness requires, in part, the presumption of the racelessness of each writer and character to increase the capacity to translate “race” when it appears and be more cleareyed about what is communicated about racism. I use African American literary studies and its literature as a case study that most often reflects what happens in the public sphere. I show how the belief  in “race” has been under reconstruction for centuries and the impact of upholding race ideology within a field created and imagined to be liberatory on “heterodox” thinkers and, consequently, in the unintentional perpetuation of racism. I apply the theory as a tool of literary analysis in Chaps. 3, 4, and 5. In doing so, I continue to give the theory its shape while also illustrating its applicability as a representative theory (theory of racelessness or what I call the walking negative trope), for a representative writer (Morrison), and a representative pedagogy (a way to incorporate  the rules and tools of the theory and philosophies of race in a literary studies class). While I focus primarily on the fields of study in which I specialize— African American, American, and Caribbean—the parallels between how reifying race ideology perpetuates racism and its nefarious effects should not be limited to academia. My work through Theory of Racelessness, an

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educational firm, takes what might have been only something rooted in academia to real-world situations and practices with the express purpose of helping people free themselves from race(ism). Unlike other models that began in academia and have had an arguably ironic and sometimes deleterious effect on how we identify, solve, and resolve racism, people who engage and adopt the tenets and tools of  the theory of racelessness get what many more say they want: a clearer picture of the history and contemporary presence of racism and a generative path forward that does not worsen relationships or uphold the problem. In this chapter, I continue laying the foundation for why and how I theorize racelessness and race(ism). I briefly explain the six philosophies of race. Each of us holds two positions of race even without having the language to describe them. I illustrate philosophies of race as they manifest in contemporary discourse and within texts by canonized writers within African American literary studies, like James Baldwin and Alain Locke. I do this, in part, to show how mining literary texts for deeper understandings of their philosophical underpinnings, particularly those that disrupt more well-accepted views, can lead to more generative and nuanced outcomes and, importantly, solutions such as the elimination of “race” to undo racism. I then synthesize the foundation of the theory of racelessness and alternative and often obscured philosophies (the forms of racial skepticism and eliminativism that presuppose racelessness or strive toward racelessness) of race. I do this, in part, by exploring the lesser discussed aspects of the works of otherwise canonized writers to detail how racism has been theorized within African American literary studies. I do this by examining the most used anthology of African American literature and the likes of Gene Jarrett whose anthology and work participate in recovering more varied philosophies of race. I conclude this chapter by giving an overview of each subsequent chapter. Again, I invite you to step into your racelessness.

Race(ism) Under Construction The US has been reconstructing the meaning of “race” since before the American Revolutionary War of 1775–1783, in other words, since before the US came into being independent of England.3 Largely influenced by longstanding and ever fluid European caste and class systems, race in 3  For an extensive compilation of texts/images that illustrate the “development of racial [racist] vocabularies” (“Note”) review Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (2007), compiled and edited by Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton.

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America once reflected a caste system that, at its most complex, included “white,” “black,” and “brown” indentured servants, who, for all intents and purposes, were enslaved, and enslaved indigenous and African people. Further, there were free African, indigenous, and “white” people. My primary objective in pointing to the more nuanced state of pre- to post-­ American history as it pertains to “race” is to highlight how enslavement and freedom were not racialized, in the ways many of us currently understand race, racism, and slavery, until approximately 1660 when various states began outlawing “miscegenation,” calculating blackness, and passing fugitive (en)slave(d) laws. Over time and within the bounds of the “peculiar institution of slavery,” racialization came to describe the systematic practice of marking out groups of people as the subjects or presupposed perpetrators of violence and oppression based largely on ancestry and phenotype. In many ways, racism is a synonym for the practice and action of racialization, which lends to why my definition of racism has changed to what it is now (i.e., race[ism]). It bears repeating: Racism is the belief in the existence of race as a social construction or as something in nature. Race(ism) always involves the belief in the existence of race and the practice of racialization. An unfortunate feature of race(ism) is that it reifies the belief in race. Today, people are racialized in two ways: by society and by oneself. Racialization once reflected one’s access to power even if not one’s possession of power. Indentured servitude was phased out, in its formal capacities. Black and Negro came to describe people of African descent who were considered, by law and practice, to be enslaved and chattel. Persons of color primarily described free “black/brown” people. White described all free people of seemingly visible European descent. “Whiteness” was coded within laws and policies to represent political, social, and cultural freedom and entitlement to the ideals that would become associated with America (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity, individualism, mobility, and equality, to name a few). People who were racialized as white were then freed from all forms of enslavement in the US, and were considered to be the embodiment of freedom, which was and remains conflated with the notion of racelessness. Whiteness, as it was tied to race, was conflated with the absence of race (i.e., racelessness), mirroring the perceived absence of “color,” a proxy for race.

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“Blackness,” created as a counter to “whiteness,” was often conflated with being enslaved or fit to be enslaved, lacking freedom and upward mobility even outside of enslavement, being outside of citizenship and humanity (i.e., chattel). Importantly, collectivism, immobility, and inequality were written into the concept of “blackness,” which was presupposed to be racial. In myriad ways, the black and white binary was crafted to uphold beliefs in inherent differences (i.e., individual/collective, free/ enslaved, American/hyphenated American, good/bad, saint/criminal, victim/victor, etc.). These presupposed differences play out today in complex ways that can confound, considering the radically different context. More than anything, race ideology continues to encourage the type of living death caused by racism, requiring fewer and fewer systemic influences to exact its detrimental outcomes. From the inception of the word “race” and the construction of what the word meant in the Americas, race was class, but class was never race. Part of what gets upheld by the adoption and usage of “race” language is the continued masquerading of class as “race.” If blackness has always been primarily understood as stemming from a particular “racial” identity, this then produces a particular cultural identity and the cultural identity predominantly understood to “represent authentic black” experiences, culture, and so on is that of the working class or poor racialized black population. And if just half or fewer of the racialized black population in American society ever fit into that box—poor and racialized black and with a particular culture—then what does that mean about our continued insistence on maintaining or making sense of the category of “race?” In part, what it means is that Americans have continued to paradoxically assign impoverishment to blackness and that impoverishment was supposed to both reflect and maintain the class hierarchy, as was whiteness supposed to reflect and maintain one’s access to power via social and economic status. But just as “white” never meant all or only rich and wealthy and “black” has never meant all or only poor and of a particular culture, the ways people continue to racialize themselves and others remains incoherent and not reflective of reality now or historically even when taking social class into consideration. However, it was certainly closer to reality then than now. Subsequently, race masquerades itself as class, in many ways, which hinders clarity and potential solutions to social, cultural, and political problems. And how people view a problem will inspire how they talk

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about and solve/resolve said problem, making it less possible to meaningfully address poverty, for example, as it constantly gets racialized, which renders identifying the problem less coherent. Even in 2022, while the concepts of race remain under reconstruction in the public and private spheres, the carrying of the hierarchy created by legalized turned illegal practices of racism remains embedded within concepts of race. The ways that racism has been studied, discussed, and taught in American society, however well intentioned, have allowed the problem to persist. Too often, the hyper focus is on the symptom of “race,” not the cause, which is racism, with little overlap or apparent understanding that racism is the prerequisite for race, that is, both demarcate subject and dominant populations. While embracing “race” language and its corresponding ideology proved a sufficient strategy for resistance earlier, the time of its practical utility has run out if we remain sincere in our efforts to undo racism. Race(ism) continues to overdetermine most facets of American life. Geneticists formulate their studies around “racial” groups, except those who have reached out to me with exasperation because they say that their fellow geneticists know that race is not biological and, yet, to get funding, they have to play the “race,” that is, racist, game. Medical facilities, government entities, employers, and schools all have you check the box of your “race.” To further solidify the perceived existence of “race” and thereby the existence of racism, they write or say, “What is your race or ethnicity,” as if those two things are one and the same. The options presented include “Black or African American.” There are many ethnicities and few “racial” categories. But agencies like the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the US Census Bureau, part of the US Department of Commerce, reduces human complexity to the following groups: (1) White, (2) Black or African American, (3) American Indian and Alaska Native, (4) Asian, (5) Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders, or (6) Two or more races (i.e., mixed). These agencies and many more continue to profit from our belief in the unicorn of “race,” as racism remains profitable and a small percentage of the population benefit. However, race ideology would have us believe that most “white” people do. Some people believe that the hierarchy reflects reality today since the metaphors initially associated with “race” have not dissipated. Race concepts cannot be reconstructed outside of racist ideology and practices because racism and race are one and the same. We continue to miss the point if we subscribe to Ibram X. Kendi’s assertion that racism is about power and policy, not

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people and belief systems. Power and policy do not exist without people. And people created and perpetuate racism, regardless of how one defines it. We must get to the roots. The reason given for the overdetermination of race within any given practice or industry is the prevalence of racism. Many people believe that the only way out of racism is in, and some self-proclaimed anti-racists believe that the solution to discrimination is more discrimination.4 Others have deep emotional attachments to what they perceive to be “race.” Add to that the common conflation of everything positive one feels about oneself and everything negative one thinks about others getting lumped in with one’s race so that undoing one’s race gets misperceived as an erasure of oneself and a desire to become and be “white” or a form of “white supremacy,” which are different sides of the same coin.5 But because “blackness” was created in opposition to “whiteness” and “whiteness” continues to be conflated with freedom, the thing many people have vied and died for is freedom, plainly put, not “whiteness.” Paradoxically, when many people have subverted the strictures of racism (i.e., “race” ideology), they have embraced their freedom, which should not continue to be misconstrued as “whiteness,” “white supremacy,” or “imagining racism away.” If freedom, individuality, agency, equality, humanity, and so on keep getting conflated with so-called white people, that ostensibly means that people not racialized as white will continue to see themselves and be seen as duly outside the bounds of freedom, individuality, agency, humanity, and so on. The conflation of “whiteness” with these things was done by design. By design, we can recognize those features as part of our racelessness and bring the dyads misperceived through raci(al/st) frameworks together into race(ism)lessness. In other words, the result of racelessness is the merging of what has been written into each category of “race,” which inspires an enriched understanding of who each of us is and the simultaneous existence of two or more things at once (i.e., the individual and the collective, the good and the bad, the victim and the victor, and so 4  In How to Be an Antiracist (2019), Ibram X. Kendi says, in short, that the only remedy to discrimination is discrimination. 5  For example, see Langston Hughes “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), where Hughes lambasts Countee Cullen for wanting to be a “poet, not a Negro poet,” which Hughes translates into “I would like to be white.” Also, notice that the mountain a racialized black people must climb is “the racial” one, which rightly translates into “the racist” one given the context of his essay.

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on). As racism creates the belief in race, such an approach makes the most sense if we remain sincere in our effort to undo racism and must not be mistaken as “willing away racism,” a claim made by Kendi without evidence since such an approach has yet to be tried. What has been tried and tried again is the doubling down on “race” identity, a happening that has never turned out well for any society. At its core, it means a doubling down on race(ism) and its nefarious effects. If whiteness was constructed to be the embodiment of liberation, freedom, individualism, closeness to American ideals, then it makes sense that people across time have been accused of “trying to be white” when they have displayed their freedom, their individuality, and also when they have subscribed to American ideals. If we are sincere about undoing racism, we must undo race to unlock all of our closeness to what is, what has historically been expressed through the thing called whiteness and blackness. Part of that journey necessitates our recognition that whiteness, although presumed to be a race and a way people are racialized because of the inception of racism, is aligned with the idea of racelessness that no one should continue to be locked out of embracing. And that has nothing to do with one’s “wanting to be white” and everything to do with one’s wanting to be free from race(ism), as iterated across every decade and century by people not racialized as white. Fortunately, true racelessness is not only encompassing of some of these beneficial characteristics that are attributed to so-called white people; it also includes the beneficial traits and values thought to be specific to racialized black people. It helps more people recognize our shared humanity, encourages us to recognize our duality or multiplicity, our complexity, that our societies are complex, and the fact that a person can be two or more things at once. A person can recognize their individuality and agency and see themselves as part of a group. More people can recognize the nuances that pertain to categories currently still being conflated with race, like “American,” good, bad, beautiful, ugly, conservative, and progressive. Part of how “whiteness” and “blackness” operate in American society reveals that what some people are presuming and saying is racial is not. The disentangling of race, culture, ethnicity, class, politics, and so on matter because then people who are presumed to be racially black but fall short of “blackness” for being outside the confines created by raci(al/st) ideology are then ostracized and deemed not black or untrustworthy, traitors, or coons, just as other racialized groups like “Asians” are coded as “white” because of stereotypes associated with “Asianness.” The harm

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caused by racism negatively impacts everyone living in a society with racialized citizens. Generally, people are less encouraged to be themselves or see themselves and others all while society preaches and mandates diversity, equity, and inclusion, using the language of race(ism) toward expressed goals. The consistent separation between that metaphysical attachment to a person’s physical being that misaligns with how they are racialized matters. If more people acknowledged and grappled with such separations, it would drastically open up the conversation about racism in meaningful ways. It would help people recognize that what is being coded and understood as race is actually all of these other particular political, social, and ideological ways of being and seeing that have nothing to do with so-­ called race categories and more to do with how race(ism) has operated and does operate. That disentangling would then stop the misdirection of discourse on racism away from “race” and how people racialize themselves into a deracialized space that enables more people to be increasingly astute in identifying and naming the problem without the emotions inspired by internalizing or externalizing one’s “race” and its subsequent -ism. So long as we continue to conflate seemingly everything with one’s presumed or self-ascribed race, then we continue to allow and enable raci(al/st) ideology to persist.  The theory of racelessness works to help people outside of those confines to recognize the difference between that which is labeled “race” or coded with race language and other meaningful occurrences. I argue that to continue to use language clearly associated with “race” does have the unfortunate outcome of reifying racism. With the undoing of “race” to undo racism, we would have a proliferated and more liberatory understanding of race, culture, and ethnicity, as culture produces race(ism), not the other way around. If more people shift to view “race” as a cultural production, it becomes clearer that the demand imposed onto the majority of racialized people to think or act a certain way, for better or worse, is a clear continuation of racist ideology. More people would seek to disentangle all of these things and to, perhaps, find alternative language and ways of describing what is happening when it comes to the production of race, blackness, or whiteness. Because so long as we talk about the production and the metaphors associated with each category but from within the categories, thereby solidifying and naturalizing them, and we talk about the associated ideology, culture, politics, and so on, we conflate all of that with race. Then very well-intended people are unintentionally upholding the problem of racism, a fundamental

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dehumanization of human beings based on beliefs about “race” and the corresponding “racial” groups. The  theory of racelessness helps people have a more expanded and astute understanding of raci(al/st) ideology. The theory illuminates how raci(al/st) ideology needs to be separated from these other entities that are conflated with it or how these other ways of being and seeing are conflated with it. Theory of racelessness encourages people to reimagine or rethink the language used to talk about what is outside of “race” and, essentially, has nothing to do with race. In the continued usage of race terms to describe what is metaphysical or ideological, race(ism) is allowed to prosper. That, ultimately, is a problem that the theory of racelessness seeks to simultaneously demonstrate and resolve. Race shifted from referring to ethnic or national groups to subspecies of humans more definitively during the eighteenth century. Race, as a biological concept, has been disproven by many credible scientists since the nineteenth century, but has remained at the forefront of American imaginations as something indicating nature. There are scientists who continue to mislead, intentionally or otherwise, laypeople regarding the significance and existence of “race.” In large part, medicine continues to profit from society and its own racism. Change, in the US, has proven difficult, as various industries profit from its citizenship’s division. People in the US continue striving to reconstruct what “race” means to both recognize America’s history of racism and remove the violence of racism from race ideology. The default positions, as they pertain to philosophies of race, have traditionally remained naturalism, constructionism, reconstructionism, and conservationism. In this book, I illustrate how and why strategies rooted in these persistent philosophies of race have failed to liberate the US from racism and, in fact, have the unfortunate opposite effect of inadvertently or even intentionally upholding racism. Paradoxically, most anti-racist discourse and initiatives help reify racism because they inhabit and promote some version of racial realism even while saying that “race isn’t real” but meaning that race is not biologically real. In other words, they promote and privilege the apparition of race. Again, readers can best join me on this journey by imagining, too, a society in which race(ism) does not exist (i.e., eliminativism and skepticism). I invite you into a twilight space where everything, including liberation, is possible for both individuals and their society, a place and time that once existed and that exists elsewhere, coming into existence again. Ultimately, with this book, I encourage a fuller and more complete

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reckoning with racism in the US, which requires some emotional, psychological, intellectual, and even spiritual work from each of us, and asks us to consider how our sincerest and seemingly objective impassioned and innocent convictions could be doing more harm than good. To free itself from racism society must free itself together. The continued embracing of racialization, the justification of racialization based on the existence and persistence of racism, requires the continued adoption of faulty logic and a misidentification of the problems that plague American society, particularly. With this book, I am not promoting a utopia. I am, however, arguing that a race(ism)less world is possible, and this includes my sincere belief that if more people name the problem, which is racialization as described above via the practice of racism, and are introduced to alternative theories and philosophies of race, more of us can create and cultivate solutions and the liberation some of us claim to seek. One of the tenets of the theory of racelessness is that everyone is raceless. Racialization is the categorizing of people into so-called racial groups. The consequence of racialization is the obscuring of every racialized person’s humanity and ethnic and cultural identities. What is left in place of a person’s true self and humanity is “race” and a so-called racial identity. The practice of racialization assaults people’s ethnic, class, and cultural distinctions by sometimes obliterating or often obscuring how culture, class, and ethnicity exist. Eracesure is the outcome of the practice of racialization for each of us. In addition to the terms above, I coined the terms erace, eracesure, and eracing.6 Erasure is defined as an act or instance of erasing, a place where something has been erased, a spot or mark left after erasing (like Malcolm X’s last name, for example), and an obliteration, and a removal of writing, recorded material, or data. The tradition of writing beyond race, the history of obscuring such examples of literature from the canon (at least until the twenty-first century through the works of scholars such as Gene Jarrett), the history of misinterpreting or mislabeling the literature, and the general practice of race and racial language overdetermining how African American literature is read, defined, and included or excluded from conversations are examples and evidence of erasure. Similarly, my examination and analyses of literature generally accepted as either “Black” or “colorless,” like Jarrett’s so-called anomalous texts, confirm my conviction that race and racial language within the field of African American 6  Erace, eracesure, and eracing are inspired, in part, by Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001).

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literary studies often perpetuate the imbalances of power the literature and profession often seek to resist, combat, and change. The literature continues to be (e)raced in the fact that racing (meaning the act of applying race and racial language, and allowing race to overdetermine interpretations) literature has the opposite intended effect; it erases or (e)races (simultaneously replacing erasures with race which, in turn, causes further eracesure and the process continues cyclically). Eracing, eracesure, and erace indicate the actions taken by society and characters themselves that result in some form of subjugation and domination based on America’s race(ism). Eracesure happens when a person racializes themselves or society racializes the person. It is just one significant but impermanent outcome of race(ism). This is not merely a matter of rhetoric. It gets to the heart of how language informs thought and behavior, which in turn, via raci(al/ist) ideology, inform and perpetuate race(ism), which in turn upholds division. If we are to take seriously the calls we consistently hear or make about having a complete “reckoning” with racism in the US, we must get serious about liberating society, in every respect, from and talking honestly about the problem, which is race(ism), that is, the idea of “race” created by unjust practices that aimed at subjugated people. The problem is not the victim’s alleged “racial” difference, and the solution is not the indiscriminate and absolute labeling of most happenings or people as evidence of “racism” or as “racist,” nor is the solution that practice now called “cancel culture,” which so often relies on invocations of racism. Part of the solution is the type of anti-race(ism) embodied in the theory of racelessness. Importantly, my use of “so-called,” bracketing of raci(al/st) designators in quotation marks, and the terms raceless and racelessness is not synonymous with uncritical conceptions of colorblindness—a term used by some usually well-intentioned people to argue that color (i.e., race) does not matter. In Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997), Patricia J. Williams argues that society cannot and should not simply wish its problems away by pretending or professing to be colorblind: “‘I don’t think about color, therefore your problems don’t exist’” (4), she says. While she says that she is supportive of an actual colorblind, not utopian, future, she talks about how the construction of race precludes colorblindness from being society’s current reality and illustrates the dangers of denying that race matters. It is clear, though, that race matters, in Williams’ assessment, because racism is real and matters. She gives evocative examples of the construction of race, and her examples are those of racism. Ultimately, Williams reifies race and inadvertently upholds racism

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(race[ism]). But her overarching argument resonates with Barbara and Karen Fields’ identification of the myth of America’s “post-racial” era as being more accurately called the myth of America’s “post-racist” era. People who claim to be colorblind or who say that they live in a post-­ raci(al/st) era are saying that race(ism) does not exist. In other words, race does not matter. As Williams and this book assert, race(ism)not only exists but persists, as does the belief that race matters outside of race(ism). Another profound difference between the theory of racelessness and general ideas about colorblindness is that colorblindness operates under the presumption that color can be translated into “race,” which is then something that can be ignored to discourage bias. That would all be fine if “race” and skin color were the same, as many people believe, but racism hides its face as “race” right along with everything else that comes to get conflated with “race.” Thus, most people remain within the strictures and confines of race(ism) under the attempt to be colorblind since race(ism) gets carried with the practice of racialization, which is then something that needs to be examined and uprooted rather than ignored or otherwise overlooked. In this book, I underscore racism, as it functions through race, and promote anti-racism. Importantly, the anti-racism reflected within this book is markedly different from what has become a common understanding of what anti-race(ism) is and how it should look. Here, I show how sometimes the solutions posed require the very undoing of race to undo racism and that the undoing of race(ism) requires, first, a complete reckoning with the history of racism in the US. This book is anti-race(ist). The theory of racelessness, in contrast to traditional anti-racism, operates from a metaphysically skeptical and normatively eliminativist position. Thus, it constitutes a true anti-race(ism) by seeking to undo not only racism but also the belief in “race.” It holds that “race” does not exist except insofar as it is imagined to exist, which does not make it any realer, and that, therefore, the sooner we stop imagining it in our language and discourse, the sooner it will vanish. In eliminating “race,” the theory of racelessness helps people recognize and imagine themselves outside of race(ism). It enables people to see themselves and others more clearly, without the distorting filter of “race.” In this way, the theory also helps people become more astute at recognizing, solving, and healing from racism. Importantly, the theory’s core is bringing our shared humanity to the forefront in ways that the divisive presence or insertion of “race” ideology precludes  by design. Together, we can do anything, including uphold race(ism). But we can also reconcile, heal, resolve, and eliminate the problem.

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One question remains: Am I “black?” So long as the category reinforces the act of dehumanization and constricting my complexity as a human, no. Touré’s concept of “postblackness” is insufficient, as it still concedes the existence of race (i.e., blackness), something I contend as a racial skeptic. Whether you insist on placing me in the raci(al/st) hierarchy or not, I choose to embrace my racelessness and elevate my humanity. And who are you to tell me who I am?

Philosophizing “Race” Many anti-racist activists in the US strive to understand the meaning of “race” in order both to recognize America’s violent history of racism and to remove the violence of racism from race ideology. The philosophies of race they traditionally invoke in these efforts are, from the metaphysical category, racial constructionism and racial population naturalism and, from the normative category, reconstructionism and conservationism. Paradoxically, most “anti-racist” discourses and initiatives inspired by one or a combination of these four philosophies help to reify racism. This is because these four philosophies encourage and privilege the apparition of race and the subsequent practice of racism. As this book is primarily for students and scholars of literary studies and one simultaneously positing a philosophical position and exploration of philosophies of race(ism) within African American literary studies, I will now explain the varying philosophies of race and show how those outside of the above-named theories remain marginalized, resulting in students sometimes turned teachers and scholars knowing limiting and paradoxical positions on “race.” In other words, many people only ever learn a fraction of the history surrounding discourse about racism and methods of resistance. That has had and continues to have a deleterious effect on our ability to transcend racism, something many anti-racist people proclaim to want. There are several significant and mostly competing philosophical positions regarding the ontology of different conceptions of race and what should or should not be done with them all. In “Passing, Traveling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race” (2007), Ron Mallon divides these philosophies into metaphysical and normative categories. The metaphysical category includes racial skepticism, racial constructionism (sometimes referred to as constructivism), and racial population naturalism, and the normative category includes eliminativism and conservationism. In “A Third Way in the Race Debate” (2006), Joshua

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Glasgow adds a third normative category: reconstructionism. Racial skeptics state that because race was initially defined as a biological category and since racial naturalism (i.e., race as a biological category) is false, race is an illusion and exists in as much as it is believed to be real but is not real. Thus, racial skeptics often argue that race and language associated with race should be eliminated (i.e., racial eliminativism). Eliminativists argue for the elimination of race concepts and, therefore, racial language often with the express purpose of intentionally eliminating racism. Constructionists argue that although race may not be biological, it has manifested itself into reality and continues to exist and be real through human culture and human decisions. One way that contemporary constructionists often contradict themselves is by asserting that “race is not real” but treating it as though it is real both biologically and socially. Some constructionists argue that although not biologically real, there are biological components of race as a social construction (i.e., skin color, DNA, ancestry, etc.). I identify that as contradictory because it muddies a profound distinction between a truly skeptical and radical take on race. Whereas my skepticism means that I say that race is not at all real, constructionists say it does not exist but still exists in a socially constructed fashion. The difference matters because it often influences how one approaches racism. Either race exists or does not. It is real or is not. The socially constructed nature of a phenomenon does not satisfy me completely about the reality of the phenomenon in question. One can believe that race is a social construction and contend with whether it is real or unreal. Notably, one can hold that it is socially real and still work to see its destruction. But many constructionists to date are mostly inspired to reconstruct racism, as they view “race” as manifesting in “real” and meaningful ways. One aspect of some constructionists’ position that I agree with, though, is that racism is real regardless of the realness of “race.” That makes racial skepticism, not only more desirable but a more practical part of influencing the undoing of racism. Part of what a constructionist might cite as evidence of race are instances of racism. My skepticism skips over the middleman (i.e., race) to the kingpin (i.e., race[ism]), which requires an astute understanding and acknowledgement of racism and analysis of “race” that avoid unintentionally upholding the hierarchy. If one believes that race does not exist without any disclaimers or hinderances to observing how racism operates, logic follows that if one wants to end race(ism), one wants to abolish society’s belief in “race.” Further, skepticism about biological race should entail skepticism about racial social constructionism.

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One key overlap between racial skepticism and constructionism is the agreed nonexistence of race as existing in nature. If skeptics believe that race is real only in that people imagine it exists but that this does not satisfy its realness, then racial skeptics depend on the natural sciences to dictate whether something is real or not, implying that racial skeptics, like Anthony Appiah, are also likely skeptical of all social constructions. Constructionists often acknowledge the impact of oppression and translate the impact and the modes of resistance and triumph to the identity category they perceive to be really constructed. Paradoxically, this tends to elevate the category of oppression in ways that mean upholding the problem. This is compounded by efforts to reconstruct the restrictive nature of said category rather than completely discarding it. By adopting a racial skepticism, more people are readily able to clearly recognize racism for what it is. Almost inevitably, more people then feel compelled toward eliminativism. This should only be interpreted as abolishing race(ism) (i.e., racism). Nothing else gets erased. People stop being eraced on an individual and systemic basis. Constructionist positions have reconstructed how racism works in America, as many constructionists lean into reconstruction. Some constructionist eliminativists lean into reconstructing racism into oblivion but infrequently enough for most Americans to not know the alternatives to either constructionism or reconstructionism. Mallon writes that, according to constructionists, “American society was not and is not divided along race lines because nature made it that way, but because people acted, and continue to act, in particular ways to maintain such a division” (657). Importantly, such constructionist beliefs signify that “certain facets of social life that might be taken for granted are, in fact, open to transformation by collective action” (657). Some constructionists adopt eliminativist positions. Others, though, seek to conserve or reconstruct the concept of race, as there are a few different types of constructionist philosophies of race. Again, one primary shortcoming of constructionist positions is that while most people view race as a social construction, they continue to talk about, treat, and teach race as if it is of nature, essence, and is fixed based primarily on phenotype, ancestry, and America’s racist one-drop rule. These theories of race are too intertwined with naturalist positions. If something is viewed as of nature, it becomes that much more impossible to change and is then logically seen as being omnipresent. Nature is, after all, everywhere. Arguments asserting that “blackness” is not racial are, often, nonstarters since it is still ascribed based on naturalist inclinations and presumptions of one’s ancestry or phenotype. If it is not understood

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as purely “racial,” then nothing is lost in changing the language used to describe it besides the violence and inadvertent upholding of racism. The languages and concepts associated with race became embedded with signification that privileges whiteness and downgrades blackness. The history of racism has inspired many scholars to philosophize and write about race as a means for explaining or combatting social injustice and inequality. It has encouraged the masses to participate by uplifting and redefining “blackness,” a race concept, too (#blackisbeautiful, #blackgirlmagic, #blackexcellence, stay black and die, #blacklivesmatter, and #drippinmelanin). Reconstructionists often strive to transform the racism out of “race” or solidify the racism within the category. Reconstructionists argue “that we should [not] eliminate racial discourse” (Glasgow 164) and that instead “it remains possible that the normative import of racial discourse motivates rehabilitating it in a way that renders race real” (164); thus, concepts of race can be positively reconstructed. Examples of reconstructionism among the masses include the attempts to increase positive representation of “black” people in the media, schools, and various industries and to inscribe positivity into and onto the meaning of blackness: #blackisbeautiful, #blackexcellence, #blacklivesmatter, #blackgirlmagic, and so on. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, enslavement abolitionists, are examples of reconstructionism before emancipation. Kendi is a prominent contemporary mainstream example of a reconstructionist. He is also part of the tradition of marginalizing alternative ways of being and seeing, lambasting eliminativists and skeptics for privileging notions of humanness while missing the fact that some eliminativists and skeptics still also work to undo racism, a more effective strategy, perhaps, than doubling down on so-called racial categories and the corresponding racism, by extension. If more people embrace their presupposed “race,” America will never transcend racism. Racial population naturalists (of which there are three types, but each holds the same foundation) believe that while there may not be an essential biological connection between races, there must be non-essentialist biological connections that form when isolation occurs that is tied to genealogy, genetics, and phenotypes. Naturalists believe that just as nonhuman species are classified across types, like dogs and cats, while still being classified as dogs and cats, humans can and should be differentiated from other humans. They are often tied to what is called scientific racism or biological racism, a pseudoscientific practice of trying to support or

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justify racist ideology (i.e., inferiority/superiority). In other words, naturalists believe in the biological existence of race(ism). Racial population naturalists tend to be conservationists. As indicated earlier, the same person can fall into more than one category at the same time or across texts, time, and space. Also, one can be a partial eliminativist. And any person holding any of these philosophies can also intentionally or unintentionally uphold racism. Now that I have described the philosophies of race, I will show how a few writers—for example, Locke and Baldwin—have philosophized about race during different historical moments. These writers problematize the continued upholding of race, but their ideas about “race” remain largely overlooked or excluded from the study of their other texts that are often upheld as evidence of a sustained race ideology. Although consistently canonized and revered in African American literary studies, Locke’s philosophy on race remained unpublished until 1992 and is still mostly undiscussed concerning his canonized texts within the field, only gaining increasing attention within the field of philosophy. In “Between Reconstruction and Elimination: Alain Locke’s Philosophy of Race” (2017), Jacoby Adeshei Carter states that Locke “contributed an historical, political, economic, and social analysis of race that was scarcely to be found near the turn of the previous century” (195). Locke’s vested interest in complicating society’s views of race reflects the “beyond race” ethos seen among his contemporaries, like George Schuyler, to whom Locke is often depicted as being in complete ideological opposition, and detecting that ethos, Carter concludes that Locke can be read as a qualified or partial eliminativist. Locke should be read as a partial eliminativist, partial conservationist, and partial reconstructionist, which counters how he has been traditionally understood and taught within literary studies. In “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture” (1924), Locke argues that before the fields involved in studying race can have truly fruitful discussions, race must be redefined as “social in manifestation and derivation” (198), distinct from culture but a product of culture—contrary to the prevailing view of his time and today, which is that race produces culture—and that both culture and race are highly composite. Due to the composite and “mulatto” nature of culture and race, Locke’s assertion that “the unwarranted assumption of race as a determinant of culture is still very current” (188–189) remains true today and extends to include the assumption of race as a determinant of politics. For most of the masses, if one is identified as being “racially black,” one must also be entrenched in “black culture”;

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often, one cannot be ethnically Euro-American and consider oneself “black” based on one’s consumption of “black” thought, culture, politics, and so on (i.e., Nkechi Amare Diallo formerly and commonly known as Rachel Dolezal). One can be considered “black” biologically, culturally, and socially but not “black” if one’s politics do not correspond (i.e., Kanye West) with progressivism. Rarely does such disqualification of someone’s “blackness” result in a public recognition of the imperialist nature of race, which requires blackness and whiteness. Thus, the imprisoning and seemingly hegemonic ways that race operates are lauded despite the nefarious and violent ways that institutionalized racialization operates. Locke grappled with America’s obsession with color and race and the contradictory nature of its application and conception of race at the turn of the twentieth century. Locke’s partial eliminativist inclinations manifest within his call to action that people stop uncritically accepting concepts of race (and culture) and reconstruct race. He writes, “First, the necessity of a thorough-going redefinition of the nature of race, and second, the independent definition of race in the ethnic or social sense together with the independent investigation of the factors and differentiae of physical race” (192). For Locke, conceptions of race can be anthropological (i.e., ethnological or biological), political (i.e., what Mallon describes as the creation of race to divide and subordinate groups of people by those in power), and social (i.e., race as a product of cultural traits; he views race “as itself a culture product” [193]). As conceptions of race stood during his time, though, Locke notes, It is concerning such principles of determination that the newer psychology of race must be worked out instead of with reference to assumed innate traits and capacities [and ideologies]. The type itself may have been established by accident or fortuitous combination of historical circumstances, but re-enforced by the sense of race as perhaps the most intense of the feelings of commonality, it becomes an accepted, preferred and highly resistant culture complex that seems to be and often is self-perpetuating. (195)

Locke can only be a partial eliminativist because, unlike his contemporary Schuyler, Locke recognizes the “practical utility of racial identification or ascription” (201). He understands that “race conditions the way they [people] perceive and understand the world” (Carter 199) both positively and negatively. This is where his partial conservationism and reconstructionism coincide with his partial eliminativist position.

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Locke wants to redefine, reconstruct, and retain new conceptions, a “newer psychology” (195), of race seeing each step as crucial to the lessening of physical, intellectual, social, spiritual, artistic, and capitalistic violence against black people. Further, he believes that races are dynamic social constructions that transform over time and, at some point, cease to exist. They grow to include new cultural elements that were previously excluded, and they can exclude populations that undergo significant cultural variation from the putative racial group. Locke’s nuanced theories of racism and culture often counter the ways his contributions to African American literary studies continue to be taught and interpreted. It matters that his philosophies remained out of print for too long and are still lesser known. In its entirety, Locke’s body of work presents a position that complicates, at minimum, ideas that continue to reify the idea of race. Introducing and including all the philosophies of race alongside the study of literature helps students expand their worldview and seek and reconcile varying writings and perspectives. And this matters because, as it stands, the worldviews that profess to be progressive and liberal are becoming increasingly regressive and illiberal, largely due to the ironic continued elevation of raci(al/st) (black and white) ways of thinking, being, and seeing. Like Locke, James Baldwin’s philosophies of race develop over the span of his work. The philosophy of race one gets depends on the text one engages. But his philosophies remain largely buried in literary studies, as most people are unaware of philosophies of race. As a result, there tends to be a seemingly complex but paradoxically narrow way of teaching and interpreting Baldwin and many others. One generative solution would be to include philosophies of race alongside the study of literature and to offer the theory of racelessness as an alternative framework of analysis. In “On Being White and Other Lies” (1984) and the texts housed in I Am Not Your Negro (2016) from the mid-1970s after the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements, Baldwin argues for the elimination of concepts of race or, at a minimum, the reconstruction of race into oblivion from a constructionist position. In “On Being White,” Baldwin asserts that “We [“black” people]—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade” (180) are “endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves” (180). For Baldwin, race is a question of epistemology, or how people come to know or deny things. “White” people attempt to control and define “black” people, says Baldwin. He writes, “America became white … because of the

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necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation” (178). Indeed, people who seek refuge in the US must choose to become white to become American. Something that Baldwin’s essay does not address but that Louis Chude-Sokei addresses in “The Newly Black Americans” (2014) is that African immigrants coming to the US can choose not to identify with African Americans, but America chooses blackness for them. This is ironic since many Americans associate blackness with the continent of Africa, supporting Mallon’s argument that race does not travel, which is to say that the precise way that many Americans think of race and its corresponding racism does not exist in the same way everywhere else in the world. People travel to racialized countries or regions and become raced, or people are born into such s/places and are (e)raced. The people holding the most power in the US got there by deciding that they were “white,” says Baldwin. If race and the subsequent racialization inspired by the idea of race are tools for those in power to maintain and create their power and subjugate all “nonwhite” people, what if that tool was not just called into question but became unavailable for anyone except historically speaking? Mallon’s later constructionist essay echoes Baldwin’s belief that race was created and is perpetuated to divide and control people; the Institutional Principle states that “where R is a race, it is a logically necessary condition on a person being R at a site that the concept of R is used at that site to divide people” (Mallon 660). Similarly, in The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), Martin Delany asserts that people of African descent were not enslaved because of actual or perceived inferiority but because enslaving African and indigenous people served the Europeans’ economic and political purposes. According to Delany and Barbara and Karen Fields over a century later, the apparatus of inferiority and race came afterward, to justify the Europeans’ enslavement and genocide of African and indigenous people.7 To Baldwin’s point, concepts of race are still used to divide people based on what is now race(ism), different societies do their dividing differently, and one can only be divided into a category recognized in the specific geographic location one is in. Poignantly, Baldwin writes, “The ancestors of the people / who became white and who require / of my captivity a song” (I Am Not 55). In I Am Not Your Negro, written before his essay on whiteness but unpublished until 2016, Baldwin brings the 7

 See Barbara and Karen Fields’ Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012).

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discourse of “interracial mixing” as a strategy for collapsing raci(al/st) discourse also shown through Locke and Carter into view. Baldwin points to America’s ironic and violent history of race and racism, saying that “white men have lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons” (50). America’s history of “interracial” relationships has created for Baldwin and Locke a country of mixed ancestry, a multiracial country by which the recognition of such “mulatto-ness” would do wonders toward suturing the fractures between racialized people in the US: And until that moment, until the moment comes when we the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for white we need each other. (75)

Baldwin mostly puts the onus of resolving social injustices perpetuated by conceptions of race and racism on racialized white people. But the statistical majority of people in any country must participate, or there will be no forward movement. He explains that being “white” is “a moral choice” (180). It is also an epistemological choice. Baldwin’s texts, these at least, illustrate his partial eliminativist inclination and, at a minimum, his desire to reconstruct how Americans think about epistemology and enact race. The division of people to control and keep divided must include intragroup discourse that promotes intragroup division, hierarchy, silencing, and exclusion, just as discussions of blackness, black art, and the black aesthetic often achieve. Part of America’s raci(al/st) house is a question of whether one can “dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools” (Lorde). After all, writers and scholars use the English language to write, analyze, read, and teach anglophone African American literature. All people deemed “black” by Americans are not black. Further, if it is meant to be ubiquitous, ideological solidarity based on a sense of shared blackness is a myth. In “The Newly Black Americans” (2014), Chude-­ Sokei discusses African immigrants in the US as “newly black Americans” in the same way Baldwin explains that European immigrants, for example, become “white” upon entering the US. His examination of contemporary texts written or compiled and edited by African writers, like Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), Isidore Okpewho and Nkuru Nzegwu’s The New African Diaspora (2009), Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (2000), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), exposes several themes central to the

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literature. First, most Africans (with the exception of South Africans) focus on nationality, not race or color, and view “black” Americans as simply Americans. Second, it continues to be assumed that common ancestry dictates “Black political behavior in America [that] reflects unified, homogenous, and distinctive racialized perspectives” (66). Third, the “Black Diaspora” is “defined and delimited by the ideological preferences and experiential priorities of African Americans” (59) not others of African descent broadly speaking. Fourth, race does not travel, but one can travel to racialized (i.e., racist) spaces. And finally, blackness is “an American formation, imperial in its expectations” (57). Chude-Sokei illuminates discontinuities between the general acceptance of African immigrants by “white” people in the US and their corresponding social and cultural positions and performances compared to those of African Americans. Ultimately, his position regarding his philosophy on race is reconstructionist, at minimum. He reconstructs the way American readers might conceptualize race, “blackness,” and Africa as being interconnected, and completely disrupts the legacy of discourses and movements like Pan-Africanism, Black Power, Afrocentrism, and Black Atlantic thought. At minimum, society needs to reconstruct, if not do away with, how it thinks about race and diaspora, according to his view. I include Chude-Sokei’s essay to further expose the ideological weakness of race ideology that gets, in large part, upheld through the study of literature or history or policies or most things without the inclusion of philosophies of race and alternative frameworks. While a person might ask what the harm is in perpetuating race ideology in ways that “empower marginalized groups and resist mainstream narratives,” I would say that the harm is in perpetuating the idea that liberation, empowerment, and resistance are only increased, maintained, effective, or sustainable when racialization operates in the ways it does. There is great harm in teaching our youth or convincing ourselves that there is no other way to transcend racism or that racism can never be transcended. We all have the power to recognize and embrace our racelessness, to write ourselves into the future, to free ourselves. But the first step necessitates an alternative consideration of the reality of race(ism) and then an expansion of how we tend to it. Only then can we truly begin to transform the material impact of racism. In addition to the widely accepted and recognizable conservationist, constructionist, reconstructionist, and naturalist perspectives, constructionist eliminativist and skeptical eliminativist philosophies of race should be included in the required analysis and curriculum for African American

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literary studies. Theory of racelessness should be presented as an alternative interpretative framework regarding race and so-called race or racial literature. Additionally, both the heterodox philosophies of race and the theory of racelessness should be a fundamental part of anti-racist discourse and taught in addition to anything being called “critical race theory” and critical race theory proper. In this book, an eliminativist skepticist perspective informs and undergirds the central theory of “anti-race” as necessarily being part of anti-racism. One need not agree with the skepticist argument to recognize and accept my overarching arguments about how the undoing of race (i.e., eliminativism) would facilitate the undoing of racism. However, it continues to hold true that skepticism helps more people toward eliminativism than constructionism does. Language beyond race but that centers race(ism) is needed, which means that theories of hybridity, multiculturalism, and creolization also fall short of liberation because they each operate on the premise of and need for race and raci(al/st) language. Scholars must continue to push the boundaries of the philosophies of race named above and others unnamed to consider and create alternative paths to intellectual and literal liberation and to reimagine the traditionally restrictive canon of African American literature. In analyzing and examining the determination of race within the field of African American literature, those who are deeply invested in resisting and eliminating racism can begin to construct analyses, practices, and curriculum that better enhance and make more accessible the power of the individual, mobilize the masses, and generatively reform education. They might discover that the critical path to transcending racism is, like Morrison says, love and a language that matches. I have laid the foundation of the theory of racelessness, described the different philosophies of race, and illustrated how history and literary texts can be mined for their philosophical underpinnings of race to better understand and transform today’s fight against racism. Now, I will illustrate how the field of African American literary studies has come to be constricted within the confines of race(ism) and raci(al/st) ideology even while it seeks to disrupt, resist, and transcend such strictures. I conclude by explaining how this book offers more background to the problem of raci(al/st) ideology within the field, a methodological solution to the analysis of the literature by applying the representative theory of racelessness, the understanding of any writer’s body of work by applying the theory to a representative writer’s work, and the teaching practices by applying the theory to an imagined syllabus.

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The Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Anti-race(ism) Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Anti-race(ism) examines how and why African American literary scholars can and should stop allowing racism to determine the discipline, the criticism, and the literature. In some contexts, “African American literature” is used to refer to the body of literature written by writers of African descent in America, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines the literature in the preface to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Third Edition (2014). In other contexts, “African American literature,” as Jarrett points out in the introduction to African American Literature Beyond Race, has come to refer to “the thematic content of literary texts” (2) that inscribes “specific ideas about racial progress” (2) and race, which has allowed the idea of race and practice of race(ism) to overdetermine that of African American literature. In this book, I employ the terms African American and African American literature as neither a literature produced by a race of people deriving from African descent nor thematic content rooted in race(ism). “African descent” too often gets conflated with blackness, with race, which inadvertently perpetuates racism. Therefore, if one defines the literature by themes of “racial realism,” as Jarrett calls it, such themes are equally problematic because they presuppose and privilege the existence of race and redirect conversations about race(ism) to the natural and inescapable nature of race, “racial politics,” “racial progress,” “racial inequality,” when what one means to discuss is, simply put, race(ism), not race or racial fill-in-the-blank. Through my theory of racelessness, I discuss African American literature as an American cultural production. One’s perceived or ascribed race does not determine one’s culture and vice versa, but being in the US, given the country’s history of racism, does influence and inspire particular types of literature that encourage a raci(al/st) reckoning and the upholding of raci(al/st) language and ideology. Ultimately, when viewed as a cultural production, it becomes more clearly an American phenomenon, as opposed to something restricted and expected to and of African Americans. As a field, African American literary scholars can more clearly delineate race, ethnicity, and culture and would find the result more liberatory than the result of conflating all three as “racial” and, therefore, in many ways, predetermined for writers, characters, and readers.

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Although Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith say in the “Preface to the Third Edition” of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014) that the “authors of these [texts contained in the anthology] works … have made the text of Western letters speak in voices and timbres resonant, resplendent, and variously ‘black’” (xxvii), African American literature has consistently been defined, across history, as a priori ideologies of race and racism and, as such, has excluded and marginalized specific types of “blackness” in literature (particularly, texts without race, with “racially ambiguous” characters, or with “white” characters).8 As defined in the field, black and blackness include and extend beyond race to include the metaphysical and ideological characteristics thought to be most often inhabited and exhibited by so-called black writers (black people, broadly speaking). In the field’s attempts to build a canon that reflects and builds political, social, and cultural value, to protect images of “black” people and culture from stereotyping and racist contamination, and to present and engage with much that is left out of the dominant narrative, exclusionary practices persistently marginalize and exclude certain types of voices. This creates the straitjacket, as Jarrett calls it in “Loosening the Straitjacket: Rethinking Racial Representation in African American Anthologies” (2013), from which many African American literary scholars and writers work to free themselves. The straitjacket, according to Jarrett, was and is created for “black” writers and literature by African American literary scholars and American society, broadly speaking. Jarrett says, To say that the term ‘African American literature’ signifies literature by, about, and/of for African Americans is not simply to utter a definition. In American intellectual society and culture, it is a determination of the way authors think about and write the literature, the way publishers classify and distribute it, the way bookstores receive and sell it, the way libraries catalog and shelve it, the way readers locate and retrieve it, the way teachers, scholars, and anthologists use it, the way students learn from it—in short, the way we know it. (African 3–4) 8  Jarrett, too, argues that African American literature has been and continues to be defined as a priori ideologies of race and racism. In this book, “a priori ideologies of race and racism” means to presuppose or presume the literature to be about ideologies of race and racism. I assert that part of this presumption, the expectation, of African American literature resides in how writers have been expected to relay or transmit race/racism ideologies, not just in that writers must relay or depict ideologies of race/racism. In other words, traditionally, there remain particular versions of ideologies of race(ism) that have been consistently excluded from classrooms, the canon, and criticism, too.

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The racism many writers seek to transcend, destroy, subvert, and interrogate in their texts, then, continues to be an antagonizing force that informs, often inadvertently, how their texts are read, taught, distributed, known, and judged and if their texts are published, taught, distributed, and read at all. Frequently, and understandably given history, monolithic and hegemonic approaches to African American literature dominate with predisposed expectations about what the literature presents (i.e., traditionally, ideologies of race and racism). Thus, Gates’ assertion that The Norton Anthology of African American Literature presents texts that are “variously ‘black’” is only partially true since, as liberative as blackness has come to be interpreted within the field, blackness still operates within raci(al/st) rhetoric and ideology that enable race(ism) to persist. While all canon-­ making necessitates exclusion, I would argue that if our preoccupation with authentic political representations of race(ism) happens to inspire that marginalization, then we should consider alternative methodologies and organizations.9 Ultimately, the discipline’s consistent focus on race within the field (i.e., in criticism and teaching) inadvertently misdirects the discourse from racism to race with infrequent crossings and naturalizes the existence of race, which fortresses and is even used as justification for the persistence of race(ism). Ironically, although “African American literature” is traditionally defined as reflective and in response to ideologies of race and racism, this book illustrates how the discourse has often centered on race, not racism (i.e., race[ism]). This misdirection creates and then maintains the illusion of race. Time and again, the ghost of race permits the consequence under investigation to masquerade among the causes. In other words, by American logic, race creates racism. The camouflaging of racism as race 9  Writers, scholars, and critics alike had good reason to be preoccupied with race, as their efforts worked to confront racism head on. Many African American writers and critics have aimed to show that race(ism) is not an impediment to creating art and saw their art and America’s reception of their art as a potentially liberatory tool against American oppression. In many respects, many African American scholars, writers, and critics defined the literature, across time, in a way that was thought to protect and even free African Americans from racism and expose and resist the violence of racism while also providing occasional refuge from racism, create and insulate feelings of unity and pride or nationalism, and redefine what it means to be “black” in the US by nonracist standards. “Race” was used as a reason to denigrate and deny the significance of African American contributions to American art and culture. Writers and critics alike aimed to surmount obstacles reinforced by racists.

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encourages and enables the persistence of race(ism) and uses race(ism) as the evidence of race, the “fact of blackness” (Fanon). In this book, I illustrate how race is evidence of race(ism), something that cannot be unwound. American society’s use of the word race and all race language (i.e., black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, biracial, transracial, multiracial, mulatto, mixed, race, racial divide, racial injustice, racial inequity, the problem of race, people of color, person of color, and so on), regardless of the format, depends on the objective reality of race and obfuscates the action of racists and racism. In this book, I argue that society’s use of the word race and race language depends on the seemingly subjective and imagined objective realities of race and obfuscates the action of racialization and racism. In other words, even though some scholars view race as a “social construction,” the canon formation, literary criticism, and pedagogical practices support ideas of inherent, that is inborn, raci(al/st) difference, ancestry, and heritage, and, subsequently, a naturalist or constructionist view of race. Incidentally, American society persists in their subscription to race, race concepts, and the subsequent racialization that occurs, which enables race(ism) to remain buried in our imaginations in ways that can be difficult to recognize, acknowledge, or change. Infrequently, people engage with African American literature and talk about race as racism (i.e., race[ism]) and recognize that some of the literature itself (i.e., James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, George Schuyler, Jean Toomer, Gayl Jones Percival Everett, Nella Larsen, Anna Deveare Smith, and the many others analyzed in this book) supports and presents an eliminativist and skeptical or constructionist eliminativist position of race. I illustrate the shades of gray that exist between these different forms of skepticism, constructionism, and eliminativism in the literature, demonstrating that even the philosophical categories do not reflect the sameness of thought even across the same philosophy. The only way one can free oneself from the metaphorical straitjacket is if one recognizes the various philosophies of race, as presented in literature, liberate the language one uses to discuss the literature by showing how unnatural race is, and talk about and teach the literature in ways that force a sustained reckoning with racism, in the US, that will, ostensibly, encourage a reckoning within American society to deepen many of our anti-race(ist) efforts. In many ways, this book appears to promote the continued exclusionary practices of defining the literature as, indeed, a priori of ideologies of race and racism. This is untrue. I recognize that to move “beyond” race

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and stop race from determining the study of the literature, though, we must first face racism, which is to say, race(ism), in ways that, as a field, scholars have not yet done but can do to resist and dismantle the nefarious effects of racism (i.e., race[ism]). It is only after a full reckoning with race(ism) and a deeper recognition of how many of our imaginations participate in American raci(al/st) discourse that scholars can liberate writers, arbiters, themselves, and each other. In making such changes, importantly, the burden of overcoming racism is moved from being placed onto “black” writers and “black” characters to all Americans. After all, the idea of “whiteness” necessitates the existence of “blackness” and supports the racist notion that any person can be “racially (im)pure.” When critics recognize that some texts and writers do not “redefine” or “complicate” “blackness” but actually undo the very idea and dispute the existence of race, altogether, the attention is redirected toward the tragicomic nature of racism, an action that depends on the continued belief—social or otherwise—in race. In this book, I illustrate what happens when one puts emphasis on race(ism), especially in texts or with writers that have traditionally been (mis)labeled as either anti-black or pro-black. Additionally, I ask and answer the following questions: What happens when we shift our language  and framework of analysis to more explicitly center race(ism)? What happens when we teach the literature alongside the architecture of race(ism)? What happens when we outright refuse to use “raci(al/st)” language to talk about race(ism) and culture? What happens when we teach students philosophies of race alongside African American literature?10

Looking Forward In this book, I examine and critique existing parts of the “anti-racist” beyond and against race discourse and expand the conversation by theorizing racelessness through a close analysis of African American literary studies and literature. I show how the field has been profoundly influenced and defined from within and without by raci(al/st) ideology that continues to inadvertently allow race(ism) to masquerade as race and why scholars should redirect the field toward anti-race(ism) to force a 10  The “architecture of race(ism),” in this book, refers to how race functions always in tandem with racism, in the US, and how specific texts and writers display race as a product of racism, not racism as a product of race, which has been the traditional interpretation by the broader public.

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reckoning with racism and, ultimately, work toward further eliminating race(ism). I present and define the trope inspired by Barbara ChaseRiboud’s “The Albino” (1974) and The Albino (1972) and engaged in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (1979). Then, I analyze America’s raci(al/ st) house turned raceless homes in Morrison’s “Recitatif,” Song of Solomon, and Paradise. Lastly, I imagine a course in which the pedagogical practices center the theory of racelessness,  eliminativism, skepticism, and antirace(ism) through units on architecture, madness, and nation and diaspora. The theory and philosophies are illustrated through close readings of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and are emblematic of the possibilities for African American literary studies beyond racism. Throughout this book, I theorize the walking negative, architecture, home, madness, twilight, invisible ink, diaspora, nation, rememory (courtesy of Morrison), maternal energy, and consolation as part of the landscape and toolkit of the theory of racelessness. In its entirety, this book represents what I call the “theory of racelessness,” as applied across each chapter. This book contributes to the field of African American literary studies and anti-racist discourse by identifying, defining, presenting, and engaging a new theoretical framework and analytical and methodological tools inspired by the literature itself that illustrate what the undoing of race, not to be confused with the “undoing of binaries” or “redefinition of blackness” or “black post-blackness” or “post-race” or any iteration involving “blackness,” looks like in literature, what it can look like in a society consumed by race(ism), and how and why the inclusion of various philosophies of race within the discourse positively expands and invigorates the study of literature, the criticism itself, and anti-racist efforts. If race and raci(al/st) language determine the criticism, education, and interpretation of the literature, students, writers, and critics will continue to be intellectually incarcerated in the US or imprisoned in America’s raci(al/st) house. The next chapter necessarily builds on the foundation of this chapter by giving more background to the problem of how raci(al/st) ideology has impacted African American literary studies. There is extensive literature engaging with and acknowledging the problems I am outlying, so the chapter is not meant to be comprehensive. It is, however, meant to illustrate how and why the theory of racelessness came to be and give readers

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an overview of the stated problems. Chapter 2, “African American Literature and Anti-racism Practices,” provides a brief history of how African American literature and its study have come to be defined across time and through various literary movements. This chapter examines the history of how the production and persistence of race(ism), during any given period, influenced and inspired what was accepted or branded within the category of “African American literature” and how the literature was and remains canonized. Critically, this chapter considers the significance of the writers and texts that remain uncanonized or were and are intentionally thrown into noncanonical dustbins, and calls for a reimagining, a reinterpretation, of canonical writers and texts from an eliminativist skeptical position or an eliminativist social constructionist philosophy. Finally, with this chapter, I bring to the fore the persistent reconstruction of race within the field that reflects how race was being reconstructed in the public sphere and the innumerous voices or perspectives that were ironically obscured in the name of liberation. Chapter 3, “The Theory of Racelessness in Literary Studies: The Literal Absence of ‘Race’ Versus the Figurative Presence of Color,” presents and engages a literary theory of racelessness inspired by Chase-Riboud’s The Albino and “The Albino” and the genealogies of race-making especially as it relates to the literal racelessness of humans, and uses the term walking negative to describe moments of literary undoings of figurative (metaphysical) race and color that correspond with the characters’ literal absence of race. Ultimately, the engagement of the walking negative literary theory in Larsen’s Quicksand, Harper’s Iola Leroy, and Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings results in the scrutinization of each American characters’ will to classification, slights of hand when racism turns into race by the characters, the writer, or the reader, and moments when race ceases to exist metaphorically and literally, resulting in a sort of walking negative (i.e., figurative colorlessness and literal racelessness). To step outside of race(ism) to examine “race” with the express purpose of resisting and ending racism a new and expanded language is required, and can include that of racelessness, as the theory attempts to reflect a sort of colorlessness, too. This chapter shows the theory of racelessness, as a framework of analysis, in action across time and mediums. Chapter 4, “Toni Morrison’s Marathon Run Home in Song of Solomon, ‘Recitatif,’ and Paradise,” maps the evolution of Toni Morrison’s imaginings of “home” over the course of her oeuvre. Morrison is a representative writer of racelessness whose philosophies of skepticism and eliminativism

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remain largely overlooked, misinterpreted, or ignored. The chapter  engages the theory of racelessness and identifies and interprets the architecture of Morrison’s literary houses redesigned and rebirthed from America’s raci(al/st) house into homes, identifying these sites as illustrative of Morrison’s imagining of freedom, a world in which race exists without dominance or a world in which race cannot exist without dominance. Chapter 4 tracks and theorizes metaphors of madness and twilight that are central parts of Morrison’s constructions of home and houses. Certain texts, times, and interviews reflect Morrison’s reconstructionist position and others her eliminativist position. Ultimately, Chap. 4 finds that her homes, an embodiment of the above-named freedom, cannot exist, at least in her imagination, as long as race exists. As a representative author, Morrison’s oeuvre reflects the variety of ways a single writer philosophizes race and, for that matter, raci(al/st) art. This chapter is another example of how theory of racelessness can be used as a tool of analysis. Chapter 5, “The Theory of Racelessness: Cutting Through the Madness of Race(ism),” offers an imagined course on African American literature that comprises units on architecture, madness, and diaspora and nation. Framing the unit on architecture as the bones of the course, the chapter continues the use of architecture, madness, and twilight as analytical tools to bring to the surface the philosophies of race present in the literature and American society and the architecture of race(ism) in works like Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The course asks students to consider the profound connections between the continued impact of race(ism) and gender and sexism and discourses of madness, nation, and diaspora. It encourages students not just to navigate the architecture of race and gender and their -ism counterparts but to trace the outlines of the invisible ink present in every text and to name and describe the actual houses themselves. Ultimately, students will be encouraged to imagine a home in which race(ism) does not dominate (either in the form of explicit racism or implicitly through patriarchy) and will analyze philosophies of race that are uncommonly, if ever, taught in African American literature courses in conjunction with fictions that can be interpreted as reflecting their own philosophies of race (i.e., eliminativism and anti-race) to help them articulate and arrive, even if tentatively, at their own nuanced philosophy of race(ism) and home. Overall, I provide a foundational genealogy of philosophies of race within African American literary studies for literary scholars, something

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that has seldom been done. As the entire book is also my theory of racelessness, I present literary scholars with a philosophy of race that can be taught alongside other more well-accepted philosophies of race found within disciplines like literature, history, political science, philosophy, and Africana and Latino studies. For any field and any industry, the theory of racelessness—a nonpartisan framework—inspires questions that have otherwise been disregarded, taboo, or unanswered. This alone is a fruitful happening.

Bibliography Baldwin, James. I Am Not Your Negro. Documentary produced by Raoul Peck, 2017, Amazon Prime, www.amazon.com/I-­Am-­Not-­Your-­Negro/dp/ B01N6Q00JM. ———. “On Being White and Other Lies.” Essence, 1984. CWS, www.cwsworkshop.org/pdfs/CARC/Family_Herstories/2_On_Being_White.PDF. Bidol-Padva, Patricia. Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. Edited by Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Verso, 1990, p. 99. Carter, Jacoby. “Between Reconstruction and Elimination: Alain Locke’s Philosophy of Race.” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 2017, pp. 195–203. Chude-Sokei, Louis. “The Newly Black Americans: African immigrants and black America.” Transition, vol. 113, 2014, pp. 52–71. Project MUSE, www.muse. jhu.edu/article/541463. Delany, Martin. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Gutenberg, 2005. Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ files/17154/17154-­h/17154-­h.htm#I. DiAngelo, Robin. “White Fragility.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp. 54–70. Everett, Percival. Erasure. Hyperion, 2001. Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” ChickenBones: A Journal, 1952, www. nathanielturner.com/factofblackness.htm. Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Valerie Smith. “Preface to the Third Edition.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Third Edition, 2014, pp. xxi–xxvii. Glasgow, Joshua. “A Third Way in the Race Debate.” The Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 2, 2006, pp. 163–185. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. U of Michigan P, 1997. Harris, Leonard. “Necro-Being: An Actuarial Account of Racism.” Res Philosophica, vol. 95, no. 2, 2018, pp. 273–302.

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Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Poetry Foundation, 1926, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69395/ the-­negro-­artist-­and-­the-­racial-­mountain. Jarrett, Gene. African American Literature beyond Race. NY UP, 2006. ———. “LOOSENING THE STRAIGHTJACKET: Rethinking Racial Representation in African American Anthologies.” Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, edited by George Hutchinson and John K.  Young, U of Michigan P, 2013, pp.  160–174. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctv3znzrx.11. Kendi, Ibram. How to Be an Antiracist. One World, 2019. Locke, Alain. “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture.” The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, 2000, pp. 187–199. Loomba Ania and Jonathan Burton. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 110–114. Mallon, Ronald. “Passing, Traveling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race.” NOUS, vol. 38, no. 4, 2004, pp. 644–673. Morrison, Toni. “Toni Morrison: 57 Seconds on ‘Race.’” Stephen Colbert, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=67K0Y3nqNL8. Touré. Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now. Atria Books, 2012. Williams, Patricia J. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. The Noonday Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 2

African American Literature and Anti-Racism Practices

Whatever the forays of my imagination, the keeper, whose keys tinkled always in earshot, was race. —Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

In this chapter, I create an overview of how African American literary studies has engaged with and defined its literature over time as a priori race and racism. While the overview presents a clearer need for something like the theory of racelessness, for reasons named throughout, it should be viewed, primarily, as engaging with historical practices and ways of viewing the literary practices of people negatively impacted by race(ism) and raci(al/st) ideology. The following background of many voices and the focus on various time periods and aspects of the field are necessary to illustrate trends in philosophies of race and the general consistency in unintentionally reifying raci(al/st) ideology via naturalist, constructionist, conservationist, and reconstructionist philosophies. In short, I demonstrate the philosophical tendencies that, paradoxically, keep readers and writers confined within race(ist) boxes. The field of African American literary studies has, primarily, been concerned with a consistent centering and defining of both “blackness” and

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“African American literature.”1 Historically, types of blackness and African American literature were consistently and pervasively excluded from conversations and the African American literary canon and often labeled as “anti-black.” In his preface to Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (2011), Gene Jarrett points out that African American authors have consistently been expected to portray their “race” in realistic ways. He writes, “If the authors ever defied these expectations by casting not African American but ‘white’ or ‘raceless’ literary characters, then a host of cultural arbiters disparaged their writings as poor quality and tossed them into noncanonical dustbins” (vii). This was true, too, of books with “almost white” or “culturally white” characters. This mirrors the raci(al/st) ideology that would have people believe in their inherent “racial” differences that get conflated with class, cultural, and ethnic differences. Here, race(ism) disregards the reality that on what would become American soil, American citizens have more in common than not, and this includes culturally. The formation of America and “American” as an ethnicity that represents every American gets obscured or denied largely because of how race(ism) operates. Importantly, race(ism) then keeps itself going by even the most well intended. Most of Jarrett’s critical work tends to what he calls the recovery and reengagement of anomalous writings and a redefinition of “African American literature” whose identity is more constitutive of anomalous traditions “than most of us have been led to think” (vii). He then “urges us to rethink canonical historiographies of African American literature that unfairly privilege writers of racial realism over those that avoid it” (vii). Many scholars agree that there has been and continues, perhaps, to be a history of exclusion of certain productions of “blackness,” “black art,” and so-called black voices. In other words, freedom of thought and being has continued to be conflated with “whiteness” and reserved for racialized white people. In actuality, heterodox thought and meandering outside of raci(al/st) confines has signified racelessness. The problem of raci(al/st) expectations of African American literature continues to be a subject of focus. In “Reading African American Literature Now” (2016), Aida Levy-Hussen, in her discussion of Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), says that if this “crisis in interpretation” (133) has gotten “us  This chapter is not meant to be comprehensive. Instead, this brief history highlights overarching themes, conversations, and inclinations within the field of African American literary studies. It serves as a history of the problems of African American literature being canonized and taught through a narrow lens of racial naturalism, constructionism, conservationism, and reconstructionism. 1

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stuck” (133), “then how might we re-fresh and re-imagine our readerly task” (133). Like her work, with this book I perform “an open-ended experiment in reading African American literature differently” (133). Now, I engage with literary criticism that demonstrates an extensive history of the scholarship that defines and centers “blackness,” spanning the periods of study of the literature, and the attendant race ideology. I focus on the production of blackness in this part of my discussion of race(ism), not to impugn people participating in upholding the category or the category itself. I focus on this aspect of the manifestation of race(ism) to root it in the history of my primary field of focus—African American literature and philosophy—and to demonstrate how the most traditional response to racism has been constructionist reconstructionist or naturalist conservationist philosophies that manifest and are reflected in how “race” continues to be tended to within a field seeking liberation from race(ism), usually, and has resulted in the unintentional upholding of racism. But I do not stop at my interrogation, criticism, and receipts. I come with an alternative mode and partial solution. Some critics have examined antebellum literature and theorized its difference from American literature. In other words, critics attempt to cast the earliest known literature as “different” from the beginning. In “‘We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause’: Independent Antebellum African American Literature. 1840–1865” (2011), Joycelyn Moody asserts that between 1840 and 1865 “black” writers broke from the traditional generic conventions of American authors and created an “independent literature” (134) intended to elevate “black vernacular expressivity” (134). Like Frances Smith Foster, Moody describes these early writings as polyvocal, but unlike Foster, she posits that so-called black authors created a “clear identity” (135), as in a singular identity, and a rhetorically subversive nature characterizes virtually all “black” texts of that era. She illustrates how “black” people fought to create their own identity outside of the identity that “white” Americans had set up for them, citing visual, oral, and textual representations. She offers Sojourner Truth as an example of a person who worked to create, shape, and define her own image (even though feminists would later coopt Truth’s image and speech). She emphasizes the work of early African American literature as being work done by and for the “black” community. Moody also points to the need for scholars to study the various literary modes (oral, visual, and textual) to create a fuller picture of the independent literature of the era. She examines the various mediums employed by antebellum people to create what she identifies as independent literature.

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She includes Truth’s struggle to define herself, Mary Ann Shad and Henry and Mary Bibb’s public discourse, mostly in newspapers, regarding raci(al/ st) segregation, and Elleanor Eldridge’s attempt to control her public image as examples of how African Americans of the era worked toward developing self-definitions. In doing so, she interrogates the notion that free “black” people were “scarcely freer than their enslaved counterparts in the South” (145) and successfully illustrates the heterogeneous identities and voices of the time. While underscoring the polyvocal nature of early literature, in some ways Moody perpetuates the definition of African American literature as being focused on the freeing of “black identity” (emphasis added 135), which may or may not be accurate. I see the freeing of “black identity” as an effort to free “human identity,” as the category of blackness, in pre-­ American and then American society, was initially meant to reflect that which is inhumane, unhuman, and without the freedoms afforded to those confined to the category of “whiteness.” She writes about “black” identity as a singular endeavor and entity, though she acknowledges that this identity shifts over time while maintaining its plurality. As Foster and others point out, the gaps that are created because of such a narrow definition of any era of African American literature are detrimental to African American literary studies as a discipline. How scholars see texts is influenced by how they define a literature and their methodologies, and defining African American literature as that which focuses foremost on racism achieves the opposite of their, perhaps, intended effects: the liberation of the texts and often themselves, by extension. As Ivy Wilson notes, the synchronic and diachronic aspects of each text will remain buried, and depending on their agenda, critics may be hindering their own stated goals in performing, teaching, and researching literary studies. Moody’s essay addresses the fact that some African Americans worked to self-define, self-assert, and self-identify “blackness” (137) but does not discuss the implications of such attempts. Implicit in definitions of blackness, then, is the hierarchy of difference, or there would not be a need to define, assert, and center. Whether the hierarchy elevates blackness or not, there is still hierarchy that forces questions asking if replacing one hierarchy with another is the solution, especially if the hierarchy is based on falsehoods or monolithic stories, in other words race(ism). What Moody misses is an opportunity to recognize how even the earliest forms of literature did not, do not, fit into the confines of race(ism) and raci(al/st) ideology. The “not fitting” can be read as not just a disruption of how race was

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conceived at the time or any time but as the very undoing of the thing people imagine it upholds: race. Other critics have looked at early publishing and editorial choices to map the production of blackness and black art because it directly influences the literature and criticism. In “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-­ American Magazine: Or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives” (2013), Wilson examines Thomas Hamilton’s publishing initiatives to question “what some of [the] contemporary practices related to the ‘archival turn’ might mean to current theories of African American studies” (19).2 Wilson states his methodology: “I use Hamilton’s Anglo-African Magazine to stage an analysis of the genealogies of African American editorial practices” (19). By focusing on the development of editorial practices in relation to Hamilton’s periodical, Wilson’s genealogy results in a call to action for scholars to think synchronically and diachronically. He asserts that Hamilton’s Anglo-African Magazine ultimately failed because of his inability to obtain and maintain enough subscriptions. He does not, however, theorize or speculate as to why subscriptions were difficult to acquire and keep. Perhaps the periodical did not fulfill the needs of readers, despite its popularity among writers. Perhaps the subscription base was affected by how African American literature was already beginning to be defined within the community, as limiting because of the confines of race(ism) but outwardly professing to be a freeing form of artistic expression. Critics have analyzed the literary habits of early American society and determined that (1) scholars should encourage and develop more interdisciplinary work across disciplines, and (2) literature and literary practices of “black” people need to be reconsidered and enlarged to include traditions otherwise excluded or overlooked. This problem is not unique to African American literature. Virtually all genres have undergone various quagmires of self-definition and a questioning of the value of their canon. It is important to note, however, that even literature dating back to what is deemed to signal the start of “African American literature” and how that literature and those literary practices have been formulated and interpreted greatly called into question the usefulness of racializing writers, their art, and consumers of that literature and art. There is nothing positive about being racialized, but there has been practical utility in accepting and 2  Hamilton published and edited the Anglo-American Magazine from 1859 to 1865, the span of its existence.

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echoing one’s racialization. The question remains whether the practices inspired by racialization are detrimental and have a negative impact on a field like African American literary studies or its writers. After all, the fact that there is nothing positive does not mean, necessarily, that there is something negative about coopting the practices of racialization. Further analysis of literary practices illuminates the limitations of race(ism) and raci(al/st) ideology. In “Rereading Literary Legacy: New Considerations of the 19th-­ Century African-American Reader and Writer” (1999), Elizabeth McHenry describes the different types of literacy and the production of knowledge among readers and writers in the nineteenth century by analyzing the histories of reading societies. In doing so, she aims to present a fuller picture of the development and evolution of the “black” public sphere. She expands the idea that “literacy equals [or equaled] freedom” (480) by shifting the definition of literacy. Like Wilson, she uses a history of literacy—mostly focusing on literary societies—and knowledge power to inform an analysis of current practices in African American literary studies. As Jarrett, Wilson, and Foster also encourage, McHenry’s essay calls scholars to be more open to “replacing our notion of a singular black literary tradition” (480) with an acceptance of and a search for the more diverse elements of said tradition. Her literacy includes oral literary efforts. Ultimately, she calls for the abandonment of “boundaries that have traditionally divided the disciplines as well as those that have kept scholars from working together” (481). There are current efforts to include heterodox thought within the framework of “blackness” to assert that “this too is black thought.”3 The refrains of “this too is black thought” or “there is no such thing as black thought” have, for too long, been unreconciled or ignored. The exclusionary practices happen largely because raci(al/st) ideology precludes, really, the categories of race from being defined and constructed outside of its confines. The misperception of the “singular black literary tradition” or the “black experience” persists and serves to homogenize a never monolithic group. Like Jarrett and McHenry, some critics also began (mostly in the 1970s up to the present) to examine and attempt to reinsert otherwise excluded voices or texts into the study of African American literature. In “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance” (1978), Abby Johnson illustrates how views of the middle class shifted after 1930 3

 For example, the Journal for Free Black Thought.

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and how the shift mirrors the exclusion of certain voices within African American literary studies. She uses Fauset’s contribution to African American literature as an example of how writers who wrote about the middle class and middle-class concerns were unwanted by all types of publishers and readers. She gives nuance to Fauset’s work by discussing her editorship of Crisis from 1919 to 1926 in conjunction with her fiction. An important component of Johnson’s argument reiterates Wilson’s call for scholars to think diachronically and synchronically. According to Johnson, Fauset “recreate[d] life from her vantage point in novels” (151) and “encourage[d] diversified interests” during her work as an editor of Crisis. In depicting experiences closer to her own, Fauset defied the raci(al/st) images America expected. Today, there is a perceived disconnection between middle- to upper-class racialized black people and those within the lower class. One common argument is that “the elite” would not know the first thing about racism or what it is like to live more modestly. These ideas support the trope of poor “black” people, which conforms to the expectations of too many Americans, not because the data supports it but because the image provides comfort and satisfies expectations. Firstly, most racialized black people in the US now do not live below the poverty line. Secondly, the people who live above the poverty line were not all born into wealth. The persistent idea that if you earn above a certain income bracket you cannot possibly know racism or poverty, and that you cannot “reflect black experiences,” is a fallacy designed to uphold raci(al/ st) ideas of inferiority and superiority about so-called black people, not because poor people are perceived to be inferior but because “black” people are thought to be inferior, and “blackness” gets conflated with poorness. Many people benefit from continued expressions of “authenticity,” as it pertains to certain racialized groups of people, when those outputs conform to the raci(al/st) narrative. Johnson cites Robert Bone as considering Fauset paradoxical, as do many people, because her fiction and essays supposedly render conflicting images or opinions. However, genre and generic strategies must become part of the conversation about authors such as Fauset and Alain Locke. How critics respond to Fauset’s fiction seems less indicative of the actual text(s) and more indicative of how race is imagined and enforced. Margo Crawford says that black art (in its most innovative forms) is always a remaking of ‘black’ and ‘post-black’ within the layered circle of black post-blackness…. Black post-­

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blackness is the circular inseparability of the lived experience of blackness and the translation of that lived experience into the world-opening possibilities of art. (2)

For many people, blackness is physical and metaphysical (like Henry Louis Gates Jr. articulated in the 1980s) and manifests in “black art,” but for others coopted as, indeed, “black,” like George Schuyler and so many others, there is a single human race (metaphysical or not), so “black” art, as in a cultural output inspired by one’s race, is a “Negro-Art Hokum.”4,5 I agree with Schuyler, who argues that art is a product of regional identity, not “racial” metaphysics. This is, in part, why I assert that although the term American was not initially meant to include everyone it now does, American can now be viewed as an ethnicity, speaking to American ancestry, culture, politics, and so on in ways that necessarily subvert race(ism). Writers themselves theorized their ways outside the confines of race(ism). The philosophical underpinnings of these writers as they pertain to philosophies of race highlight the problem of raci(al/st) ideology both within American society and the study of literature. Like Schuyler, Jean Toomer saw himself outside of race. He tried to write himself within a “new” race in direct response to the palpability of race(ism). In the Foreword to Toomer’s Cane (2019), Zinzi Clemmons discusses Toomer’s struggle with society’s race(ism) and his attempts to transcend it. She says, Toomer’s ‘racial position,’ as described in his journals, was ‘an aristocracy … midway between the white and Negro worlds’ composed of mixed-race people. This position would later inspire him to imagine a new race for him4  In Black No More (1931), Schuyler dedicates his novel to “ALL CAUCASIANS IN THE GREAT REPUBLIC WHO CAN TRACE THEIR ANCESTRY BACK TEN GENERATIONS AND CONFIDENTLY ASSERT THAT THERE ARE NO BLACK LEAVES, TWIGS, LIMBS OR BRANCHES ON THEIR FAMILY TREES” (capitalization in original, Dedication page). His dedication aligns with the content of the novel, which satirizes notions of raci(al/st) purity (i.e., whiteness, the only “pure” race) and racism, broadly speaking. In the novel, racism is rooted in how American society reads skin color, the practice of which is both a commodity and an obsession. Thus, when Dr Junius Crookman invents Black-No-More and countless Americans subject themselves to the new procedure to turn their brown skin “white,” chaos erupts. No one can decipher the other’s “true” race, their “true” identity. America’s raci(al/st) hierarchy crumbles. 5  For examples from philosophers, see The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018) by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race (1992) by Alain Locke.

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self … a midpoint between blacks and whites from which he could communicate with both. He called this new race ‘American,’ and it was both an invention and a foreshadowing of one of the many ways in which race is reimagined today. (Cane viii)

Here, the fact that Toomer’s socioeconomic status informs or is presumed to influence his “racial” identity and his proximity to “authenticity” echoes how other writers have been limited to the confines of depicting a socioeconomic status with which they may have no experience. This has been true even when some people say that “white privilege” extends beyond class and need not be interpreted as saying that all or even most “white” people are wealthy. There remains a double standard that, left unacknowledged by more people, misdirects solutions to race(ism) and reconciliation. In literary studies, it has been generally accepted and encouraged to “depict the masses.” The irony is that the question of “what about everyone else who is racialized as black” rarely gets asked. It does get answered, though, in the affirmative when talking about racialized black people and conflating them with poverty. This illustrates how the concept of race itself masquerades as racism. It simultaneously reflects what was once truer—that most racialized black people were impoverished and enslaved in the US—and prevents more people from talking about impoverishment in meaningful ways that help and recognize all poor people, not just the minority of those who happen to be racialized as black.6 Toomer imagined and strived 6   See, for example, poverty statistics by Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200476/us-poverty-rate-by-ethnic-group/. In 2020, approximately 19.5% of racialized black people lived below the poverty line. Statistics are not always completely accurate. However, even give or take a few percentage points, American media and intelligentsia talk about so-called black people as though they are mostly poor, uneducated, and criminal because of their impoverishment, all due to racism—the system’s belief in inferiority and superiority or cultural inferiority and superiority based on how culture is racialized. While these numbers were undoubtedly different 100  years ago, what is true today matters. At least, it should matter. Compared to other racialized groups racialized black people are disproportionately impoverished, but this does not neatly prove the cause now, nor does it prove the problem of contemporary racism. So, why does much of African American literature get analyzed from frameworks that less accurately depict both the historical and current reality of racialization and American identity? After all, who benefits then and now from the persistence of raci(al/st) ideology? Who benefits from the limiting and devaluing of a multitude of voices and experiences, as it pertains to “racial” identity and the identification of race(ism)? And if we include discourse about the wealth gap, this still says little about the

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for a post-raci(al/st) world but could not see his vision through, as many people rejected his ideas and persistently categorized him and his literature as Negro, as black, despite his protestations. He felt removed from the “black and white races” and not simply a “mixture” of both but as embodying something new, a new race, the American race. He protested not because he saw anything wrong, per se, with being black but because he saw what was wrong with America’s obsession with race and color, the same obsession and commodification that Schuyler highlights and critiques. In his lesser-known novella York Beach (1929), Toomer philosophizes about race(ism) through his protagonist Nathan Antrum.7 While Antrum’s philosophy is general and can be applied to universal themes, one can also apply the philosophy specifically to Antrum’s philosophy or race(ism) and to Toomer’s philosophy as described, in part, above. In the opening paragraph, Antrum reflects on his philosophy of life. Toomer writes, [T]he pattern of his life led him through alternating phases of apparent fulfilment and apparent nonfulfillment. Sometimes the gifts of earth and of his fellow men more or less corresponded to his inner state; and at such times it was as if his active wishes had found and merged with their objects. At other times the substance of the exterior world seemed fragmentary, insufficient: its various forms and forces did more than stimulate wishes and cause them to intensify themselves and grow more intense the more they manifested without tangible means of satisfaction. When in this latter state, Antrum moved about, his wishes so intense that they formed a world, a world of sheer wish-force, this world so over-reaching and out-leaping the objects round about him that it seemed with sufficient force to free itself from earth and rise to a more perfect planet. (Toomer, American 12)

Here, Antrum thinks he can wish himself out of and above race(ism). His vacillation between fulfillment and nonfulfillment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, is caused by both internal and external forces, which easily map onto the internalized and externalized struggles of traditional depictions of “biracial” characters and tragic “mulattos,” like those Fauset creates. In information previously relayed, as wealth gap does not mean poor. The difference in interpretation matters. 7  York Beach is thought to be a raceless text and, therefore, is often misread as an example of the writer not confronting racism. In other words, the characters’ races are not rendered clear. Thus, the novella does not meet the traditional expectations for African American literature.

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the Introduction to Cane, George Hutchinson says that the dramatic publication of Cane, which was largely published and promoted through the institution of race(ism), “epitomizes the fact that no person considered ‘Negro,’ according to the one-drop rule of the United States, could get a hearing except under the sign of blackness, even if they did not consider themselves black” (Cane, emphasis in original, xxvii). In a letter to Horace Liveright, Toomer writes, “‘My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine…. I expect and demand acceptance of myself on their basis. I do not expect to be told what I should consider myself to be’” (Cane xxviii). Toomer’s phenotype and how society reads his appearance contradict how Americans view race(ism), like his protagonist Antrum, like so-called tragic mulattos, and like Schuyler’s “white” African Americans and “Caucasians” who cannot confidently assert that there are no “black leaves, twigs, etc.” on their family trees. His fundamental position on race highlights the paradox and his desire to reimagine the world and elicit recognition of an alternate and new world. Ultimately, it is primarily because of his resistance to and recognition of race(ism) that Toomer’s Cane went out of print between 1929 and 1967 and why his shorter works do not receive much critical attention. Often, voices like Fauset and Toomer are those labeled “black” that continue to go out of print or are presented as simply oppositional voices for readily “black” writers or texts when, frequently, they shared common liberatory goals. In the field, which is a relatively new phenomenon, as Jarrett points out, blackness must remain separate and distinct from whiteness, so the literature must reflect that separation and distinction, which is to the detriment of every racialized person. One characteristic argument of the criticism of African American literature that rejects the raci(al/st) ideology of its society is integrationism. In 1946 and approximately 32 years after his request for a course on race and race relations was rejected by Howard University’s Board, Locke wrote an essay titled, “The Negro Minority in American Literature.” In this essay, Locke contends that one “ultimate aim” (315) of considering any “minority-­group literature” (315) must be “the integrated consideration of the minority literature with the main stem of the literature of the majority” (315). He says that “Black American literature” is, simply put, American literature and should be taught within courses centered on American literature. He also calls for a reconstruction of methodologies for teaching ethnic literature as part of American literature. He argues that

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content inclusion and exclusion and other “tradition-set boundaries” (315) within academia masks the limitations of such boundaries and reifies hierarchy. Locke suggests two pedagogical objectives: the integration of African American literature within American literature and the elimination of what he dubs “the double standard of critical values and judgment” (315). Furthermore, he asserts that a sociocultural approach to literature is the best approach especially regarding African American literature. “Black American literature” may be approached in one of the following ways: “as a reflection of the minority mind; as an index of the majority attitude toward the minority; and as a social mirror reflecting the interactions of the majority-minority relationships with their ever changing alignments” (315–316). Locke promotes the third approach, calling it both a combination of the first two and a sociocultural approach that would bring common values and objective criteria to the surface. On the one hand, he participates in canon making, and some of his seminal works are canonized. On the other hand, he critiques the tradition, which indicates the importance of reading authors extensively across genres and time. Locke is a figure most often upheld as supporting or upholding race ideology. Yet, his ideas on race and culture, like many people’s, are more wide-­ ranging and complicated. Like Locke, many writers and critics have echoed and continue to encourage the integration of African American literature into American literature, arguing that one simply cannot discuss America’s national literature without also talking about so-called black Americans who are an integral part of the “nation.” According to Locke, a racially distinctive Negro literature exists and is a profound part of American literature, broadly speaking, which clashes with Schuyler’s position that there is American literature and no “distinctive Negro literature.” Locke’s position reflects the desire to be considered as equal to “white” Americans and aims to end racism and social injustice but in ways different from the solutions posed by “Black Nationalists” and so on. There is no firm “starting point” for when integrationist literature emerged, though some critics suggest that integrationist literature became most prominent in African American literature leading up to and throughout the Harlem Renaissance Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. There is indeed no endpoint. Integration should not be misinterpreted as assimilation, though some integrationists believe in assimilation. Just as Locke points out in his essay on “black” American literature, some integrationists think that viewing

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African American literature as American literature still requires methodological frameworks that take historical, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts into consideration for productive conversations regarding the literature. By painting African American literature as solely separate, distinct, and “black,” African American writers were unintentionally reifying the underpinnings of racist discourse that insists on writing otherness onto so-called black people and then oppresses them based on these alleged differences, which signify inferiority. In 1951, Howard University’s Sociology Department compiled and had the university’s press publish a book titled The Integration of the Negro into American Society. In his chapter on athletics and the arts, Sterling A.  Brown, a professor of English, defines integration as “complete acceptance” (117). His thoughts on integration merit discussion: The integration of the Negro athlete or artist means his acceptance as an individual to be judged on his own merits, with no favor granted, and no fault found, because of race…. If his achievements warrant, he should receive the rewards as a man, not as Negro…. But the integrated man is a whole man, not a fractional. By integration in the arts I do not mean [the] loss of artistic identity…. Integration does not have to mean the loss of such distinctiveness. (117)

While some integrationists write against the labeling of “blackness” and distinctiveness in literature, others, like Brown, maintain that there are indeed differences between “black” American art and “white” American art. In other words, there is not a single way to be an integrationist, although, in the field, that is often how the literature is taught. In apparent contrast to integrationism, within the literary criticism of African American literature, there have been and continue to be calls for “Black Nationalist” views of the literature and nationalist literary production. The Black Power and Black Arts movements (BPM and BAM, respectively) reflect a particular type of gravitation toward recentering and redefining blackness in the arts and academia but also in other aspects of everyday life. Addison Gayle, Hoyt Fuller, John Henrik Clarke, and Larry Neal, as critics of African American literature, sought to identify, define, and, therefore, manifest a “black aesthetic.” The term black aesthetic was coined by Fuller, who defines the term in his essay “Towards a Black Aesthetic” as “a system of isolating and evaluating the artistic works of black people which reflect the special character and imperatives of black

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experience” (4). While this definition does not do much to help critics identify and name characteristics of a black aesthetic, Fuller’s essay and other work essentially led the conversation and gave a name to what writers of the BAM/BPM and early twenty-first-century writers do, according to Crawford in Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-­ First-­Century Aesthetics (2017). Gayle takes up the term in “The Harlem Renaissance: Towards a Black Aesthetic,” making a clear distinction between assimilationists (often used interchangeably with “integrationists,” which, as explained above, is a misstep because, historically, it has kept camps with similar goals within the discipline unnecessarily divided) and nationalists, stating that the nationalists of the BAM are picking up on the work of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. These writers, according to Fuller, were writing texts that are distinctly different and unapologetically “black.” In “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic,” Neal provides a visual model of how African American literary criticism might look, in addition to attempting to categorize and identify the “black” aesthetic. He says that the reflections are an outline for what will turn into an essay in a traditional form. He writes prolifically about the black aesthetic and in what some would identify as the black aesthetic. For Gayle, Fuller, and Neal, “black” American writers and critics must recognize and privilege “the subtleties and significance of black style and technique” (Fuller 5). In “Reclaiming the Lost African Heritage,” Clarke calls black American writers to another sort of action: reclaiming and reconciling their African heritage, which, according to him, necessarily involves rewriting African history and African people within America and the world’s cultural, raci(al/st), and national imagination. In other words, “black” American writers must reclaim their “black” African roots, which would then manifest itself in the form of what Neal, Gayle, and Fuller would identify as a black aesthetic. The dichotomy Gayle especially constructs between assimilationists and black nationalists simultaneously echoes and mirrors the sort of rhetoric that has been used to separate and fracture American communities (i.e., critics, writers, and people, broadly speaking). He uses assimilationist in place of integrationist; such rhetorical choices then foster a more profound sense of division than is necessarily there or that must be there. After all, integration is not the same as assimilation. More to the point, integrationists wanted the same outcomes and new realities Fuller argues that nationalists desire. Some writers, like Locke (someone Fuller draws on), have nuanced stances regarding the solution for raci(al/st) social

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injustice but how the field teaches, anthologizes, and canonizes writers has an unintended (or intended) impact on how we see ourselves, each other, and the various political and artistic movements. Many integrationists argue that “black” American literature was different from American writing in the ways Fuller describes. Further, Fuller says that “Black critics have the responsibility of approaching the works of black writers assuming these qualities to be present” (5). The qualities he discusses include style, language, and history. Gayle misreads at best, and disregards at worst, the subversive nature of Phyllis Wheatley’s poems and other writers that do not fulfill his search for a “black” aesthetic. In such moments, he fails to take Fuller’s cautionary words. What he says, though, according to Jarrett, also became true. The “Black Aesthetic” continues to be theorized, defined, and looked for in the literature and criticism. The impact is a reified and deepened sense of disunity rather than a tradition of recognizing existing differences and yet still focusing on the commonalities between goals. In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012), Barbara and Karen Fields, a historian and sociologist, respectively, describe this fracturing caused by the race-racism evasion as the privileging of the individual versus the collective, or the focus on “difference” to the preclusion of similarities. Such inclinations reverberate across time and texts and manifest as a “racial aesthetic,” even as it is conflated with a cultural aesthetic, which, again, naturalizes race and, inadvertently, upholds its hierarchy but tries to invert the hierarchy. In other words, “blackness” gets reconstructed as an equally limiting, oppressive, hegemonic, and exclusionary force. The apparent inability to reconstruct race to inflict fewer restrictions and more liberty reflects, in part, the limitations of reconstructionist philosophies of race, a positionality that manipulates many people into feelings of progress and resistance. Like Crawford, many critics work to highlight connections between African American literary studies (i.e., specifically its persistent interest in the “Black Aesthetic”) and other fields of study. In “An Overview: The Black Atlantic as a Bridge between Postcolonial and African American Literary Studies,” John Gruesser illustrates the interconnectedness between literary and postcolonial studies. Ultimately, he focuses on defining (1) Postcolonialism, (2) Signifyin(g), and (3) The Black Aesthetic, and argues that all three theoretically “offer valuable and far-reaching critical insights” (19) into African American literary studies and postcolonial studies. He attempts to build bridges between the disciplines. His effort

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reflects the resistance of the “siloization” (a term coined by Erica Edwards) whose abolition Foster, Edwards, Paul Jay, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o also advocate. Foster and Edwards broach the “debilitating fragmentation” (Jay 14) caused by the (1) forgetfulness or ignorance of disciplinary history and literary genealogies, and (2) the learned practice of not straying from one’s preferred (or specialized) way of knowing/seeing. Jay’s introduction extends the conversation to show how literary and cultural studies have taken a turn toward transnationalism and globalization. He posits that although many critics apply “black and white” terms and definitions to both, there is value and practicability in freeing the discourse from the schismatic language currently used to examine literature. His essay also reflects the attempted movement away from siloization and echoes Edwards’ sentiment that “[w]e create the spaces we study” (8), which brings the discussion to anthologies. Anthologies, in many ways, determine which authors and texts get included in classrooms. The anthologies of African American literature have reified raci(al/st) ideology and, in many ways, prevented alternative philosophies of race from being considered since many readers, ironically, read to confirm their beliefs. It is not that there have not always been alternative radical theories of race and culture in the US. It is that these different modes of seeing, being, and imagining the future have been excluded and obscured within the context of America. Instead, the default philosophies of race persisted, which has unintentionally aided the continuation of race(ism). Anthologies of African American literature continue to impact the teaching and analysis of literature. In “Platforms for Black Verse: The Roles of Anthologies” (2011), Howard Rambsy illustrates how anthologies influenced and shaped (and were influenced and shaped by) the Black Arts Movement. What Jarrett sees as shortcomings Rambsy uplifts as strengths. The paratextual information he examines shows how specific types of writing (and writers, by extension) remained excluded from the canon and the conversation in some ways. He also highlights how diverse voices were packaged together in a way that cast them as similar and unified. As discussed, the history of the packaging of African American literature does place restrictions and limitations around the literature. In “Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994” (1997), Kenneth Kinnamon anthologizes (catalogues) African American anthologies published between 1845 and 1994. He provides a seemingly extensive survey of anthologies ranging from general to poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and literary criticism and evaluates them based on the

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following criteria: (1) their influence “in establishing the canon” (462), (2) the number of texts and writers included in the anthology, and (3) the quality and length of the bibliographical and biographical sections. Mostly, though, he lists the anthologies and editors, occasionally commenting on their value, according to his standards and their intended function (for high schools, HBCUs, etc.). Kinnamon uses language such as “good” writing and “refined taste” when discussing the work the anthologists did; such words have genealogies rooted in and stemming from beliefs and definitions of literature and raci(al/st) hierarchy. He also names three general anthologies as the best since The Negro Caravan (1941) and includes one he edited. Some important aspects of how Kinnamon talks about the anthologies are the frequent imbalance of gender representation, the evaluative lens he places on the texts included or not included in the anthology (basically, an anthology, by his definition, must always and forever include specific authors), and that all these anthologies exist. Indisputably, though, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature is the go-to in academia, further limiting and constricting literary criticism and the literature. That anthology has received a fair amount of criticism, considering the ready acknowledgment that canon creation necessitates exclusion and marginalization. Some scholars criticize the continued use of The Norton to teach African American literature. In “The African-American Anthology: Mapping the Territory, Taking the National Census, Building the Museum” (1998), Theodore Mason questions the strengths and shortcomings of the anthology. He talks about how the text itself has become symbolic of a significant event—“a community’s coming together to represent and codify in a formal way the history of its own expressivity” (186)—and is also the problem. He analyzes how the anthology signifies an “idea of mainstream acceptance and canonization” (186) and calls for continued scholarship and development within the field. According to him, the problem is less about editorial intent and more about how the anthology is likely to be interpreted or read (191). He goes on to say that “the idea of nation” (192) influences the ways in which anthologies function as reflecting some sort of difference (raci[al/st], cultural, or generic). The creation of the African American anthology, for example, was at least in part a response to race(ism) and how “blackness” had been constructed as nonliterary, non-­ contributors to American culture, unrefined, and so on. He dubs such responses “hermeneutical skepticism” (192). He points to the tension between anthologizing based “on conforming to the principles defined by

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literary practice” (193) and anthologizing literature by African Americans. Based on the tensions he identifies, he suggests that perhaps it would be more fruitful to view anthologies as foundations for understanding historical conflicts (197) rather than as defining canon. While this might be a more generative way to view and use anthologies, it is not currently a reflection of how anthologies are utilized. Continuing the simultaneous backward and forward glance in the field and specifically on examinations of anthologies, George Hutchinson, in “Representing African American Literature: Or, Tradition Against the Individual Talent” (2013), shows how African American literature has been defined by reinforcing a “system of difference” (39) that sustains the majority/minority dyad. As a result, he says, certain authors and texts have been skewed to reaffirm the agendas of today’s critics, which he illustrates as being a consistent process since the 1930s. He examines the representation of African American writing in anthologies, using Countee Cullen as a case study, and analyzes the paratextual processes used to direct a text’s reception, using Larsen’s Passing as an example. According to him, the meaning of Countee Cullen and Larsen’s texts has largely been determined by “black and white” people alike despite evidence that supports “oppositional” or, at the least, more nuanced readings of such authors. The common thread regarding interpretation comes down to defining “black” and “black art” in a way that keeps them distinctly separate from “white” and, thereby, American art. From altering Larsen’s biographical information to include increasingly less information about her Danish heritage to reprinting Cullen’s “Heritage” alongside texts explicitly race centered or anthologizing only the poems that are race centered, which Hutchinson says is a small percentage of Cullen’s work, the marketing, publishing, and reading trend has consistently supported “race-centered” readings and texts. Such readings maintain the status quo definition of race via black and white, and unknowingly, he speculates, also uphold the raci[al/st] hierarchy. If the goal as a discipline is to liberate raci(al/st) American imaginations, a shift within theories, criticism, and pedagogy is necessary. The theory of racelessness is just one addition to the alternatives. There has been some movement to continue redefining African American literature and how it is taught. Kenneth Warren’s argument to historicize African American literature as a happening of the past is a prominent and well-known but widely criticized example. In What Was African American Literature? (2012) Warren asserts that African American literature is a historical body of work written by “black” people within the

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period of and in response to Jim Crow America. While I recognize some merits of Warren’s argument, namely that insistence on raci(al/st) difference reifies hierarchies and that the middle and upper classes were enlisted in a literary and artistic politics that was thought to serve the entire racialized group of so-called black people, I do not agree that African American literature is something of the past. So long as America continues grappling with race(ism) and probably long after, much of American literature and its criticism will reflect some form of engagement with raci(al/st) ideology. Many other critics and the academy have transitioned to an increasingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary moment that gives a false sense of progress and unity in ways not dissimilar to the Black Arts Movement. As the above-named set of writers each says, critics and intellectuals have the power to manifest their liberatory visions. There continues to be movement away from the hegemonic ideology described and displayed in the above essays and books regarding how literature portrays “race” and the so-called black aesthetic, or at least questions regarding whether there is a distinctly “black aesthetic” or “black art” to be identified and promoted. However, excluded philosophies of race, limiting frameworks, and literature exist in the literature and are prevalent. Scholars have become increasingly interdisciplinary, even if not often reaching toward philosophies of race, if at all. Literary critics, continue to redefine African American literature and its criticism. In Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (2014), Simone C. Drake argues that certain African American women artists “offer cultural productions that present characters or performances that claim transnational identities for African American women who do not travel, women who stay put in the United States” (1). She calls the artists’ tendencies toward cultural appropriation of other cultures, like Beyoncé’s Afro-Latina-Caribbean vibe in “Beautiful Liar,” an instance of the artists’ conceptualization of “identity as heterogeneous and always in a state of production and reproduction” (11). Critical Appropriations, in the title then, reflects the intentional and political decisions the artists make, according to Drake. She combines transnational studies with “black” women’s studies, feminist studies, and literary studies and illustrates (1) the value of expanding our definition of transnationalism to include figures who do not physically leave home, which she dubs immobile transnationalism, and (2) the value of reformulating conceptions of diaspora and the deep, critical analyses of the intersections of race and gender when discussing art by African American women. Ultimately, she argues that only the willingness to

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“[re]formulate ways to represent and imagine the complexity of an African American subjectivity beyond the highly racialized, homogeneous construction of blackness” (9), vis-à-vis the recognition of transnational subjectivities, will further liberate women. The move, then, for Drake, requires the possession of transnational identities and the displacement of “national identity that is tied to one particular place and nation” (10). She also continues saying that “black” women’s studies have made minimal if any progress in most institutions, which she attributes to several reasons including the limitations imposed by current alternate definitions of transnationalism and diaspora. According to her, if scholars adopt her definitions and assertions, they will help “erode confining, geographical, and intellectual boundaries that pigeonhole African Americans in localized and static spaces” (23). In addition to critics like Levy-Hussen and as mentioned at the outset, Jarrett consistently calls for new and alternative ways to engage African American literature. In “Toward a New Political History of African American Literature” (2011), Jarrett argues that the value of African American literature should be examined and measured by studying the following: “[1.] African American literature’s role in the political imagination, [2.] political action’s role in the African American literary imagination, and, conversely, [3.] African American literature’s role in political action, to the extent that it can facilitate social change” (4). According to Jarrett, beginning with African American and American literature from the eighteenth century and continuing through Barack Obama’s presidency overcomes and (re)writes what he calls “the blind spots of methodology and historiography that all of us, unwittingly or not, have inherited from Black Studies” (4). In doing so, Jarrett skips over the 1960s and 1970s, stating that much of the political historiography of African American literature rests on the literature and politics of the Black Arts Movement, and noting that “the famous period has dictated too much of the recent political approaches to African American literary history and that its terms need an update” (13). He makes a few calls to action: (1) an update of terms regarding the BAM, (2) a recasting of “dominant histories of African American literature” (12), (3) a critical survey of “African American intellectual contributions to political action” (10) in the field of African American literary studies, (4) a renewing of the African American intellectual history, and (5) a “coordination of literary studies with political studies” (9). In summary, Jarrett is fundamentally concerned with the potential of politics or political action to help define the literature. One

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dominant “trend” or shift from prior moments in literature and literary studies is, indeed, a shift toward interdisciplinary approaches to literature. Jarrett and other contemporaries work to create and illustrate bridges between departments/disciplines, the theories, and pedagogies, something in which this book participates. In African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader (2006), Jarrett attempts to rewrite what he dubs “anomalous” African American texts into African American literary studies and literary studies broadly speaking. For Jarrett, anomalous African American literature equates to “raceless fiction” in which the breadth of canonical writers’ work that does not reflect a preoccupation with race is ignored, critiqued, and transformed into footnotes or goes out of print. Celebrated authors like Richard Wright, Baldwin, Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston sometimes marked their “protagonists as racially white, neutral, or ambiguous” (8). In this way, so-called black American writers wrote beyond race, which is the inspiration for the title of Jarrett’s Reader. The “commonality of human experience” (Kilgore 181) comes to the forefront of the texts Jarrett identifies as anomalous. Including such raceless texts in the study of African American literature, according to Jarrett, proves to be a necessary revision of raci(al/st)-political history including the interracial and “intraracial segregation of canonical African American literature … from anomalous African American literature” (italics in original, 21). In other words, such intellectual work and revision, which require the participation of educators, students, critics, and the broader reading public alike, illuminate and interrogate essentialist and reductive assumptions and definitions about African American literature as literature that focuses primarily on race and racism, adding, instead, “extra layers of meaning that enhance our understanding of the aesthetic and political complexities of African American literature” (20). Talking about the ironic exclusionary practices of African American literature and criticism, Jarrett’s introduction, the headnotes written by other African American literature specialists, and the choices of fiction included in the collection fail to move the book itself beyond race(ism), as De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s review of Jarrett’s work illuminates. Kilgore praises the anthology, asserting the following: “This valuable collection demonstrates that black writing need not be a direct transcription of African American experience” (emphasis added, 182) as if the texts included do not transcribe the experiences of many African Americans. Unintentionally, Kilgore keeps African Americans on the fringes of

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humanity since the “African American experience” cannot be raceless and functioning within a racist society. He furthers his praise by saying that the headnotes authored by Hutchinson, Matthew Guterly, and Amrijit Singh present Larsen, Toomer, and Wallace Thurman, respectively, “as writers in constant motion between black and white worlds” (182). Thus, Jarrett’s explication and deconstruction of the “essentialist reification of race” (4) that has been shaped through and, in part, by an ideological consistency in the “exclusion of unconventional or anomalous texts from African American literary anthologies” (2) simultaneously implies and perpetuates another form of essentialism and highlights a call for a new deracialized language and way of interpretation that completely steps outside the bounds of race(ism). What remains fixed even in Jarrett’s effort to go beyond race(ism) is the belief in four potentially destructive binaries: (1) that characters that are not explicitly raced are also not “black,” (2) that writers and characters can only inhabit a “black or white” world, which suggests the existence of a “black and white” world with no alternative worlds or cross influences, (3) that anomalous fiction does not depict African American experiences, either because of the absence of dialect or the lack of raci(al/st) descriptors, and (4) that anomalous and canonized texts cannot also represent a strategy for and an interrogation of race(ism) itself. The anomalous works that comprise Jarrett’s collection extend beyond race to include the undoing of race and the raci(al/st) assumptions that default some Western readers to “whiteness” and, consequently, essentialist notions of “blackness.” Texts initially thought not to reflect race(ism) remain to be mined and included in African American literary studies, and will open up a critical part of conversations about race(ism), as do texts with explicitly “raced” or deraced characters. In writing beyond race, some of the writers and texts included in the collection interrogate and critique society’s various conceptualizations of race and, ultimately, resist racism in ways different from their counterparts, so-called race-obsessed authors, by resisting traditional indicators of race(ism). In “Introduction: New Essays on ‘Race,’ Writing, and Representation in Early America,” discussing William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Robert Levine argues that Brown attempts to “destabilize race so that race thinking itself would come to seem a form of (cultural) insanity” (Jarrett beyond 199). Indeed, authors such as Hurston, Morrison, Wright, and Baldwin produced what Jarrett calls anomalous—a deviation from the norm—texts that did more than unsettle readers by imagining racially

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ambiguous, “white,” or racially neutral characters to highlight universal human experience or other oppressive ideologies, like gender, class, and sexuality, that troubled them. According to Levine, there are significant differences in racial thinking from the 1670s to the present, which is also reflected in the literature of different time periods included in the collection. However, in “Ecumenical America: Global Culture and the American Cosmos” (1994), Orlando Patterson explains that America’s traditional conceptualization of race remains the same, which is also something Barbara and Karen Fields identify and argue. Patterson says, “While the binary rule was originally constructed and rigidly imposed by whites out of their commitment to notions of racial purity and exclusion, it is one that traditional African Americans have come to embrace for political and cultural reasons” (emphasis added, 114). The effects of accepting such binary bound notions of race(ism), as Jarrett rightly points out, have come to stymy more progressive conversations within the field of African American literary studies. The history of marginalizing types of texts and writers to the periphery within the discipline or category of African American literature has become evidence itself of ascription to notions of “whiteness” and a type of “blackness” that by definition depends on “whiteness” and is identified only in relation to “whiteness,” which is the same as saying it depends on racism and its relation to racist ideology. On the one hand, Jarrett interrogates what is generally called “the black aesthetic,” asserting that throughout African American literary history scholars have applied limiting lenses to texts that eventually led to an increasingly restrictive definition or conceptualization of the literature. Jarrett says, “[T]his cultural preoccupation with racial representation [through a black aesthetic and theme] perpetuated the belief that the best and most useful African American literature depicts the race” (emphasis added, 3). On the other hand, the language of Jarrett’s argument itself reflects, even if only slightly, a particular belief in the capacity for raci(al/st) authenticity (purity) and representation, a burden placed primarily on African Americans. While he critiques the preoccupation with raci(al/st) representation, he suggests that there is African American literature that “depicts the race” and, therefore, anomalous literature that does not. Part of the African American experience in the US is eraced and continues to be silenced, chalked up to non-blackness (whiteness) and even anti-blackness, which underscores the race(ist) undertones of raci(al/st) ideology.

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This is to say that, traditionally, literature that illustrates experiences that do not fit into the existent model of African American literature and literature that troubles the model has received controversial or poor reviews, or gone out of print to be recovered decades later if at all. Additionally, literature that does not fit the model might not be published at all or, if published, is marketed in ways that do not highlight the content of the text. Ultimately, the existent model, in addition to sometimes promoting stereotypical images of African Americans, places the onus of uplift onto the people most negatively impacted by racism and enables people of European descent to reject what should be a shared task, a question of human rights. Barbara and Karen Fields say, “Race belongs in the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity” (101). The ways that racism manifests as race ideology perpetuate the racist American’s illusion that race(ism) does not exist, but race does. Jarrett’s explicit and implicit goal is to help build a new framework for theorizing about and emancipating African American literature, culture, and politics. At a minimum, African American literary critics must work to build a more complex language to discuss the literature and decolonize imaginations. Like Morrison, writers in Jarrett’s anthology are writers “struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs” (x). From the outset, writers have highlighted the constructed nature of race in their efforts to resist race(ism), but such tropes and motifs have yet to be fully discovered, acknowledged, and theorized. Instead, “blackness” continues to be written onto the writers and their respective texts, except when it is not (i.e., anomalous), with disregard for the complexities of ethnic and cultural identity. According to Levine, [R]ace in early American studies should also be thought of in relation to creolization, nationalism, colonialism, a range of ethnicities, styles of discourse, and native studies. In the hybridized space of the Americas in ­particular what made a person ‘white’ or ‘black’ or ‘red’ when there were interracial sexual relations across the color line? (199)

The anomalous texts Jarrett seeks to (re)insert into African American literary studies and the canonized texts present a crisis of racial definition for those still “clinging to the binary conception of race” (Patterson 114) if,

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as critics and lovers of literature, we can move our own imaginations beyond popular and well-accepted conceptions of race(ism) (i.e., racism) and literature, as described above. Critics in the field must consider moving beyond the rhetoric of “race as construction” toward ideological and philosophical frameworks that view literature in ways that reflect such understandings. The erasure or silencing of anomalous writers and texts requires a (re) vision of African American literary history and the language used to describe both. The language used to encourage such intellectual work is a vital part of the process. Jarrett’s use of anomalous alone furthers the seeming divide between the canonical and noncanonical texts he includes in the anthology, forming a type of counternarrative, rather than an integral but potentially misunderstood part of the larger narrative, a narrative that can be inclusionary and yet not reflective of an imagined homogeneity. The methodology he proposes for reading and teaching such marginalized texts suggests that while there is a way for writers to provide authentic portrayals of black people, anomalous texts do not, but should not be ignored since they have “universal” value and implications. Thus, another implication of his argument is that race-obsessed authors/texts do not have universal application. In the headnotes for Frances Harper’s Sowing and Reaping, Carla Peterson’s explanation of Harper’s anomalous text highlights the superficial separation of African American narratives and national ones: “It [Sowing and Reaping] invites us to read the novel as a national rather than an African American narrative” (beyond 68), she says. So, while Harper’s interest in temperance “is both domestic and national, and defies racial ascription” (69), the implication is that so-called African American narratives are not national or vice versa because national narratives do not deal with “race” issues and non-anomalous African American literature does. Either way, there seems to be a consistent disconnect being perpetuated within the introduction and the headnotes between binaries that in turn support the ideologies Jarrett’s Reader intends to critique. What remains fixed is the belief in the four potentially destructive binaries as named and described above. Jarrett’s African American Literature Beyond Race is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge, definition(s) aside, for the following reasons: (1) the collection offers an expanded view of African American literature, (2) the collection includes anomalous texts written by beloved writers, which inspires a fuller analysis of said writers and others, (3) the collection intends to inspire readers to

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seek out other such texts and authors, (4) the collection calls for further research of African American literature, and (5) the collection demonstrates that new frameworks for theorizing about African American literature and examining our use of a canon are needed to liberate both writers and readers. Jarrett’s project is vital to the discipline, though the impact of his work has not been fully felt or made completely visible. In part, his efforts inspire this book. One critical pathway to positive change is fresh language, tropes, theories, and pedagogies that simultaneously extend beyond and against “race,” raci(al/st) ideology, and, ultimately, race(ism). Step into the theory of racelessness. Step into your racelessness.

Bibliography Clarke, John Henrik. “Reclaiming the Lost African Heritage.” Black Fire: an Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, Black Classic P, 1968. Crawford, Margo Natalie. “Introduction.” Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics, by Margo Natalie Crawford, U of Illinois P, 2017, pp.  1–17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j. ctt1q31s64.4. Drake, Simone C. “Introduction.” Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity, Louisiana State UP, 2014, pp. 1–23. Edwards, Erica. “Recapitulating the Yam: The Promise of African-American Literary Studies at History’s End: A Response to Frances Smith Foster.” American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 381–389. Fields, Karen and Barbara. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2014. Foster, Frances Smith. “African American Literary Study, Now and Then and Again.” PMLA, vol. 115, no. 7, 2000, pp. 1965–1967. ———. “Genealogies of Our Concerns: Early (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times.” American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 368–380. Fuller, Hoyt. “Towards a Black Aesthetic.” Chicken Bones: A Journal, 1968, www. nathanielturner.com/towardsablackaesthetichoytwfuller.htm. Gayle, Addison. “The Harlem Renaissance: towards a Black Aesthetic.” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 1970, pp.  78–87. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40640915. Gruesser, John Cullen. “An Overview: The Black Atlantic as a Bridge between Postcolonial and African American Literary Studies.” Postcolonialism, African

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American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic. U of Georgia P, 2005, pp. 1–22. Hutchinson, George. “Representing African American Literature or, Tradition Against the Individual Talent.” Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, U of Michigan P, 2013. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.2580732.6. Jarrett, Gene. African American Literature Beyond Race. NY UP, 2006. ———. Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013a. ———. “LOOSENING THE STRAIGHTJACKET: Rethinking Racial Representation in African American Anthologies.” Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, edited by George Hutchinson and John K.  Young, U of Michigan P, 2013b, pp.  160–174. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctv3znzrx.11. ———. “Toward a New Political History of African American Literature.” Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature, NYU P, 2011, pp. 1–19. Jay, Paul. “Introduction: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies.” Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Cornell UP, 2010, pp. 1–12. Johnson, Abby Arthur. “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance.” Phylon, vol. 39, no. 2, 1978, pp. 143–153. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/274509. ——— and Ronald Mayberry Johnson. “Aesthetics of Integration Negro Quarterly, Negro Story, Phylon, and Harlem Quarterly, 1940–1960.” Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century, U of Massachusetts P, 1991, pp. 125–159. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. MELUS, vol. 33, no. 1, 2008, pp. 180–182. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30029750. Kinnamon, Kenneth. “Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994.” Callaloo, vol. 20, no. 2, 1997, pp. 461–481. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/3299277. Levine, Robert. “Introduction: New Essays on ‘Race,’ Writing, and Representation in Early America.” Early American Literature, vol. 46, no. 2, 2011, pp. 199–205. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41348711. Levy-Hussen, Aida. “Reading African American Literature Now.” How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation, by Aida Levy-Hussen, New  York UP, 2016, pp.  131–168. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bj4s8q.8. Locke, Alain. “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture.” The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, 2000, pp. 187–199.

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———. “The Negro Minority in American Literature.” The English Journal, vol. 35, no. 6, 1946, pp. 315–320. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/807765. Mason, Theodore O., “The African-American Anthology: Mapping the Territory, Taking the National Census, Building the Museum.” American Literary History, vol. 10, no. 1, 1998, pp.  185–198. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/490266. McHenry, Elizabeth. “Rereading Literary Legacy: New Considerations of the 19th-Century African-American Reader and Writer.” Callaloo, vol. 22, no. 2, 1999, pp. 477–482. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3299496. Moody, Joycelyn. “‘We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause’: Independent Antebellum African American Literature. 1840–1865.” The Cambridge History of African American Literature. Edited by Maryemma Graham and Jerry W.  Ward Jr. Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 134–153. Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. Vintage Canada, 2009. ———. The Origin of Others. Harvard UP, 2017. ———. The Source of Self Regard: Selected Speeches, Essays, and Meditations. Alfred Knopf, 2019. Neal, Larry. “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic.” The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Doubleday, 1971. Patterson, Orlando. The Ordeal Of Integration: Progress And Resentment In America’s “Racial” Crisis. Civitas Books, 1998. ———. “Ecumenical America: Global Culture and the American Cosmos.” World Policy Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 1994, pp.  103–117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/40468616. Rambsy, Howard. “Platforms for Black Verse: The Roles of Anthologies.” The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry, by Howard Rambsy, U of Michigan P, 2011a, pp. 49–76. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/10.3998/mpub.1798608.6. ———. “Getting Poets on the Same Page: The Roles of Periodicals.” The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry, U of Michigan P, 2011b, pp. 17–48. Schuyler, George. Black No More. Dover Publications, 2011. Warren, Kenneth. “Historicizing African American Literature.” What Was African American Literature?, by Kenneth Warren, Harvard UP, 2011, pp.  1–43. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvjghtk7.4. Wilson, Ivy G. “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-American Magazine or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives.” Publishing Blackness, edited by George Hutchinson and John K. Young. U of Michigan P, 2013, pp. 18–38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.2580732.5.

CHAPTER 3

The Theory of Racelessness in Literary Studies: The Literal Absence of “Race” Versus the Figurative Presence of Color

Introduction Scholars from various disciplines attempt to liberate African American writers and African American literary studies from the strictures that the expectation of race(ism) within African American literature imposes on the authors and arbiters of the literature. The canon and criticism of African American literature have often been necessarily exclusionary, in part, for these reasons: to prevent stereotypical images of “black” people in the US or “racist contamination” (beyond, 165), to promote less stereotypical and more positive images of blackness, and to “control cultural and political portrayals of the race as much as possible” (165). The result has been what John Guillory, in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), calls “a politics of representation in the canon” and a “democratic representational politics” (5) in the US academy. Writers and critics alike have been expected to perpetuate and have perpetuated the value of African American literature as it remains intertwined with the elevation of historical conventions of American raci(al/st) politics. Thus, the literature written by those people identified as “black” Americans or who identify themselves as such must conform to these expectations of their work to have any aesthetic, cultural, social, political, or commercial value. Ironically, in African American literary studies, the straitjacket one sometimes finds oneself working to free oneself from is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. M. Mason, Theory of Racelessness, African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99944-5_3

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imposed both externally and internally and is perpetuated by a history of ascribing and using raci(al/st) language to analyze, organize, and influence the literature. In African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader (2006), Gene Jarrett explains “how race, representation, authenticity, genre, canon, and tradition factored—and still factor— into the way scholars read, anthologies organize, instructors teach, and students learn African American literature” (emphasis added, 3). I recognize and honor the political value that canon formation and the history of literary criticism of African American literature have generated and promoted. Importantly, though, I seek to illuminate how using raci(al/st) language in the criticism, applying raci(al/st) thought to the literature, and continuing to expect the literature to be, even in part, a priori literary ideologies of race and racism paradoxically upholds the racist hierarchies many scholars seek to deconstruct or, at least, reconstruct.1 In effect, the against race discourse of Paul Gilroy’s Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000), where Gilroy calls for the renunciation and elimination of race and raci(al/st) thought to be replaced by a new type of humanism, cosmopolitanism, and political language, and Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011), where Warren argues that the tendency for race to determine our valuing and reading of the literature paradoxically supports “our commitment to a social order that naturalizes forms of inequality” (UChicago, 2018), lay the foundation for this chapter’s discussion, as does Jarrett’s attempts to reinsert anomalous texts—which he defines as raceless texts or texts that have “white” or “racially ambiguous” characters—into the canon and criticism, by extension, with African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader. In this chapter, I argue that, as it stands, the continued use of raci(al/st) language and concepts to talk about and interpret the literature removes the emphasis from racism to race, which naturalizes race in unintentional ways and allows race(ism) to continue largely unchecked. Finally, in this chapter, I represent and apply the theory of racelessness—alternatively named the walking negative trope in this chapter—as a tool for literary and societal analysis. Paradoxically, here, I appear to support the notion that African American literature and its criticism are or should be primarily concerned 1  This includes post-blackness since one might be inspired to ask if the argument that society accepts and expects many versions of blackness is accurate but primarily because it still operates within the sphere of race.

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with ideologies of race and racism. This is not so but to work toward liberating oneself from the straitjacket, African Americanists must grapple with race(ism) in more liberatory ways before being able to fully liberate the canon, criticism, and teaching of African American literature, which requires talking about race(ism) but in more complex ways. In showing how race(ism) masquerades as race (i.e., heritage, ancestry, phenotype, and so on) in African American literary criticism and literature and how the default philosophies of race and their corresponding frameworks for analysis naturalize the seeming existence of race, this chapter illuminates a much clearer delineation between race and culture, which this author takes to include the metaphysical and figurative nature of “blackness.” This separation of race from culture enables one to recognize that race does not dictate culture and, in the ways that race(ism) informs and shapes culture in the US, it would be most beneficial to remove the hierarchy that causes these types of cultural happenings in the first place. In effect, I argue that, in the literature, racism often masquerades as race and is not indicative of who a person or group of people is or are, and that when readers miss this integral connection, race(ism) continues operating in seemingly unavoidable and inescapable ways. My theory of racelessness helps more people stop mistranslating “race” in a way that does not uphold racism to then help people better recognize, address, and stop racism in its tracks. Often, readers conflate concepts like race, class, ethnicity, and culture, which strengthens the metaphorical straitjacket, especially as it pertains to the literature, and overlook the paradox race(ism) fosters: racism creates race, and the belief in race creates racism (i.e., race(ism) and raci(al/st)). In literature, if one focuses on how race functions in direct relation to the operation of race(ism), one might come to increasingly view race as the violence enacted by the racialization of people, policies, and systems and not as the cause of race(ism), but as a way racism hides its face. Remember, the core tenets of theory of racelessness are as follows. Race does not exist in nature. Race does not exist as a social construction. Everyone is raceless. Racism is the belief in race as biological or a construction. Racism is not everywhere and is not the cause for every perceived “racial” disparity or negative interaction. Racism can be overcome. With these tenets in mind, I deploy my race translator to derive a clearer image of racism and all that gets conflated and upheld with “race.” After elucidating how race and racism cannot be separated but race and culture are separate, I present and engage the theory of racelessness through a raceless “walking negative” literary trope that will aid critics in

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their efforts to redefine African American literature outside of the exclusionary tendencies, hierarchy, and domination of race(ism) altogether. The trope encourages and enables a clear redirection of one’s attention from “race” to race(ism), from “racial” to race(ist), that requires and allows race to function how it currently does both in literature and society. This redirection of focus to race(ism) then allows for the proper identification of what “racism” is and how society can solve race(ism) and reconcile and begin to heal from the nefarious effects of race(ism). In other words, critics must move the onus of uplift from the authors and characters to those that benefit most from the continued status quo, which describes a very small minority of people on all parts of the raci(al/st) and political spectrum. We can begin by transforming how we engage with the literature and decolonizing our imaginations. Raci(al/st) language unintentionally and sometimes intentionally upholds race(ism) by allowing the concept of race to remain at the forefront of the American landscape and tongue while race(ism) continues lurking in the shadows. In other words, most scholars of African American literature use concepts and terms like race, racial (in)justice, racial politics, racial authenticity, racial ideology, the racial divide, black, white, Asian, person of color, Indian, Hispanic (also an ethnicity), mulatto, skin color, interracial, mixed, post-blackness, blackness, minority, majority, ancestry, heritage, creole, hybrid, transracial, biracial, and racial, which naturalizes, often unintentionally, the very existence and presence of race and masks the historical and current cause of race, which is race(ism). Thus, even when scholars illustrate how many African American literary texts subvert or otherwise resist ideologies of race and argue that race is socially constructed, they use race language and concepts in their discourse, which undermines the liberatory potential of their work and that of the literature they examine by presenting race as natural, inherent, and always present regardless of its subversion. Although a fallacy, race is still perceived and discussed as existing in nature (i.e., ancestry and heritage) or as a social construction, and human beings are categorized, in part, in the US according to their self-identified or ascribed race, which has also come to be conflated with ethnicity. That is to say that “black Americans” are also, ethnically speaking, assumed to be “African Americans,” which is not always true. One central problem with race(ism) and the conflation of race, culture, and ethnicity is that it naturalizes race and conversations about race(ism) manifest as discourse about race, which then does not solve and reifies the problem of race(ism).

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In a sleight of hand, race(ism) often masquerades as race in both the literature and the criticism. Race(ism) is inextricably connected to race and all components of “race,” like the continued use of race language even to describe culture.2 Notably, some critics of African American literature do not view all the literature as, ultimately, inherently raceless if it were not for the influence and presence of race(ism). One alternative to viewing literature in such unintentional but equally confining ways might be to consider bell hooks’ conceptualization of postmodern blackness; in “Postmodern Blackness,” hooks addresses intragroup tendencies to essentialize blackness and authentic blackness and argues that postmodern blackness projects function to highlight intragroup differences to decenter ideas about homogeneity within black communities. However, the word blackness, even in its most expanded definition, still naturalizes race and signifies raci(al/st) ideologies, which diminishes its liberatory potential. It is no longer enough to continue working to reconstruct, to redefine, blackness or any other concept that remains inextricably connected with race(ism), especially when many writers and texts work to not just redefine or problematize blackness, as is often argued, but to undo it altogether. The difficulty—the straitjacket— raised through Jarrett’s anthology and his use of raci(al/st) language stems from the limitations of how both African American and black are defined and intertwined. African American literature “should be defined in the broadest way possible” (2), says Jarrett. African American literary scholars can (re)define the literature and the field by recognizing their use of racecraft and redirecting the focus of their criticism and teaching toward race(ism) to force a societal reckoning with race(ism) and open dialogue to writers and texts that do not fit into the prison America’s raci(al/st) house creates for them. In African American literary studies, by viewing race as simply that which carries and perpetuates racism to be (re)enacted within American society, scholars can begin to separate the parts of what many people misperceive to be “blackness,” that is, racial, that many people value dearly and, thereby, separate the violence from ourselves and each other. Further, we can see how many characters in African American literature are, by nature, depicted as raceless and effectively deraced by the writers and raced 2  Race is not an exclusive determinate of culture, nor vice versa. Additionally, one often participates in many cultures simultaneously. “American culture” is an amalgam, even if it is unrecognized as such.

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by other characters and the reader depending on how racism functions in the text and not based on cultural connections. Importantly, this chapter denies the existence of race without racism and reinforces the knowledge that racism exists, not the opposite. Without our continued assigning of race, our cultural inclinations will be made clearer and more specific based on region, nation, and ethnicity. Thus, we would not use raci(al/st) language to describe ourselves when we mean to talk about our cultural affiliations since there are extremely limited ways of talking about concepts like “blackness” without also essentializing and, therefore, stereotyping the concepts and oneself. The argument that because racism exists one must talk about and focus on race proves illogical upon further examination. We can focus on and talk about race(ism) in terms that do the liberatory work current anti-­ racist discourse only appears to enact for a select part of the population. We can shift the burden of anti-race(ism) from those affected most to everyone who is serious about “social justice.” We can help liberate oppressed characters in fictional realms by redirecting our analyses toward the impact and presence of race(ism). Then, we can begin to heal because we will stop naturalizing race and inadvertently upholding racism, which often deepens fractures and prevents unity across differences even within differently racialized groups. In this chapter, I strive to contribute to such transformation through my presentation and engagement of a raceless walking negative literary trope. Although they are from different literary eras, Frances E. W. Harper in Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), Nella Larsen in Quicksand (1928), and Barbara Chase-Riboud in Sally Hemings (1979) each negotiate how people are born raceless how people are promptly and consistently raced and (e)raced throughout their lives, depending on their phenotype (i.e., especially skin complexion), by other people in ways that most often benefit those other people and help maintain “order” and hierarchy both literally (e.g., institutionally, politically, and “scientifically”) and figuratively (e.g., socially, emotionally, and spiritually). This chapter uses the terms raceless and walking negative to demonstrate how the works discussed contradict and negate the “mulatto/a,” “passing,” “anti-black,” and even “creolized or hybrid” categories in which African American literary scholars continue to place such works. Additionally, this chapter’s use of raceless and walking negative is employed here to use language that reflects the call for racelessness that, it is argued, exists in otherwise raced texts and raced characters. Whereas “post-racial” suggests an era in which society is free of

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raci(al/st) discord (i.e., post-racist), the focus here is on texts that call for the undoing of race(ism), a skepticism and an elimination of the idea of race to harken a raceless post-racist era, and on texts that illustrate how and why race should not and does not exist. In other words, these texts reflect skeptical eliminativist or constructionist eliminativist philosophies of race that remain largely unknown, unacknowledged, or misunderstood. A “black” person with very fair skin visually and viscerally negates how society, at large, views and conceives of race. Although one significant marker of race is thought to be one’s skin color, “people of color” with fair skin are eraced by society based on other phenotypical identifiers and, with further speculation or inquiry, ancestry, the nefarious and racist one-drop rule. The body of a walking negative, then, reflects every human’s “natural” or “normal” state, which is one of being unraced or, at least, part of the human race, and society’s desire to categorize and claim bodies for better or worse becomes centered and highlighted. In other words, race(ism) is centered and in focus, as this centering shows how race works to uphold and mask race(ism). Therefore, metaphorically and metaphysically, walking negatives inspire and inform a literary trope that does not simply deconstruct race but illustrates how race does not, should not, and could not exist (i.e., eliminativist skepticist). Around the world, society’s nuanced and often troubled engagement with people perceived as “racially ambiguous,” including people with albinism, only underscores that which the walking negative as a literary trope promotes or, at least, illustrates, which is, in part, that eliminating racism necessitates the undoing of race and vice versa, and that neither can be resisted in the upholding of race and the metaphorical disappearing of race(ism) in literary criticism. Walking negatives conjure both the best and worst types of responses even within literature and art. Like people with albinism and with fair complexions, they can be misraced and eraced. Some can “pass” as “white” though they will likely always be identified as distinctively walking negatives (i.e., ambiguous). They are “colorless” since color is absent from their skin, and their colorlessness simultaneously mirrors their racelessness, as all humans are raceless, and this highlights the often raci(al/st) inclinations of their society. Walking negatives are raceless since people, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s, primarily and mistakenly defined race by biology and phenotype. In instances when society defines race metaphysically and conflates race with culture and ethnicity, they are often deemed raceless, too, because not only do they lack the typical physical markers,

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but they are often marginalized or ostracized, kept metaphorically or literally on the outskirts of society, thus muddying their metaphysical positionality. Still, they become raced by Western society despite their status at birth as noticeably unraced and “abnormal.” Societies that do not conceptualize race in the same ways as Westerners, especially Americans, view the abnormality through the perspective of one’s skin color being grossly different from that of the rest of the community, and typically make religious-­ inspired inferences as to how one is born without pigmentation. In the US, “normal” has come to mean clearly and unquestionably “black” or “white” in what is supposedly a no longer black or white world. This chapter examines how in certain texts so-called mulatto/a characters are more accurately thought of as raceless characters, as walking negatives, since the term mulatto accepts and perpetuates a colonialist and imperialist view of race and said characters highlight the fact that people (with and without fair skin) are born without race and are eraced by those around them for political and personal gain. Thus, while traditional literary analyses of African American literature predominantly use raci(al/st) language to discuss texts even as many texts interrogate race and raci(al/ st) language, the aim here is to step outside of raci(al/st) terms and terms that uphold raci(al/st) conceptions to elucidate and decipher some writers’ arguments that the undoing of race figuratively would subsequently undo racism since race does not literally exist. In rereading the literature in this way, one can better imagine a much less bleak future. Next, this chapter provides a brief etymology, overview, and literature review of how the “mulatto/a” has been traditionally interpreted in African American literature. Indeed, rereading the mulatta to illustrate the absence of color or absence of race as the solution for race(ism) instead of as the combination of race or the interracial nature of the US is to revise the African American literary tradition that has privileged and excluded specific images and definitions of “blackness” and to progress the fight against race(ism), as many African American critics argue is the function of literary criticism, literature, and academia. Then, after describing and defining the raceless theory of the walking negative inspired by Chase-Riboud’s “The Albino” (1974) and The Albino (1972), I will apply the theory to Harper’s Iola Leroy, Larsen’s Quicksand, and Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings, illustrating how texts separated by 36, 51, and 87 years, respectively, offer an eliminativist skepticist or eliminativist constructionist philosophical position regarding race. Now, I will provide a brief etymology, overview, and literature review of how the “mulatto/a” has been traditionally interpreted in

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African American literature. Mulatto/a is deeply rooted in raci(al/st) ideology and, traditionally, mostly naturalist philosophies of race. The term plays a significant role within African American literary studies, especially as it pertains to the earlier literature analysis.

She’s Tragic (Mulatta)3 Scholars disagree on the etymology of the words mulatto and the female version mulatta. Werner Sollors argues that the traditional etymology that connects mulatto with Spanish or Portuguese mulato “of mixed breed,” literally “young mule,” from mulo “mule,” from Latin mulus (fem. mula) “mule,” possibly in reference to the hybrid origin of mules (compare Greek hemi-onos “a mule,” literally “a half-ass,”), dating back to 1472 in relation to livestock, is a result of raci(al/sts) such as Edward Long and Josiah Nott’s assertion that “mulattoes” were sterile like mules, resulting in the imposition of a racist etymology connecting humans with mules (Sollors 129). Jack Forbes argues that mulatto originates from the Arabic term muwallad, which means “a person of mixed ancestry” (Forbes 145). The term muwallad has a meaning close to “the adopted,” referring to the offspring of non-Arab/Muslim people who adopt the Islamic religion and customs. However, linguists point out that the use of muwallad appears more recently than the use of mulatto. Ultimately, regardless of where the terms derives, the definition of the word mulatto/a has always been “one of mixed race” and, particularly, “one of black African and European” descent or, in the American South, of “Indian and African American ancestry” (Hening 252), or, broadly speaking, a “white person mixed” with any other race. From the beginning, mulatto/a was problematic because using the term, even anachronistically, reflects the essentialist view of race as a de facto biological phenomenon and the “mixing” of race as legitimate. It “disregards cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity and differences between regions and globally among populations of various ancestry” (Adhikari). Further, it legitimizes the existence of real or racialized 3  Mulatta refers to  a  woman whereas mulatto refers to  a  man. This section necessitates the use of frequent racialized language, making the use of “so-called” or quotation marks redundant. Thus, signifiers that highlight the author’s skepticism—the belief that because race does not exist as  a  valid biological category, it does not exist at  all, although racism does—are used less frequently but are noted for the following terms: biracial, white, blackness, black, mulatta, mulatto, and all racial language found within the citations.

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(natural or constructed) “white” people, which, by definition, are understood as being “racially pure” due to the nefarious and racist one-drop rule. This remains true even when race is argued to be a construction. What determines race often remains rooted in ideas about nature. A mulatto/a is, even if not directly related to livestock, aligned with and reflective of race(ist) ideology. Continued use of the term unintentionally and intentionally upholds race(ist) ideology, which is something African American literary scholars do not often seek to reify. In literature, the so-called tragic mulatta is a stereotypical, fictional, “biracial,” female character that emerged in African American literature during the late nineteenth century and remains a character used in contemporary African American literature, particularly in novels by women. Frequently described as appearing near-“white,” the phenotype of the mulatta often conflicts with her revealed inner “blackness” and reflects her fated tragic ending. She is a walking negative. Scholars like Cherene Sherrard-Johnson explain that the tragic mulatta highlights “an acute disjuncture between the avowed ideology of the one-drop rule and the inescapable interracial nature of antebellum Southern life” (206). As with people with albinism, naturalists were especially interested in deciphering what causes some mulattos (here, referring to all genders) to have fairer skin and appear “white” and some to have darker complexions with their “blackness” clearly visible for all to witness, know, name, and control. In “A Comparative Microscopic Study of the Melanin Content of Pigmented Skins with Special Reference to the Question of Color Inheritance Among Mulattos” (1911), H.  E. Jordan undertakes a “comparative histologic study of pigmented skins … with the hope of discovering evidence that might throw more light on the problem of color inheritance among the descendants of crosses between whites and negroes” (449). People are reduced to their “pigmented skins” as “sections of infant’s scalp and eyelid of newborn mulatto[s]” (450) were taken and samples of skin were taken postmortem or during abdominal operations. With the disturbing history of medical research on African Americans, it is unclear whether these samples were given freely, though they were clearly freely taken. Those people studied are described in ways similar to how one describes nonhumans, with emphasis placed on both skin color and race. Jordan records that “pure negro” (451), “pure negro woman” (451), “light mulatto” (452), “light mulatto male” (452), “brown mulatto boy” (452), and “mulatto” (453) account for the so-called black or mixed people. Whereas “whiteness” is assumed “Blond” (452), “Brunet” (452), “Dark

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blond male” (452), “Brunet female” (452), and so on, as Jordan makes no indication as to the subject’s “race” except by the absence of an indication. Ultimately, people feared “racial mixing” that was no longer founded and controlled by slavery or laws, not just regarding miscegenation but in terms of having to coexist and live together or as neighbors. The mulatta, according to Sherrard-Johnson, reflects the literal and figurative interracial mixing that society had to, by necessity, negotiate. Vashti Lewis argues that “[m]ulatto women were often singled out as morally bankrupt seducers of white gentlemen” (315) and that positive images were needed to “contradict the debasing and popular characterizations of black people in the late 19th century American fiction” (315). Interestingly, many “mulatta” figurations were created to counter negative depictions of both so-called black people and so-called biracial people. Such interpretations diminish the oppression and conflict “biracial” characters (and people by extension) experience and their other functions. Interpreting them as appeals to a “white” readership supports the discourse of “intraracial colorism,” which operates both ways and silences the various forms of oppression that exist both within and outside of “black” communities. Hazel Carby argues that the mulatta, “as a narrative figure, has two primary functions: as a vehicle for an exploration of the relationship between the races and, at the same time, an expression of the relationship between the races. The figure of the mulatt[a] should be understood and analyzed as a narrative device of mediation” (“Of Lasting Service for the Race” 89). Carby’s emphasis on interraciality upholds “black and white” raci(al/st) lines that the so-called mulatta character herself interrogates and subverts. Infrequently, critics interpret the “biracial” or “transracial” or “multiracial” characters as antitheses of race itself, as the undoing of “whiteness,” which relies on “racial purity” to exist, and as the ultimate undoing of race(ism), too. It is through literature and literary criticism that many American writers seek to disrupt, subvert, and undo race(ism). In such attempts, though, race and raci(al/st) purity remain at the forefront of discussion regarding texts even when writers such as Chase-Riboud and Morrison work to extend conversations that include but go beyond those of race in their attempts to resist race(ism). In other words, some texts require critics to step outside of the language of race (i.e., mixed, black, and white) to interrogate and subvert race(ism), not to elevate “whiteness” or resist “blackness” but to illustrate how in reifying “blackness” hierarchies associated with race remain intact. In effect, then, a question this chapter works

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through is whether undoing race is the solution for race(ism), by which I mean toward solving the institutionalized aspect, and navigating what, when, and how writers and scholars have imagined or argued for a raceless society for that reason. In addition, this book illuminates why the existing beyond race discourse does not fully liberate imaginations within the field. One way to extend the conversation beyond race to trouble race(ism) is to reread the tragic mulatta figures and mulatta figures, broadly speaking, as raceless, not “mulatta,” “white,” or “black” characters. Additionally, theories regarding creolization and hybridity confirm predominant theories of race because they are ultimately rooted in race, raci(al/st) thought, and raci(al/st) language. Since the perceived fact of race gives rise to the practice of race(ism), and the practice of race(ism) produces the illusion of race, this book aims to navigate, expose, and theorize the twilight between the unraced and raced territories by accepting, identifying, and recognizing moments of literary racelessness (unraced) and race(ism) (raced) without relying on raced tropes or theories. One way to extend the conversation beyond race to trouble race(ism) is to reread mulatta figures, often characters that can “pass,” as raceless characters, as walking negatives. Now, I will further describe racelessness as a trope in literature. This description includes an analysis of Chase-Riboud’s “The Albino” and The Albino, the initial works that gave me the starting language for and a deeper understanding of racelessness.

Racelessness as Trope To step outside of race to examine it with the express purpose of resisting and ending racism, a rhetorical remix of how one describes so-called biracial characters is required. A significant difference between what is suggested here and theories of hybridity/creolization is that these named theories still operate under the concepts of race even as they problematize the binary; although “black and white” combine to reflect a “new” way of being, the creolized character is still “black,” although both “black and white” within the context of this chapter; race language is still strongly attached to the theories; therefore, the theories do not move the conversation beyond race(ism). There are still assumptions about “whiteness” and “blackness.” Walking negative, according to Chase-Riboud, means “Albino,” “[w]hite African,” and “the absence of color” (19–20). In her poem “The Albino,” the speaker wonders if the absence of color is the answer to a moral question or the “color problem.” Indeed, (re)reading

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the “mulatta” to illustrate the absence of color or absence of race as the solution for race(ism) and not as the combination of race or the “interracial” nature of the US is to revise the African American literary tradition that has privileged and excluded specific images and definitions of “blackness” and to progress the fight against race(ism). The so-called mulatta would not be viewed as a stereotypical “biracial” figure and would provide the language and expanded and imagined ideological framework needed to go “beyond the descriptions that keep us [‘black’ women] locked in opposition and antagonism” (emphasis added, McDowell 59). In 2010, in a response to a question about what she thinks about America’s so-called post-racial (supposedly post-raci[al/st]) society, Morrison says, “When I walk down the street and I see a black person or I see a white person, I don’t know anything. I may assert some things depending on other things but that’s not knowledge. That’s not penetration of a personality or a human being … but we’re using that more and more and more, as you know, now, in this country trying to distinguish A from B and B from C and who belongs and who doesn’t …. I can’t bear it any longer” (PEN America 2010). Neither could Chase-Riboud, Larsen, or Harper, to name just three writers. Created in 1972, The Albino is a 12’4.5” by 9’9” sculpture that Chase-­ Riboud crafted out of black bronze and black wool. As in the poem “The Albino” (1974), the sculpture is its own walking negative. It is a pure black figure set against a stark white background. The blackness of the sculpture depends on the whiteness of the background and vice versa. At first sight, the center of the sculpture seems to defy gravity because it is a heavy brass base floating on a pile of ropes, which would be difficult for brass and ropes to do outside of Chase-Riboud’s imagination. What the viewer cannot see and must imagine is the rest of the brass base continuing underneath the ropes to give only the illusion of heavy materials being upheld by lighter materials just as the brass appears to be folding into and onto itself and the ropes. Chase-Riboud’s plastic demonstration of brass, not cloth, folding and rope upholding the brass, and blackness contrasted by whiteness does more than deconstruct binaries—hard and soft, black and white, static and moving—by including both sides of the binary in one image, like the colorless, the raceless, figure of the title or how literary critics interpret the mulatta figure in literature. It unravels each binary and forces the viewer’s eye inward in a self-reflexive posture that encourages each viewer to consider how one reads art, yes, but importantly, how one reads race, too, and how one participates in race(ism), by extension.

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Outside of the sculpture, the “racially ambiguous” person’s perceived lack or presence of “color” inspires people to ascribe race onto the walking negative and thereby contextualize that person within a racialized—that is, a race(ist)—society, which privileges a mostly Western view and conceptualization of race and what is “normal.” In fact, the walking negative figure is a bodily representation of what is literally normal: the absence of race. The sculpture inspires its viewers to think about how race(ism) and one’s own prejudice influences how they read people, how they read skin color, how they read other phenotypical characteristics, and how they presuppose a colorless—here, meaning a white—image of a person with albinism and are presented with another unexpected image. As in the studies described above, in her poem, the “blackness” of Chase-Riboud’s “Albino” is immediately identifiable and visible. However, her walking negative cannot be controlled, so she does not attempt to control. The base, the heaviest part, floats on rope and the U-shaped wings simultaneously climb upward and float downward. They are anchored into the wall or, perhaps, they find refuge and rest there. The whiteness of the wall with the top part of the sculpture holding the wings still certainly tries to control the raceless figure, but the explosion of binaries to the point of the binaries being undone prevents the white wall from actually controlling the sculpture. There is only a semblance of control in the guise of assistance (the arms are being held up) but the “freak” show nature of the figure remains boundaryless as its lineaments gesture toward another way of seeing. It is walking negative, a problem of color, that naturalists and sociologists have tried to pin down, know, define, and control. The Albino carries with it in all of its uniquely braided and fashioned materials the violent and heavy and otherworldly and god-inspired histories of societies studying, naming, renaming, excluding, including, elevating, degrading, and (e)racing people without race and (e)raced people, broadly speaking. The paradoxical “U” highlights all that is unseen or invisible holding up the structure of the sculpture, hidden underneath the black material. To decode the sculpture and its signification of the title, we will have to point out everything that it is not. It is not floating. Its heaviness is not supported by light fabric. It is not white. It is not black. Its blackness depends on its whiteness and vice versa. Blackness is written—braided, draped, and sewn—onto the raceless structure, which is what makes it a walking negative. It is abnormal because blackness has to be written onto it while whiteness edges its blackness to the foreground. Its pigmentation

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would remain unseen if it were not for the white walls upholding and informing the black figure. It is not magic but is socially constructed. As such, the walking negative figure itself reflects a sort of racelessness that prefigures race and raci(al/st) language and discourse, pushing the racialization and eracesure into the “abnormal” space of existing without race, which brings the reader’s belief in “race” (i.e., racism) to the foreground. Like the viewers of Chase-Riboud’s work, readers must decode how race(ism) functions in applicable texts. The terms raceless and walking negative function as a sign for the writer’s black structure against a white background and black text against a white background—both literally and figuratively. This book differentiates between raceless and terms like “racially ambiguous” to signal and underscore the idea that race does not exist (i.e., skepticism), not even in texts typically “racialized.” Every human being is raceless even if they are also “racialized” or if they “racialize” themselves. Race(ism) has created and perpetuated race ideology, which pushes race(ism) underground and concepts of race to the surface. This camouflaging does not allow race(ism) to be fully dealt with and, in fact, allows race(ism) to fester and persist. Thus, to say that a character is “racially ambiguous” would be to subscribe and reify race ideology, which is rejected here, and to inadvertently sideline race(ism). Race(ism) manifests itself as race in the literature when one recognizes and presumes the existence of race(ism), not race. The texts then show how the race-racism evasion occurs and encourages readers/viewers to consider and imagine solutions. The image evoked by the symbol—auditory or visual—of the title does not resemble the reality of the image, as is the case for Chase-Riboud’s The Albino. One’s understanding of race and color—colorless, black, and white—informs how one reads the text. In “In the Interstices of Sculpture and Poetry: Sewing and Basting” (2009), Claudine Armand reduces Chase-Riboud’s poetry and art to an unraveling of “tensions and binary oppositions” (981). She elaborates, saying that the poem “The Albino” erases differences and “questions the notion of essence” (993) creating “the image of hybridity” (993). While Chase-Riboud does, in fact, attempt to overcome binaries, her work extends beyond upending binaries. Spectators become active participants in decoding the sign(s): here, the title and the meaning conveyed through the title and the sculpture itself. The definitions of black and white, as colors and as raci(al/st) markers, seem fixed and oppositional. “Walking negative” is not a color but is a term used, here, to describe a person or a condition that affects skin pigmentation and causes

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a lack of color, which presents as “whiteness” or metaphorically as racelessness, as free of color, of race, of race(ism). Thus, race performs within different texts producing black material for the reader to drape over the characters, which results in the metaphorical replication of The Albino. Through plastic and textual work, Chase-Riboud shows the impossibility of defining raci(al/st) difference without also reifying the raci(al/st) hierarchy and, therefore, race(ism). In the afterward to Sally Hemings (1979), her first novel, she writes that she hopes to “illuminate our [America’s] overweening and irrational obsession with race and color” (350). In “The Albino,” she writes, “If color exists then / The absence of color must exist / As well” (Chase-Riboud  From 20). The absence of color (i.e., racelessness), then, becomes her solution to the “moral question” (21) or the “color problem” (21), which early naturalists recognized when they worked to reinscribe and sensationalize race, masking the “problem” with the architecture of racism—race.

The Literal Absence of “Race” Versus the Figurative Presence of Color Our race dialogue desperately needs this more complex language. Anna Deavere Smith4

Three vital contributions to the discussion of the so-called mulatta figure as reflective of a call for the absence of color or race as the solution for race(ism) are Harper’s Iola Leroy, Larsen’s Quicksand, and Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings. Harper’s novel portrays characters as what I am calling “walking negatives” and undercuts the surface interpretations of raci(al/ st) solidarity and raci(al/st) uplift. Harper puts the onus of uplift and civil rights onto all Americans and not just African Americans. In contrast, Larsen’s novel depicts a spectrum of color, both physically through skin color and abstractly through clothing and capitalism, that society paradoxically tries to frame as homogenous and is, therefore, oppressive. Larsen’s color spectrum mirrors society’s obsession with color and, ultimately, highlights the need for an abstract absence of color or the elimination of America’s obsession with color and the recognition of the spectrum as the solution to the “color problem” (20) that is race(ism). ChaseRiboud’s Sally Hemings is not black, white, or both, nor is she unraced. 4

 Anna Deavere Smith. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Anchor Books, 1994, p. xxv.

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She is, in fact, raceless, a walking negative who gets race(ism) written onto her being depending on the agenda of those around her. In Sally Hemings, race functions as power and disempowerment, rendering race(ism) clearer and that much more insidious. Importantly, each text works to undo the binary of black/white. The juxtaposition of these texts is a way into the complicated discourse on race, color, and racism. Next, I engage the theory of racelessness in literature by examining Harper’s presentation of color and race in Iola Leroy. Then, I apply the walking negative framework to Larson’s use of color and depiction of race in Quicksand. Finally, I examine Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings using the trope inspired by the artist. Published in 1892, Harper’s novel Iola Leroy portrays Iola Leroy, Dr Latimer, and Harry, walking negatives, as some of the “white negroes [who] are of illegitimate origin” (228) and who should be excluded from “social equality” (228) according to some characters in the novel. These raceless characters are walking negatives and embody, literally and figuratively, the absence of color Chase-Riboud writes. Critics, however, discuss Harper’s characterization of these three characters as one rooted in science: “[H]er future is illegitimate since it is based on the concealment of her true identity as a black woman” (emphasis added, xviii), says Carby in her 1987 introduction to the novel. In other words, the one-drop rule is real and renders Iola and other “mixed” characters “black.” Rather than interrogate Iola’s transformation into a “black” woman, critics talk about Iola as simply a “black” woman. Rhetorically speaking, this acceptance of raci(al/st) ideology also becomes an unintentional acceptance of race(ist) discourse that follows based on the presumed blackness or whiteness of each character, which needs to be questioned considering how phenotypes of characters are often misleading. Rather than “reduce a complex set of dynamics to a simple opposition or choice between two ‘pure’ alternatives” (McDowell 68), analyzing how the characterization of characters in Iola Leroy depends “on a discourse of racial difference it acknowledges even as it works to undermine every fixed notion that such a discourse might employ” (Ferguson 213), supporting the undoing of race and the rereading of the so-called tragic mulatta. Although many critics credit Harper with attempting to uplift those deeply and negatively impacted by race(ism) and the aftermath of chattel slavery, through her career and the novel, and with creating a blueprint for reconstruction, ironically, the discourse of the novel writes against itself. Instead of being born “black,” one must learn about one’s race, whether through a life of slavery or through

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a life of political and social enslavement that still exists in the US for many people. Although the “biracial” characters in Iola Leroy refuse to “pass as white,” their “black” identity in the novel is based on an archaic, race(ist) calculation that determined when people were still considered “black” despite “interracial” relations. Blackness then was not determined by culture or by phenotype but by science that has since been disproven. Essentially, “blackness” was a myth that was written onto even “white” bodies and was not connected to culture but to skin color and heritage. As such, Leroy’s acceptance of her “black” self and society’s continued writing of “blackness” onto her, combined with their erasure of her “whiteness,” brings to the surface questions regarding the validity of her “blackness.” Again, such a rhetorical move is not to question “blackness” to uplift “whiteness” but to interrogate both, to consider the value of undoing race to undo race(ism). Raci(al/st) purity depends on the enforcement of the black/white binary, and ideas of purity support and perpetuate oppressive systems: “But has not society the right to guard the purity of its blood by the rigid exclusion of an alien [black] race” (66), Lorraine asks Eugene Leroy, Iola’s father. As Morrison argues in Origin and elsewhere throughout her career, humankind shares a single origin and comprises a single “race.” There is only one race—human—and the one-drop rule, which was never based on real science, falls flat because everyone’s origins began in Africa. In other words, Africa is in everyone, and by many people’s conception of race then everyone is “black” or at least African. The fact of blackness morphs into a critique of raci(al/st) constructions in the novel in ways Harper may not have anticipated. In Iola Leroy, no one can know for sure if they or each other are “black” or “white” or both. The “new machinery of freedom” (255) is a need for new language and ideological systems that reject homogeneity and raci(al/ st) purity. Harper writes, “Dr. Latrobe had thought he was clear-sighted enough to detect the presence of negro blood when all physical traces had disappeared” (239). However, Dr Latrobe mistakes Dr Latimer for a “white” man. Like Iola and Harry and all raced characters in the novel, “black” blood courses through Dr Latimer’s veins (238), something scientists now know is a fallacy. One does not have “racial” blood. Just as Dr Latrobe cannot detect the presence of Dr Latimer’s “blackness,” Iola, Harry, and other characters do not recognize “blackness,” their own or that of others, either. Eugene hides “the blood in their [Harry and Iola’s] veins” (83) from them, “not wish[ing] them to grow up under the

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contracting influence of this race prejudice” (83). Indeed, the contracting influence comes after they learn and are transformed into “black” people. Such transformations are necessary because they maintain political and economic imbalances in favor of moneyed “white” men, which is not the same as saying all “white” men. Dr Latrobe expounds, “[t]here are niggers who are as white as I am, but the taint of blood is there and we [white men] always exclude it” (229). Ironically, his sentiment echoes Iola’s earlier in the novel when she argues against abolition as a “white” girl. By the time Dr Latrobe makes his claim of who is “white” and who is “black,” the reader has witnessed Iola’s, Harry’s, and Marie’s falls (even Eugene falls from “yellow” fever [92] or a taint of blood) from so-called white-­ hood into so-called black-hood. Dr Latrobe’s assertion of his own “whiteness” comes under interrogation considering even his own misreading of race regarding Dr Latimer and the other misreadings of Iola, Harry, and Marie. By his definition of “black,” he could, in fact, be “black” but remains “white” throughout the novel because there is no transformative moment turning him into a “black” man: “I [Latrobe] am a white man, and, right or wrong, I go with my race” (224). People accept his “whiteness” at his word, as they usually accept Iola’s race at hers whether “white or black.” Still, is he “white?” How can anyone know for sure? Harper depends on and even elevates a discourse of raci(al/st) difference but simultaneously undermines fixed notions of such discourse. Racelessness becomes a dominant thread in Iola Leroy, painting “black” people as “white,” “white” people as “black,” and by leveling the twoness of “mulattoes” into “blackness” based on the race(ist) pseudo-science of race. Robert says, “when the Africans first came to this country … [t]hey were not all one color, their complexions ranging from tawny yellow to deep black” (134). Robert’s words resonate on several levels when put into conversation with other racialized assertions. Eugene “did not wish you [Harry] to know that you had negro blood in your veins” (124). Africans did not consider themselves “black,” nor did they recognize differences of skin color, but America’s obsession with skin color and miscegenation (raci[al/st] mixing) ignores the range of “blackness” Robert describes and replaces the range with dialogue about “Negro, or black,” blood. That ideological shift makes recognizing “blackness” more complicated and nuanced considering one cannot see or separate Negro blood from “white” blood. If society writes “whiteness” onto one’s body and the phenotype contradicts “colored blood in her [or his] veins” (211), the hierarchy and visibility of race fall apart. While Harry is “[a]ppalled at the

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sudden change” (120) of his race from “white” to “black” and Iola refuses to marry Dr Gresham knowing that should their children “show unmistakable signs of color” (117) Dr Gresham would likely regret his decision, Harper critiques the science that alleges to support race and, subsequently, race(ism); she illustrates the learning and teaching of race as transformative moments that dictate one’s future. Iola and Harry are no longer “[p]erfectly ignorant of [their] racial connection” (113). Race is written onto them, first as “white” children, and then as “black” adults. The construction of race within the novel and illustration of such constructions calls for the consideration of an absence of color since the presence of color reifies the race(ist) discourse of its society. To recognize the absence of color that is present in every character and that is physically reflected in the “racially ambiguous” characters, one must look to the origins of race(ism) and how race was and remains set up to function as the liberator and imprisoner of people in the US enacting a violence that literally kills “nonwhite” people in many ways. When one acknowledges that race is the violence of race(ism) and is, therefore, a tool perpetuated to maintain “control” and power, one sees every person as raceless, colorless, regardless of a person’s phenotype and as being eraced by race(ist) systems and people. Race comes to be perceived as real in any way only because of race(ism) and does not exist without race(ism). Yet, as in the novel, race gets discussed in ways that naturalize and reify it while race(ism) remains largely in the background. When we direct our attention to race(ism), not race, in the novel, we begin to have a full reckoning with the violence, the nature of racism, not race, and identify ways to be more fully anti-racist. The simultaneous absence and proclaimed presence of color disrupt society, further undoing race. Frequently mistaken as a “white” woman and a “white” man, Iola and Harry eventually claim “blackness” and resist “whiteness,” but society continues to read both as “white.” Dr Gresham’s pursuit of Iola and her subsequent rejection provides a foil for Eugene’s pursuit of Marie and Marie’s acceptance. Also, though, Harper depicts race as a ludicrous and deceptive construction: “Iola, I see no use in your persisting that you are colored when your eyes are as blue and complexion as white as mine” (232), says Dr Gresham. Here, race is enigmatic, and ideas of race are perpetuated by individuals, as opposed to being something that is fixed and essential. Characters struggle to reconcile what their eyes perceive and what they are told to believe: “[a] woman as white as she [Iola] a slave” (58), Dr Gresham observes. Also, Camille, an “intimate

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friend” (99) of Louis Bastine, laments, “[s]he [Iola] is just as white as we are” (100). Meanwhile, an officer tells Harry, “surely you are a white man” (127), while Harry insists, “I am a colored man” (126). Harry expresses the absence and presence of color that both he and his sister experience rather succinctly, saying that “[i]t would be ludicrous, if it were not vexatious, to be too white to be black, and too black to be white” (emphasis added, 245). Just as Dr Latimer insists that he is “white,” Harry and Iola have to assert their “blackness” because there are no “unmistakable signs of color” (117). Society suppresses their absence of color, signaled by the “presence” of both colors, by writing “black” or “white” onto them. Iola would “hate to be colored” (91) not because being transformed into a “black” woman doubly oppresses her but because the presence of color, the writing of color onto her whether “white” or “black,” is unnatural, learned, and oppressive. Ultimately, “[i]f it wrongs the negro, it also curses the white man” (79) mainly since every person is likely all of the above, signaling the human race unseparated into different races. On the surface, Harper’s attempt to “add to the solution of our unsolved American problem” (282), race(ism), through Iola Leroy celebrates “blackness” and purity of the race. Her “whitening” of “black” characters and “blackening” of “white” and “biracial” characters results in a call for the absence of color—racelessness—rather than the presence and solidification of pure and separate races, which do not actually exist. Iola says that “[e]very [black] person of unmixed blood who succeeds in any department of literature, art, or science is a living argument for the capability which is in the race” (199). Lucille, Iola’s dear friend and Harry’s love interest, represents and reflects Harper’s blueprint for successful “pure” black women that stand in contrast to Iola’s “mixed,” though still “black,” blood. However, characteristics associated with “white” people, education, money, Christianity, and leadership, to name a few, rhetorically “whiten” Lucille and other “black” characters. Positive images of “black” people were needed to counter a multitude of race(ist) stereotypical images. Thus, Harper rhetorically “bleache[s] their [black people’s] faces to the whiteness of your [Dr Gresham’s] own” (227). As a result, other solutions arise: “[I]nstead of narrowing our sympathies to mere racial questions, let us broaden them to humanity’s wider issues” (260), says Dr Latimer. Dr Latimer suggests that society should address race from an egalitarian perspective instead of a raci(al/st)ed and polarized one. Even Dr Gresham wonders if “the final solution of this question [the color question] will be the absorption of the negro into our

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[white] race” (228). His line of inquiry highlights assimilation, as opposed to integration, as a possible solution but can also be interpreted as a recognition of one human race rather than separate races and, therefore, echoes Dr Latimer’s humanitarian sentiment. Thus, Harper’s celebration and elevation of blackness ironically become what “would be a death blow to [a color obsessed] American civilization” (228): the undoing of race(ism). By contrast, Larsen’s Quicksand emphasizes a spectrum of color and society’s obsession with color to, ultimately, conclude that the solution must include the undoing of race as it connects to skin color. Published in 1928, Larsen’s first novel Quicksand features, in part, Helga Crane’s obsession with color and race, both her own and that of others. Helga’s obsession with color (here meaning race, skin color, and color) manifests itself in several ways: 1. her increasingly capitalistic desire and admiration for colorful and fancy clothing and objects, 2. her frequent mobility and flight, psychological, spiritual, and physical, and 3. her desire for homogeneity in Copenhagen or the absence of color in people including herself. Helga’s obsession illuminates what Chase-Riboud calls America’s “overweening and irrational obsession with race and color” (350). As a “mulatta” figure, Carby says that Helga allows Larsen to “negotiate issues of race as they were articulated by both white and black” (173). However, she extends Larsen’s “representation of both race and class” (174), pointing out that her characterization of Helga is “structured through a prism of black female sexuality” (174). She calls Helga Crane “the first truly sexual black female protagonist in Afro-American fiction” (174). Other critics, like Ann Hostetler, Jeanne Scheper, and Debra Silverman, echo Carby’s argument and also focus on Larsen’s novel, analyzing what they call black female sexuality and black women’s bodies. Yves Clemmen analyzes Helga Crane’s characterization through the “Derridian concept of difference inasmuch as being different constantly postpones the definition of identity and meaning is kept in motion” (466). Through Derridian difference, Clemmen argues that “Larsen makes us [readers] question attempts to define identities in terms of categories: ethnicity, race, gender, and feeds into a modern movement against essentialism” (466). This chapter aims to illustrate how Larsen does not just encourage readers to question their will to classify but undoes means of (mis)classification altogether. Critics miss a significant opportunity to derail and interrogate race(ism) by overlooking “whiteness” in these texts. They miss an opportunity to redirect the conversation toward the race(ist) systems that create and

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encourage the “mulatto” or “passing” character to “pass” or choose “blackness” and how, as a “black” person, the character is expected to work and die trying to uplift those most deeply affected by race(ism) (i.e., James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jessie Fauset’s Comedy, American Style, Walter White’s Flight, and so on). Whereas, as a so-called white person, the character is depicted as being unable to do the right thing for fear of being discovered. Instead of using one’s position of privilege, of power, as a “white” person, one must sit on the sidelines in silence and leave civil rights to “people of color” who are, ironically, the most hindered by race(ism). Critics, in not talking about these characters’ or writers’ “whiteness,” reify the race(ist) definitions of “whiteness,” as the “pure” race, and “blackness,” which is often conflated with culture and essentialized, and miss opportunities to interrogate “whiteness,” in its relation to “blackness,” since many of the novels suggest that so-called white people are black and passing. This ignoring of “whiteness” is complicated by the general desire to decenter “whiteness” and center “blackness.” However, race(ism) necessitates uncomfortable and dynamic conversations about “whiteness,” which is, as Baldwin says, “a metaphor for power” (I Am Not Your Negro). The texts play on American society’s anxieties about “whiteness” not being real (in nature or otherwise) and losing its ability to reify the hierarchy of race(ism), in the first place. The arguments about race and color in Quicksand often undercut themselves; after all, how can one talk about Helga’s “A Plea for Color” (Larsen 17) as representative of “a plea for recognition of her own color—or the different colors of the black race” (607) while simultaneously and ironically ignoring the fact that Larsen’s spectrum includes “whiteness.” Like Harper’s “white black” characters and “black white” characters, Larsen’s spectrum undoes color and race. “Black” and “white” terms do not sufficiently acknowledge or reflect the writer’s mediation on color or race. Aptly named, Helga ties her identity to Scandinavia and Old Norse, and Crane reflects her frequent and consistent attempts to stretch her neck and body (both metaphorically and literally by movement) to overcome identities that seem inscribed onto her being and body. In her quest to stretch and expand, her body then becomes a contraption—a crane— for moving heavy objects—racism, sexism, and so on—and, ultimately, children. Unlike the typical so-called tragic mulatta, Helga has a “white” mother who raised her and a distant and reviled Afro-Caribbean (described in the book as “black”) father. That she is most often called Helga Crane,

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rather than Helga or Crane, reflects the author’s desired unification of her protagonist’s seemingly divided self. Her “skin [is] like yellow satin” (2). Her brows are “[b]lack” (2) and set over “dark eyes” (2). She has “curly blue-black hair plentiful and always straying in a little wayward, delightful way” (2). In the beginning, she sits in her darkened room with a “lamp, dimmer by a great black and red shade” which makes “a pool of light on the blue Chinese carpet, [and] on the bright covers of books” (1). The books have “white pages” and sit on “the shining brass bowl crowed with many colored nasturtiums beside her” (1). She wears a “vivid green and gold negligee and glistening brocaded mules” (2). The “Southern sun” (1) floods her room and creates a shadowy spot “[s]o large that the spot where Helga sat was a small oasis in a desert of darkness” (1). In a baroque description, Larsen paints Helga onto a background and foreground of color, lightness, and darkness. “An observer would have thought her well fitted to that framing of light and shade” (1), says the narrator. The description makes Helga appear lavish and “consumeristic” (Monda 23), cultured, civilized. However, the description, like the novel and society, frames Helga regarding light and shade, that is, color and race. As in Iola Leroy, the construction of race in Quicksand and the illustration of such constructions calls for the consideration of the absence of color but does so through the presence of color that still seems to reify raci(al/st) discourse. On the surface, Larsen critiques “black” and “white” people alike, celebrating spectrums of color that reflect the diversity the characters represent that is missed by the homogenizing effects of racialization. Amid the colorful background and within her colorful clothes and yellow satin skin, Helga broods over a “white” man’s proposed solution to the “race problem” (3) and the black people’s acceptance of it: “contentment” (3). Her anger and hate turn from the “white” man to “[t]he South. Naxos [a black school fashioned after Tuskegee]. [And] Negro education” (3). Suddenly, she yearns for “an even more soothing darkness” (3), a “vacation, so that she might get away for a time” (3). Here, her solution becomes running from color into darkness, not a spectrum of darkness but pure darkness. She has become wary of “those baffling ebony, bronze, and gold faces” (4) that she teaches at Naxos. The narrator’s description of the students as a spectrum of color and faces contrasts with what Helga identifies as a homogenous indifference and contentment: “[I]t wasn’t the fault of those minds back of the diverse colored faces. It was, rather, the fault of the method, the general idea behind the system” (4), a system that rejects

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innovation and individualism (4) despite its heterogeneity and individualism. The system that created Naxos, the American system that is obsessed with color and race, dislikes difference. Just as Iola reminds Dr Gresham that their children would “show unmistakable signs of color” (117), in Quicksand, society seeks to suppress unmistakable signs of color, which manifests as a suppression of colorful and unique clothing. Helga transforms society’s disdain for her—“[s]he could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity” (7)—into a love and longing “for nice things” (6), colorful and exotic things, in fact. She learns and enacts the complicated dual relationship with color that she detests as part of “Negro society” and “white society” (9). Perpetuating the pseudo-scientific one-drop rule, the narrator writes that “[i]f you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t ‘belong’” (9). It is also Helga’s own, perhaps rational since she learned it, obsession with color that hinders her and prevents her from accepting herself and others who are different from her. Interestingly, she views everyone else as diverse yet the same. First, she desires darkness to escape America’s diversity and pretend homogeneity. She sees the spectrum of color within or written onto people as oppressive because of the forced uniformity and contentment. Then, though, she flees to Copenhagen, a place she imagines is pure “white,” homogeneous, and more accepting because they lack color, a spectrum. There is not indeed an absence of color in Denmark upon Helga’s arrival because she reflects an appearance of color; despite Copenhagen’s fascination with her, she eventually realizes that “exoticness,” Otherness, color, gets written onto her body in ways not dissimilar to her experiences in America. Helga’s time in Denmark also illustrates a need for new language and ideological systems that reject homogeneity and raci(al/st) purity just as Harper’s novel indicates. A place that is supposedly homogeneous, pure, and, therefore, without prejudice turns out to be operating within racist and sexist discourse. Upon the republication of Quicksand, Larsen’s biographical information that ties her to Denmark, that is, whiteness, was promptly removed from the novel’s cover. George Hutchinson points out that the novel is, in part, a “critique of the ways in which American racial identities depend upon the sacrifice of racial ambiguity or transracial identity” (48). The publisher and editor’s constructions of “blackness” required the sacrificing of Larsen’s ambiguous “biracial” identity. Similarly, according to Arne Lunde and Anna Stenport, “Larsen scholarship has

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tended either to dismiss or gloss over” (229) Larsen’s Danish origins and “self-identification with her Danish ethnic background” (228). Moreover, critics tend to dismiss or gloss over Helga’s Danish origins and ethnic background in favor of a “black” feminist framework and position. For example, Kimberly Monda argues that Larsen “criticizes the ways in which white racist constructions of black women’s allegedly inherent lasciviousness have cut black women off from experiencing their legitimate sexual desires” (23). Monda reifies the one-drop rule identifying Helga as “black,” as opposed to “black and white” or part of a spectrum or raceless. Ultimately, Carby, Monda, and other critics analyze how Larsen depicts “black” female sexuality and how “white” constructions of “black” bodies reduce Helga to the exotic creature coming from the jungle. Infrequently, however, critics examine how Larsen’s mediation on color suggests the undoing of the binary of color—black and white—and, therefore, of the belief in race. Lunde and Stenport assert that the literary criticism, whether conscious or not, surrounding Larsen and Quicksand may “have resulted from a desire … to secure her [Larsen’s] status within a feminist, African-American literary canon, a status that Larsen’s own identification with her ‘Nordic’ side and Danish roots threatens to destabilize” (229). While critiquing hegemonic views of sexuality and color, critics also reify hegemonic views of color, that is, race, which undercuts the philosophical underpinnings of what Larsen’s novel reflects. As described above, for the most part, critics inadvertently subscribe to the construction of race(ism) in the novel by continually identifying Helga as “mulatto” or “black,” which is something the novel rejects. This is not about ignoring the supposed reality of race to then deny the existence of race(ism). One cannot wish away race(ism). This is about acknowledging, recognizing, and considering alternative philosophies of race, as presented in the literature, and deeply analyzing how writers both lauded and criticized across time have rejected raci(al/st) ideology and presented the presence of race as the core of race(ism). Chase-Riboud, Harper, and Larsen show readers how society continues enabling the existence of race(ism) (emphasizing the institutionalized nature of the system of knowledge that creates and upholds it) by simultaneously privileging the putative existence of race as proof positive that race(ism) also exists. Helga’s “bothness” reflects a spectrum she simultaneously rejects. Unfortunately, she is unable to fit in or accept herself because society does not view race as reflective of range. One is either black or white. There is no in-between, no bothness, and no albinism, except as a disease. Thus,

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Helga hides her “white” heritage from her friend Anne Grey, whose name suggests the middle ground the protagonist struggles to find. Also, Anne’s last name mirrors what she hates the most: mixing. Silverman interprets “Helga’s color and passion for colors [as what] situates her on the border between cultures—whiteness and blackness” (608). However, both Anne and Helga reject such so-called borders in favor of maintaining the binary—“black/white.” Helga laments over the “[s]inister folk … who had stolen her birthright” (42). She harbors disdain for white people and intends “to marry one of those alluring brown or yellow men” (42). She lacks the insight required for her to recognize her own narrowness; her actions, consciously and unconsciously; she sees binaries wherever she goes: “Her existence was bounded by Central Park …. Not at all a narrow life, as Negroes live it, as Helga Crane knew it. Everything was there, vice and goodness, sadness and gayety, ignorance and wisdom, ugliness and beauty, poverty and richness” (42). At first, Harlem seems like a place where she belongs. She welcomes and recognizes a spectrum like the one she embodies as a “mulatta” character. However, she soon becomes afraid of herself (44). Anne’s obsession with the race problem and with color “fed her [own] obsession” (44). She returns to subscribing to “black” or “white” thinking; Helga critiques Anne who “ape[s]” (45) white peoples’ clothing, manners, and “gracious ways of living” (45) while she, ironically, despises “people of the white race” (45). Helga’s own disdain for “white” people and “black” people, for that matter, frequently arises and causes her own struggle. She is afraid of herself because of her capacity to see, embody, and embrace the spectrum. Unconsciously, she reifies the hegemonic thinking she sees in characters like Anne. Larsen counters the notion that there is a single or pure image of “blackness” or “whiteness.” Quicksand, according to many critics, simultaneously critiques hegemonic views of sexuality and color. Carby interprets the ending—Helga nearly dies to have her fourth child and then finds out that she is pregnant with her fifth—as Helga’s “certain death” (169 and 174). Ultimately, Carby interprets Helga as a so-called tragic mulatta. She maintains that “[r]eaders are left with the unresolvable” (174) and that Larsen offers readers “few avenues of resolution” (174). Carby also says that Helga must choose a social group to attach herself to in order to save herself from the quicksand—oppressive systems and ideologies—but that each group which Helga supposedly stands outside of— the “black” bourgeoisie and the “white” middle class—is equally damning. Larsen does indicate a different way of living, being, and seeing that

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suggests that one need not, in fact, choose one of two social groups, as Carby and the other critics named above say Helga must. Larsen’s solution is Audrey Denney, a walking negative figure. Drinking a “colorless” (Larsen, emphasis added, 55) liquid, Audrey is “pale, with a peculiar, almost deathlike pallor …. [She has] pitch-black eyes, a little aslant” (55). Her apricot dress shows “a skin of unusual color, a delicate, creamy hue, with golden tones. ‘Almost like an alabaster,’ thought Helga” (55). According to Anne, everyone must “know she’s colored” (emphasis added, 55) and “ought to be ostracized” (55). Audrey frequents parties hosted by “white” and “black” people and “gives parties for white and colored people together” (56). She dances with “white” men and “black” men. Anne argues that she is a race-traitor whom every “self-respecting Negro” (57), including Helga, should despise. Like Iola, Harry, and Dr Latimer, Audrey’s phenotype does not reflect her “blackness.” “Blackness” gets written onto her, but unlike Helga and Anne, she inhabits the colorless space of the spectrum, embracing both sides of the dyad and herself. Liberated, she does what she wants and does not allow chatter, like Anne’s, to dictate how she lives and moves. Society wants to police her movement. She moves how and where she wants: “Her long, slender body swayed with an eager pulsing motion. She danced with grace and abandon” (57). Helga recognizes Audrey’s assurance and “courage, so placidly to ignore racial barriers and give her attention to people” (57) despite color and race(ism). Audrey awakens Helga’s sexuality and desire; she feels her “heart throbbing” (57) and flees. Paradoxically, Audrey’s presence and self-liberation—she is not in quicksand—inspires and scares Helga. Helga takes the next ship to Copenhagen. Helga’s admiration and desire to be and be with Audrey happens again at a party upon her return to the US. Monda asserts that “Helga’s recurring admiration for the independent, sexually confident Audrey Denney allows us to read this … as an oblique consideration of her [Helga’s] earlier plan to have sex outside the safety of marriage” (35). Audrey should not be reduced to Larsen’s commentary on race(ism), religion, and gender as it relates to “black” women. Her outward liberation reflects her inner freedom that is conducive not just to her choice of mates but also her choice of colors. She, not Helga, stands firmly outside and inside a raci(al/st) world. Helga never formerly meets Audrey and only ever admires her from afar. “There too, poised, serene, certain, surrounded by masculine black and white, was Audrey Denney” (92), says the narrator. Helga asks to be introduced to her but wants the introduction to seem

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spontaneous and not to appear as though it is by request. She attempts to frame their meeting. Subsequently, they never meet, and Audrey does not have a line of dialogue in the novel. Her body, though, her movement, her reputation, and her color (as written onto her colorless body), is “enough to send [Anne] into a frenzy for a week” (92). Had Helga befriended Audrey, Quicksand would have been a very different novel. Helga’s inability to fully liberate herself from the quicksand of raci(al/st) barriers leads her to a path Carby identifies as certain death. However, Audrey signals hope for Helga and the reader. One can and probably should escape from oppression and live within a spectrum of color that simultaneously reflects the absence of color (i.e., race[ism]). Like Harper, Larsen uses “biracial” characters as antitheses of race itself and, therefore, as the ultimate undoing of race(ism). Published in 1979, Sally Hemings defies raci(al/st) terms. In the novel, race exists insofar as racism exists, which redirects attention to race(ism), and Chase-Riboud negates other binary modes of thinking—male/female, free/enslaved, and right/wrong. In the novel, Sally Hemings—known for her relationship with her enslaver Thomas Jefferson—is not “black” or “white” or both; she is not only a slave nor is she free; she is neither fictional nor historical. In Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud illustrates how raci(al/st) ideology is not rooted in science, like genetics, but is created, perpetuated, and reinforced by a raci(al/st) gaze. The novel does this by transforming both slave narrative and historiographical generic conventions, by depicting Sally Hemings as a Euro-descended woman on the novel’s 2009 cover and as a “black” (and sometimes “white”) woman—a raceless woman who is eraced—within the narrative depending on who is viewing her, by fictionalizing history and historicizing fiction, and by employing several characters that decide Hemings’ race depending on their raci(al/st) agendas. Also, race(ism) performs within the novel producing black material for the reader to drape over the cover’s subject, which results in a replication of The Albino. The structure of the novel and the role race(ism) plays in the novel, ultimately, has caused readers to overlook the subject on the cover and the “whiteness” indicated in the novel and to write the “blackness” displayed in the novel onto the so-called white subject. In other words, Africa gets written onto the outside of the “White African,” which depends on Hemings’ status of power. Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings, within African American literary studies, has received little critical attention for reasons that seem similar to those named above for Harper and Larsen. In “Our Founding (M)Other:

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Erotic Love and Social Death in Sally Hemings and The President’s Daughter” (2009), Sara Clarke Kaplan says, With its reliance on the rhetorics of ‘universal literary merit,’ preoccupation with intellectual lineage and formal influence, and normalizing of disciplinary categories, the language and logic of canon formation have much in common with the narratives of origins, authenticity, and legitimacy that underpin discourses of miscegenation. (774)

Kaplan argues that the raci(al/st) discourse of canon formation, in African American literary studies, echoes that of miscegenation, which is a pointed critique but a significant one, especially within the context of this book. The obstacles that hinder Larsen and Harper, across time, from gaining sustained critical attention or that lead to misreadings of their work are the same hinderances that ignite misreadings or general ignoring of Chase-­ Riboud’s novel. Kaplan says that her interest in the book is not despite its marginal status “in the fields of African American literary studies or their disparagement by Jeffersonian scholars, but, in part, because of it” (774). She categorizes Sally Hemings as a neoslave narrative that “interrogate[s] the processes through which both historical knowledge and racial subjects are produced, mediated, and articulated” (774). She argues that the novel follows the “double trace of erotic love and racial violence in order to reimagine the meanings of love and violence, death and freedom in the context of African chattel slavery” (774–775). She examines the paradoxical nature of the novel, especially within the context of the historical controversy the novel and DNA testing of Hemings’ actual descendants inspires. Other critics further explore the neoslave narrative aspects of Sally Hemings. In “‘A Seeping Invisibility’: Maternal Dispossession and Resistance in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings and The President’s Daughter” (2009), Laura Dawkins traces the adult experiences of Harriet Hemings, allegedly the only daughter of Jefferson and Hemings, [arguing that] Chase-Riboud demonstrates how slavery—and the sexual exploitation of black women within slavery—have disrupted kinship structures and wrought lasting devastation upon the African American family …. Harriet Hemings serves as a metaphor for African American exile, motherlessness, loss of identity, and familial dispossession. (793)

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The violence of enslavement impacts each generation. The novel, for Dawkins, portrays this trauma and the persistent bonds “between black mothers and daughters in the face of dispossession and exile” (794). According to Dawkins, Chase-Riboud humanizes Hemings and gives her a speaking voice. The novel, she says, is a “corrective to white-authored portrayals” (792) of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Similarly, Ashraf Rushdy notes the revisionist project of Sally Hemings. In “‘I Write in Tongues’: The Supplement of Voice in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings” (1994), Rushdy identifies Sally Hemings as “one of the earliest and leasy discussed of these novels of remembrance and revision” (105). History is the subject of the novel, he argues, stating that the novel’s ending “suggest[s] how historiography itself fails to achieve a satisfactory representativeness” (105). He illustrates how the novel “makes the relationship between supplemental memory and written historical records an issue involving the play between orality and literacy” (106). Finally, in “The Iron Fettered Weight of All Civilization: The Project of Barbara Chase-­ Riboud’s Narratives of Slavery” (2009), Rushdy argues that, throughout her oeuvre, Chase-Riboud explores “how slavery as a system, and enslavement as an experience, created the conditions for modernity—conditions in which the master-slave dialectic is part of the structure of how we feel, how we become acculturated, and how we think” (759). This chapter extends the critics’ arguments by highlighting Chase-Riboud’s use of the walking negative trope, a racelessness that simultaneously underscores race(ist) ideology and aims to transcend the ideology by forcing a complete reckoning with America’s history, which is, in many ways, America’s present. Recognizing her use of a “white” African, a walking negative, and her refusal of raci(al/st) binaries is essential to unveiling the result of the very history the novel depicts and that the raci(al/st) gaze still refuses or attempts to dissuade: the “browning” of America, and by this I mean the creolization of the Americas and the fictive nature of “whiteness,” especially. Shalini Puri states the necessity of recognizing and interpreting creolization and hybridity in discourse quite succinctly: “[a]t stake are not pure origins but egalitarian futures” (38). Through her plastic and textual work, Chase-Riboud shows the impossibility of defining “raci(al/st) difference” without also reifying the raci(al/st) hierarchy.5 Her walking negative is her raceless figure. Historically, each participant in the Hemings/ 5

 The conflation of race with culture is part of this misstep.

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Jefferson controversy has approached the debate by focusing on Jefferson’s “whiteness” and the Hemings’ “blackness.” To different ends, these participants succeed in reifying the raci(al/st) gaze Chase-Riboud destabilizes. By using fiction as her mode of historicization, she participates in the “apparent void of history which haunts the black man … in the Americas as a whole” (Harris 17). Recognizing and acknowledging race(ism) and racecraft, according to Chase-Riboud, signifies the acceptance of parts of history typically blotted out by the dominant narrative that serves to reify current power relations through race(ism). Sally Hemings defies the myth of America’s “pure” (363) raci(al/st) history through its performance of race(ism). The first chapter draws on the evidence of a census taker recording Hemings’ race as “white.” Langdon (the census taker) meets Hemings in Albemarle County in 1830. Hemings’ eyes are like “liquid gold in an ivory mask” (4, emphasis added). Langdon notes that Virginia law mandates that former enslaved Americans leave the state. However, he writes “whiteness” onto her and her sons in the census as a means of protecting Jefferson, not her: “there was one thing he, Nathan Langdon, was determined that Thomas Jefferson would not be guilty of: the crime of miscegenation” (16). He recognizes her as the former president’s “slave mistress” (4) but not as the raceless figure she is. He views her as both “childlike” and “[a] woman” (5) but struggles to accept her perceived “whiteness,” thinking, “How did one address a creature who did not exist, who was the negation of everything he had been taught to believe? There were no white slaves. There could be no white ex-slaves” (emphasis added, 8). Again, Langdon perceives Hemings as a “[w]hite African” (From 19) and a walking negative, and Chase-­ Riboud points rhetorically to Hemings’ raceless and walking negative status by having Hemings be the negation of what Langdon believes. Langdon’s confusion is the first of many instances in the novel when Hemings’ phenotype disarms other characters. However, race(ism) performs at the hands of each character as they each decide Hemings’ race despite her phenotype and what they initially believe. Imagine another braid of black wool thrown over the cover’s subject. Power determines race(ism). Langdon’s willingness to “change” Hemings’ race to protect Jefferson’s “whiteness” becomes even more ironic when Hemings and Langdon talk about race(ism) and the law in the sixth chapter. Hemings wants Langdon to “take on the case” (49) of “a mulatto” (49). He does not recognize her as a “mulatto” in this chapter and justifies his confession— “In the census. I listed them [her sons

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Madison and Eston] and you as white” (50)—saying, “After all, by Thomas Jefferson’s definition, you are white” (50). Jefferson’s “algebraical notation” (17) expresses “the pure blood of the white in capital letters of the printed alphabet [and] the pure blood of the negro in the small letters of the printed alphabet” (17), in the second chapter, in the form of a letter to Francis C. Gray. Despite his own calculations and presumably with his enslaved family in mind, Jefferson concludes, “Whoever they were, black or white, they belonged to Monticello. And to him” (19). Jefferson, then, illustrates how race and power (i.e., race[ism]) are intertwined. As enslaved people, “whiteness” (any fraction of it) becomes unimportant and debatable, leaving “whiteness” to signify purity, in more ways than one. Similarly, Langdon tells Hemings that he cannot help a “mulatto” because under the law—under the powers that be—“mulattoes” are “black,” not technically “mulatto,” and cannot testify against “white” people in court: “He is still legally mulatto, therefore he cannot testify against his white cousins in the case. It is no longer a question of slavery but that of a black man testifying against a white man” (50). He goes on to say that the Hemings family can “testify against anybody on earth” (50) because he listed them as being “white” on the census, making them “white” in the eyes of the government. In response, Hemings denies her own “whiteness” or raceless identity by pointing to her lack of power: despite Jefferson’s calculations, as argued by Langdon, “[b]y Thomas Jefferson’s life, I’m a slave” (50), says Hemings. She also recognizes that the census taker “changes” her race for race(ist) reasons, not to benefit her or her sons. A “white” slave is the antithesis to the sensibility of other characters, too. Race(ism) continues to perform and to blur the raci(al/st) gaze, albeit momentarily. “Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s half-sister-in-law” (74), which means that Hemings was the aunt of Jefferson’s children: Polly and Martha. When Hemings is 14 years old, she travels with her nieces to meet Jefferson in Paris, France, where she was to remain enslaved and work as Polly’s “maid” (63). Her mother hopes Hemings will free herself in France since France’s laws protect “black” people. On the journey to Paris, Hemings charms the ship’s crew and Monsieur LaFaurie asks Hemings why people refer to her “as being a Negro slave? Since obviously I was neither a Negro nor a slave. ‘Why, you are whiter than I,’ I remember him saying in astonishment” (68). She realizes that she could have

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told him that she “was a slave not because of [her] color, but because [her] mother was a slave and her mother before her” (69) but, instead, lies. She concocts a story about being a “Spanish orphan from New Orleans” (69) who was not enslaved but, in fact, a true “lady’s maid” for Polly Jefferson. Captain Ramsey, the ship’s captain, finds out about her lie and tells Monsieur LaFaurie the truth. Ramsey scolds Hemings, telling her that what she considers charming behavior, given her status as a “female slave” (70), is actually “[p]rovocation … flirting … frolicking” (70). He threatens to lock her in her cabin if she keeps lying and behaving like a “siren” (70). While she “wanted to impress Monsieur LaFaurie because he hadn’t treated [her] any differently for being ‘black’” (69), the captain gives her a scolding lesson on how her “whiteness” operates differently from Polly’s “whiteness” and how her status as an enslaved woman, essentially, erases the “whiteness” her body reflects. In her 2009 Afterword, Chase-Riboud asserts that “[e]ven her [Hemings’] whiteness is perceived as blackness” (363). Indeed, every action Hemings takes is viewed differently when her “blackness” reveals her lack of power because of how race(ism) functions. “Blackness” performs and continues to get impermanently written onto Hemings. Abigail and John Adams meet the children—Sally, Polly, and Martha—at the dock in Paris with plans to look after the children until Jefferson is available and able to pick them up. Abigail Adams, an abolitionist, sees Hemings for the first time and mistakes her for Jefferson’s dead wife: “‘A WHITE SLAVE!’ Abigail Adams would never get over the shock of seeing the image of Thomas Jefferson’s late wife descending the gangplank of Captain Ramsay’s ship in the guise of a Negro slave” (capitalization in the original, 73). Abigail’s exclamation and discomfort come after Hemings says, “I am Mistress Polly’s slave, Ma’am” (72). Her response, though, to Hemings’ assertion is significant on many levels. She sees Hemings as simultaneously “white” and as enslaved. Her distress stems from Hemings’ power status as it relates to Hemings’ color: “Her color only underlines the horror of her condition because it’s our color” (73). Here, the raceless figure serves rhetorically as the solution to the “moral question” (From 20). Hemings’ slave status becomes associated with color, not a continent. For most of the characters, her color masks her African heritage. However, Abigail’s reaction betrays her: “Several expressions passed quickly across her face, but the one that settled there was one I already knew well: that of a rich white lady eyeing a poor darky

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slave” (72, emphasis added). At this moment, the physical manifestation of race(ism) gets written onto Hemings by Abigail. Since race(ism) performs in the novel, much like the stark white background and the black material used on The Albino perform, “blackness” and “whiteness” are transient and enigmatic in Sally Hemings. Just as Abigail erases Hemings’ “whiteness” and replaces it with “blackness,” a moment Hemings relates to the reader, Hemings erases her “blackness:” “I had never seen such a place filled with more white people than I had ever imagined in one place. Not one black face anywhere …. There were no slaves. This [Paris] was another world” (71), writes Chase-Riboud. Rhetorically, Hemings counts herself as one of the “white” faces in Paris and, by extension, attributes power and freedom to “whiteness,” to the absence of color. Echoing Abigail and Langdon’s denial of the existence of a “white” enslaved person, Hemings believes that the absence of color in Paris, including her own, directly reflects the absence of the enslaved. In other words, the absence of pigment, the walking negative, is “the answer / To [the] moral question” (From 21) of enslavement and its obvious prerequisite: race(ism). Hemings returns to the US pregnant with Jefferson’s first son, and her mother (re)writes “blackness,” her lack of power, back onto her: “Did you forget about that over there in France? That you returned to the same burden as the blackest, most ignorant field hand? You forgot the first lesson of slavery, your blackness” (179), Elizabeth Hemings asks. At times, Hemings does “forget” her “blackness”—her role—and, on other occasions, her “whiteness” even as other people write race onto her; moreover, she tries to live her raceless status that should, theoretically, place her outside of American slavery. However, her love for Jefferson repeatedly prevents her from liberating herself. The disempowered state of the Hemings family, then, determines their color. Enslaved, the Hemings family is “black.” Free, the family is “white” (i.e., race[ism]). Langdon’s irrational obsession with Hemings coupled with his inability to own her causes him to collect biographical information about Hemings. Aaron Burr, one of Jefferson’s political rivals, says, “THE ONLY THING I know about Sally Hemings is that she was for a time the most famous lady of color in the United States” (capitalization in original, 161). Ironically, Chase-Riboud consistently describes Hemings as lacking color, but Hemings is still a “lady of color” because of her status as an enslaved woman. Similarly, Jefferson and Hemings’ children who free themselves, something Sally Hemings could have done for herself on several occasions, permanently write “whiteness” onto their bodies after

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their liberation both literally and metaphorically. Harriet and Thomas must choose “whiteness” to be free: “She would be white. White. For the rest of her and life she would live this lie” (318). Harriet’s choice to be “white” is a lie because she is both “white” and “black. Her red hair, “creamy complexion,” and yellow and blue eyes “of her father” (319) will help her “pass for white” (319), recognizes Adrien Petit, Jefferson’s servant from France. Harriet, like her mother, cannot choose to live as “both” because the US is obsessed with perpetuating the myth of raci(al/st) purity, so much so that raci(al/st) mixing becomes outlawed in most states. She must choose to be “white.” Power—race(ism)—determines “race,” and Harriet wants power. Ironically, enslaved people, in the novel, create “the impeccable whiteness of Monticello” (277). Thomas Jefferson-Hemings, like his sister, “‘stroll[s]’ away” (277) from slavery and “pass[es] for white” (277). According to Hemings, Thomas “leave[s] Monticello a white man” (277). Protected by his auburn hair and “pale hooded eyes” (278), Thomas flees his enslavement and “passes” for “white.” Madison, another of Hemings’ sons, chooses “blackness” and remains enslaved, by extension, saying, “Never. I’ll never pass. It’s worse than being sold. Selling yourself for whiteness” (emphasis in original, 317). Madison, the son credited and also blamed for exposing the Hemings/Jefferson affair, cannot bring himself to deny his “blackness” by embracing his “whiteness” despite the shift in power the denial would cause. Like Harriet and Thomas, though, Hemings reverts to trying to erase her “blackness” in the presence of “white” people in the US. “There was not one black person to be seen as Sally Hemings stood in the white mob disguised by her color” (55) at the execution of Nat Turner and his “army” (55). She and Eston, another son, remain hidden in their “pale” (56) skin. Hemings and her son consider themselves to be the only walking negative figures present at the execution: “They were without doubt the only black witnesses to this awful moment” (56). Of course, there is a doubt because if they can “pass” as “white,” so-called white people “pass,” too. Mother and son stand like The Albino, walking negatives. Here, the main difference between how race(ism) performs for Hemings in Paris and how race(ism) performs for her and her children in the US is clear: their lives—their power—depends on the “whiteness” of their phenotype. Racism in distinctly black or white terms causes the sewing, braiding, and weaving of “blackness” to get strewn onto Sally Hemings despite Hemings’ raceless complexion.

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Through her plastic and textual art, Chase-Riboud reveals the ways in which race(ism) is constructed and reified in the US. The structure, genre, and content of Sally Hemings mirror the structure and content of The Albino and “The Albino.” Just as The Albino cannot avoid being covered in “blackness” and its corresponding raci(al/st) hierarchy even as it exemplifies the absence of color, Hemings’ “whiteness is perceived as blackness” (363) because of America’s race(ism). Hierarchies inscribed through discourse on “blackness” remain written onto her with each spectator’s eyes (i.e., Langdon, Jefferson, Elizabeth Hemings, Abigail Adams, historians, literary critics, and so on). Consequently, “America’s racial[/st] history [remains] more complex and hidden than most of us care to acknowledge” (362), writes Chase-Riboud in her 2009 afterword. In Sally Hemings, the artist rhetorically removes and replaces race in ways that highlight the country’s raceless and race(ist) history. In the Acknowledgments section, which immediately follows the last page of the novel, Chase-Riboud acknowledges using some of the following sources: Fawn Brodie’s book, Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, the memoirs of Madison Hemings, Edmund Bacon, Israel and Isaac Jefferson, the diaries of Aaron Burr and John Quincy Adams, and letters of John and Abigail Adams (345). Just like the American landscape, the novel’s scape is “the infinite chiaroscuro of silence, where all biographies become one” (344). Chiaroscuro is a technique used in oil painting and photography that uses strong tonal contrasts between light and dark. The novel becomes a chiaroscuro of sorts; The Albino requires its stark white background as part of its composition; similarly, Sally Hemings (the novel and the figure) requires the biographical information found in the sources listed above to shed light (i.e., whiteness) onto her blackened figure. The result is a duplicate of The Albino and, ultimately, a woman who represents racelessness rather than “black” or “white” or “both.” Chase-Riboud thinks that she is “the only one left standing to contest the establishment whitewash” (362). She says that her goal includes wanting “to illuminate our overweening and irrational obsession with race and color in this country” (350). Her use of Jefferson— “the man who almost single-handedly invented our national identity” (350)—and Hemings— “the emblematic incarnation of the forbidden, the outcast [and] the rejection of that identity” (350, emphasis added)—positions Hemings as

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someone with a condition that extends beyond being “black” and “white” and beyond being “black” or “white.” Returning to the artist’s plastic and textual work and further analyzing her use of race(ism) can return Sally Hemings to history and can expose the US’s racelessness, which would help unravel the raci(al/st) material the reader traditionally drapes over the girl on the cover and could be “the answer / To a moral question” (From 21). If more people focus on race(ism) even in literature, society can redirect its attention to more fully reckoning with its race(ism), not in a moral indictment type of way but more as a matter of fact, as many people unintentionally uphold race(ism) by upholding the idea of “race.” Each of us has individual power and agency even as we are also each impacted by society’s decisions. Both the individual and society exist in separate and empowering ways but not if most individuals choose to give their power to the larger community. After all, a community comprises individuals. One must be bold enough to imagine a different way. just as Nelson Mandala, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Jacobs, and many other individuals boldly asserted a different today, as they dreamt of different futures for their larger societies. Rereading the so-called mulatta(o) as a walking negative (as in [re]imaging racelessness since race has always existed through the lens of race[ism]) figure will further efforts to undo race(ism) by recognizing how writers like Harper and Larsen, intentionally or otherwise, undo race. Kimberley Roberts marvels at the range of skin color Africans illustrated when they came to the US. Similarly, Helga describes the spectrum “black” people reflect: For the hundredth time [Helga] marveled at the gradations … There was sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white. There was yellow hair, brown hair, black hair; straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair, crinkly hair, woolly hair. She saw black eyes in white faces, brown eyes in yellow faces, gray eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces. Africa, Europe, perhaps with a pinch of Asia, in a fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty. (55)

Thus, language beyond race(ism) is needed and reflective, still, of racelessness. Indeed, “[i]t would be like learning a new language” (151) to dismantle terms like mulatta(o), octoroon, biracial, transracial, creole, hybrid,

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mixed, pure, white, half, minority, majority, people of color, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, and black. The words walking negative and raceless carry their own set of complications but are, even if only slightly, closer to highlighting and imagining a world and time “[w]hen we have learned to treat men according to the complexion of their souls, and not the color of their skins” (Harper, 212) both positively and negatively. Further, “we will have given our best contribution towards the solution of the negro problem” (212), which is the architecture of race(ism), as Morrison conceptualizes. If the presence of color exists, the absence of color must also exist, and it does and can come to the foreground.

Beyond and Against Race(ism) Into Home This chapter’s theory of racelessness in literature highlights the absence of race and the presence of race(ism), and highlights how writers like Harper, Larsen, and Chase-Riboud present the absence of color and race as part of the solution to race(ism). In other words, in this chapter, I highlight the nonexistence of “race” and the existence of racism. Other writers to consider (re)examining through this lens include William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853); Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) and White Rat (1977); Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928), The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931), and Comedy, American Style (1933); James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); Walter White’s Flight (1926); and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), to name a few. Additionally, there is a need for more critical attention to be given to raceless characters in such works as John Edgar Wideman’s Sent For You Yesterday (1983), Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985), Ernest J. Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men (1983), Chester Himes’ Blind Man with a Gun (1969), and George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). This chapter serves as an example of how literary scholars can prevent race from determining readings of literature and why race should not determine analyses of literature. Ultimately, inspired by Chase-Riboud’s The Albino and “The Albino,” the engagement of the raceless literary theory results in the scrutinization of each American character’s will to classification, slights of hand when race(ism) turns into race by the characters, the writer, or the reader, and moments when race ceases to exist metaphorically and literally, resulting in a sort of albinism (i.e., figurative colorlessness and literal racelessness). To step outside of race to examine it with

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the express purpose of resisting and ending race(ism), a new and expanded language is required and can include that of racelessness. Racial skepticism gives people the tools required to fully step outside of race(ism) to undo race(ism) and to be anti-race(ist) in ways that Ibram X. Kendi’s or Robin DiAngelo’s versions of anti-racism preclude. The theory of racelessness helps people know that race does not exist in nature or as a social construction. Everyone is raceless. Racism is the belief in race as biological or a construction. Racism is not everywhere and is not the cause for every perceived “racial” disparity or negative interaction. We can overcome racism.

Bibliography Adhikari, Mohamed. Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Ohio UP, 2005. Armand, Claudine. “In the Interstices of Sculpture and Poetry: Sewing and Basting.” Callaloo, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, pp. 981–998. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/27743076. Azoulay, Katya Gibel. “Outside Our Parents’ House: Race, Culture, and Identity.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 1, 1996, pp. 129–142. Carby, Hazel. “‘Of Lasting Service for the Race’: The Work of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-­ American Woman Novelist, Oxford UP, 1987a, pp. 62–94. ———. “The Quicksands of Representation: Rethinking Black Cultural Politics.” Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, Oxford UP, 1987b, pp. 163–175. “Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.” Robert K.  Barnhart, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd., 2003, p. 684. Chase-Riboud, Barbara. From Memphis & Peking. Random House, 1974. ———. Sally Hemings. Chicago Review Press, 2009. Ferguson, Jeffrey B. “Black No More.” The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance, Yale UP, New Haven, 2005, pp.  212–244. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npw69.12. Fields, Karen and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2014. Forbes, Jack. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. U of Illinois P, 1993, p. 145. Garrant, Sheena. “A WHITE SLAVE: Albinism in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings.” New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, & Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives, edited by Ewa Barbara Luczak, Anna Pochmara, & Samir Dayal, De Gruyter Open, 2018, pp. 366–378.

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Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Valerie Smith. “Preface to the Third Edition.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Third Edition, 2014, pp. xxi–xxvii. General Assembly of Virginia. “4th Anne Ch. IV (October 1705).” In Hening, William Waller editor. Statutes at Large, 1823, p. 252. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Belknap Press, 2002. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. U of Chicago P, 1995, p. 5. Harper, Frances E. Iola Leroy. Beacon Press, 1987. Hostetler, Ann E. “The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” PMLA, vol. 105, no. 1, 1990, pp. 35–46. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/462341. Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Belknap Press, 2006. Jarrett, Gene. African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader. New York UP, 2006. ———. Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013a. ———. “LOOSENING THE STRAIGHTJACKET: Rethinking Racial Representation in African American Anthologies.” Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, edited by George Hutchinson and John K.  Young, U of Michigan P, 2013b, pp.  160–174. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctv3znzrx.11. Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Beacon Press, 1974. ———. Eva’s Man. Random House, 1976. ———. White Rat. Random House, 1977. Jordan, H.  E. “A Comparative Microscopic Study of the Melanin Content of Pigmented Skins with Special Reference to the Question of Color Inheritance Among Mulattos.” The American Naturalist, vol. 45, no. 536, 1911, pp. 449–470. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2455742. Kendi, Ibram. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Nation Books, 2016. ———. How to Be an Antiracist. One World, 2019. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. Martino Fine Books, 2011. Lewis, Vashti. “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy.” Phylon (1960–), vol. 45, no. 4, 1984, pp.  314–322. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/274912. Locke, Alain. “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture.” The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, 2000, pp. 187–199. Lunde, Arne, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport. “Helga Crane’s Copenhagen: Denmark, Colonialism, and Transnational Identity in Nella Larsen’s

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Quicksand.” Comparative Literature, vol. 60, no. 3, 2008, pp.  228–243. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40279414. Monda, Kimberly. “Self-Delusion and Self-Sacrifice in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” African American Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 1997, pp. 23–39. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/3042176. Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Harvard UP, 2017. ———. PEN America Literature Festival. “Toni Morrison and Marlene van Niekerk in Conversation.” YouTube, 2010. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JaOsMouZpJw. ———. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard UP, 1992. Roberts, Kimberley. “The Clothes Make the Woman: The Symbolics of Prostitution in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 16, no. 1, 1997, pp.  107–130. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/464042. Scheper, Jeanne. “The New Negro Flâneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” African American Review, vol. 42, no. 3/4, 2008, pp. 679–695. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/40301261. Schuyler, George. Black No More. Dover Publications, 2011. Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. “Legacy.” Legacy, vol. 23, no. 2, 2006, pp. 206–207. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25679580. Silverman, Debra B. “Nella Larsen’s Quicksand: Untangling the Webs of Exoticism.” African American Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 1993, pp.  599–614. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3041896. Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. First Anchor Books, 1994. Sollors, Werner. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both. Oxford UP, 1997, p. 129. Warren, Kenneth. “Autobiographical Notes.” 2018. U of Chicago, english.uchicago.edu/faculty/kenneth-­warren. ———. What Was African American Literature. Harvard UP, 2011. Wright, Richard. Native Son. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

CHAPTER 4

Toni Morrison’s Marathon Run Home to Racelessness in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise

Toni Morrison is an author whose fiction and nonfiction grapple with the question of race despite her overt effort to “design racelessness” (“Home” 8). In “Race Matters” (1994), her keynote address at Princeton University’s Race Matters Conference, she says, “The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act” (152). One must analyze how race(ism) functions and operates within the depth and breadth of Morrison’s oeuvre to transcend “race” because enforcing and illustrating racelessness, ironically, remain raci(al/st) acts. In this chapter, I extend the core tenets and tools of theory of racelessness to identify, define, and analyze metaphorical and literal houses—spaces where race(ism) exists—that Morrison redesigns into race(ism)less homes—spaces where race(ism) does not exist or where “race” exists without domination (i.e., hierarchy) in Song of Solomon (1977), a novel; “Recitatif” (1983), a short story; and Paradise (1997), a novel.1 Home, for Morrison, is “not a windowless prison into which I [she] was forced” (132). As an apparent racial social constructionist reconstructionist or racial social constructionist inconsistent eliminativist, Morrison seeks to “transform this [racial] house 1  The core tenets of theory of racelessness are as follows: Race does not exist in nature. Race does not exist as a social construction. Everyone is raceless. Racism is the belief in race as biological or a construction. Racism is not everywhere and is not the cause for every perceived “racial” disparity or negative interaction. Racism can be overcome.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. M. Mason, Theory of Racelessness, African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99944-5_4

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completely” (132) into a post-raci(al/st) home in which “race” exists without dominance, (138) essentially “deracing” (138) the world. Morrison’s work, in many ways, reflects the breadth and depth of varying philosophies of race across literature and the fruitfulness of using frameworks like the theory of racelessness within African American literary studies to expand and bridge canonized and uncanonized texts and its corresponding criticism. Further, rereading the literature opens the door to arguably more effective anti-racist solutions and future-making.2 Homes and houses, thereby, become Morrison’s simultaneously literal and metaphorical constructions that represent and reflect both raci(al/st) houses and liberated homes in her literature. In Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise, the houses that come the closest to being Morrison’s sites for homes are literally redesigned (rebirthed) into homes for society’s so-called outsiders who are people (men, women, and children, young and old) seeking refuge as the writer imagines freedom. Ultimately, while Morrison writes about reconstructing the raci(al/st) house in her essay “Race Matters,” the architecture of houses and homes in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise illustrates that freedom, a world in which “race” exists without dominance, and home, an embodiment of such freedom, cannot exist, in these texts, as long as race exists, since racism sometimes hides its face as race. In “Race Matters,” Morrison speaks about her desire to reconstruct the raci(al/st) house she feels forced to live in, as someone who has not had the luxury of living in a world in which race did not matter and “as an already and always raced writer” (Source 132). For Morrison, the raci(al/ st) house, as it stands, is not a home. In texts like Song of Solomon, although less overtly than elsewhere, she works to create a metaphorical and literal “home” outside of the architecture of race, a freedom she never fully creates or successfully imagines. Similarly, in “Recitatif,” and Paradise, Morrison overtly attempts to eliminate raci(al/st) cues in her narratives or, at minimum, eliminate the hierarchy and racism attached to raci(al/st)  Most people simultaneously hold philosophical positions regarding both the metaphysical and normative categories of race. As a social constructionist, a metaphysical category, Morrison clearly articulates throughout her career that she believes that race may not be biological but has manifested itself into reality and continues to exist and be real through human actions and decisions. However, Morrison’s position regarding race alternates between reconstructionism and eliminativism. She sometimes argues through her work or in interviews that race and racial discourse need not be eliminated and that, instead, racial discourse can and should be rehabilitated in a way that 1. renders race real and 2. removes the hierarchy and domination. Other times, she argues that race and racial discourse cannot be rehabilitated, and that race and concepts of race must be eliminated to, by extension, eliminate the hierarchy and domination built into race. 2

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language. This chapter examines the evolution of her imaginings over the course of her oeuvre and the progress Morrison makes in (re)designing narrative houses into homes from her first attempt in Song of Solomon to her first attempt in short fiction in “Recitatif” to her most explicit effort in Paradise 20 years later. Indeed, the architecture of Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise and the houses in the novels are the foundation for meaning within the reader’s and Morrison’s imaginations. The homes in her works are not bound by walls and ceilings but often expand to include whole towns, individuals, and communities of people. Morrison employs what this chapter identifies as six specific features of her architecture that ultimately facilitate racelessness or race without hierarchy and her subsequent revisioning of houses into homes in the above-named texts: rememory, maternal energy, invisible ink (i.e., reading silence in conjunction with what is voiced/written), twilight, madness, and consolation.3,4  Here, madness means foolish or dangerous behavior, ecstasy, enthusiasm, disorder, extreme folly, a state of severe mental illness—not used as a technical term—and intense anger or rage. Madness then will be analyzed in the texts simultaneously as a manifestation of the disorder racial hierarchy creates, the order writers create illustrating the enforcement of racial hierarchy, the intermixing of genres, spaces, languages, dialects, voices, and the like, and a critique of society’s idea of order. In her introduction to Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, Anna Deavere Smith says, “Few people speak a language about race that is not their own. If more of us could actually speak from another point of view, like speaking another language, we could accelerate the flow of ideas” (xxv). Through excavating the “twilight moment[s]” (emphasis added, 232), the “in-between moment[s]” (232), the universal moments found among the interviews she conducted, Smith simultaneously and necessarily points out similarities and differences even within the same racial, cultural, and political groups. Her project provides an illuminating framework for examining the function of madness and twilight in Morrison’s work since Morrison’s use of both also reflects a desire and need to speak different languages about race, class, gender, and culture. 4  In Beloved (1987), the first of the trilogy Paradise completes, Morrison coins the term rememory. Based on Sethe’s use of the word in the novel, “rememory” is best understood as repeatedly (re)membering memories and inhabiting the liminal space and place between history, reality, memory, and individual versus communal experience. (Re)membering is defined as the revisiting of and piecing together of memories and histories held by different members of society (including those of ancestors). Also, this chapter’s use of the term is inspired by Wilson Harris’ theorization of the phantom limb that was created by the Middle Passage and which creates a limbo gateway of endless possibilities between the Old and New Worlds. One must (re)member the violent and troubling past to (re)attach the phantom limb and open the gateway. In effect, his theorization of limbo resonates with this project’s theorization of twilight and involves a physical and metaphysical dismembering and then (re)membering through (re)memory. Unlike memory, “rememory” transforms an individual’s understanding of their present and the (re)imagining of their future. In effect, Morrison’s characters are often (re)birthed because of their rememories or, at least, have the potential for such transformation. Although the word rememory is not used in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” or Paradise, characters in each text experience rememory as a crucial feature of Morrison’s homes. 3

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Each feature works in unison to transform, reconstruct, and create a ­subliminal and, coincidentally, liminal space in which home can exist once race/racism is undermined. Twilight, madness, rememory, and maternal energy blend in Chapter 10 of Song of Solomon through Circe’s characterization to aid in Milkman’s liberative transformation. While Morrison’s later (re)designing of houses into homes comes, in large part, by writing “Recitatif” and much of Paradise without race, home in Song of Solomon appears more through hints of racelessness since the reader knows that for much of her life Circe is “black,” and prejudice, race, and racism exist in the rest of the novel. In Song of Solomon, Morrison’s house turned home is slightly more complicated than the other two analyses given, in part, because the home is found mostly in a fraction of the novel’s tenth chapter and primarily through Circe’s cameo and then Milkman’s permanent transformation influenced and informed by his interaction with her. Unlike in the short story and the novel, in Song of Solomon the character’s transformation does not require his deracing or racelessness. Milkman’s transformation does, however, necessitate Circe’s deracing, thereby facilitating Milkman’s freedom and flight. Circe (re)births and (re)delivers herself and Milkman from the architecture of raci(al/st) hierarchy and does not, in the end, let racism or race dominate in the brief segment. Instead, she offers a significant glimpse of home space in Song. In the beginning of the novel, Milkman is emotionally and spiritually homeless and seeking enrichment. He thinks he is searching for gold. Circe’s characterization, as it differs and is like the classical Circe, and Milkman’s changes after he meets her, though, show that he is searching for flight, freedom, and liberation from both racism and capitalism. He wants to fly both literally and metaphorically. He is searching for home. Importantly and fortunately, he finds home through Circe. Further, the literal and littoral architecture of the house in which Circe resides reflects twilight, madness, rememory, and maternal energy inspired by and maintained by Circe’s unraced essence. Milkman’s twilight—from birth his identity is tied up in opposites (i.e., life/death, human/nonhuman, significant/insignificant, sexual/asexual, free/restricted, and so on)— becomes closer to the clarity of either night or day because of what happens in Chapter 10. In Song of Solomon, Circe is the gatekeeper to home, and home hinges on her deracing, not eracing, herself. The images of home in Song are admittedly untidy but important to analyze and consider as part of Morrison’s marathon to home.

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Much of the criticism of Song of Solomon centers on raci(al/st) and cultural difference and black pride and the black aesthetic but also extends to topics outside of “racialized” discourse. Harry Reed argues that the novel is a black cultural nationalist text. In “Open Movement and Selfhood in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” (1984), Robert Butler writes that “Although American and Afro-American literary traditions are quite different in many important ways, they are in essential agreement on this [“to find in motion what was lost in space”] way of imagining movement” (58) simultaneously subscribing to and perpetuating the discourse regarding African American literature and the black aesthetic as its prerequisite. Critics such as Timothy Powell label the novel a “soaring affirmation of black selfhood” (749), stating that Morrison has created a “(w)holy black text” (749). Realists (i.e., naturalists) claim that Song of Solomon is a rumination on “black life” (Coleman 151) and “black subjectivity” (Oforlea 115). Dolan Hubbard analyzes the novel’s depictions of spiritual authority, sermonic discourse, and self-determination. Lastly, in “Signifying Circe in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” (2006), Judith Fletcher focuses “on how Morrison employs the figure of Circe to position her novel both within and beyond the classical tradition of the catabatic narrative” (405).5 She argues that in the Odyssey Odysseus’ catabasis “functions as the prototype for this [catabatic] narrative tradition, and as a model for Morrison’s novel” (406). She analyzes the differences between the classic characterization of Circe in the Odyssey and that of Circe in Song of Solomon, concluding that the changes reflect Morrison’s simultaneous subsuming of the classic tradition and her expansion beyond such classical barriers. Ultimately, although alternate readings of Morrison’s Song of Solomon exist, much of the criticism does remain centered on race and discourse typically associated with race in ways that Morrison frequently attempts to dissuade, not just complicate.6 Morrison’s The Origin of Others (2017), a book based on a series of lectures given at Harvard University in 2016, illuminates her attempts to dissuade readers from defaulting to raci(al/st), not just racist, discourse. Due to its relative newness and its palpably relative difference compared to  Catabatic means to go down into the underworld.  In The Origin of Others, Morrison says that race is the classification of a species, and that there is a single “human race” (111). Here, she takes a firmer stance on deracing rather than eracing society and our imaginations than she has in “Home” or its latter version “Race Matters.” This is where her partial eliminativism shades into total eliminativist inclinations. 5 6

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her extensive oeuvre, there are virtually no critical papers on The Origin of Others and only a handful of reviews. In his “Foreword,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about Karen and Barbara Fields’ definition of racecraft and intertwines it with Morrison’s theorization of the formulation of the “Other,” the stranger, the foreigner, the alien.7 One passage is worth quoting at length as it underscores Morrison’s attempt to transcend the boundaries race creates and, ultimately, the racism and prejudice that create race and vice versa. When we [Americans] say ‘race’ as opposed to ‘racism,’ we reify the idea that race is somehow a feature of the natural world and racism the predictable result of it. Despite the body of scholarship that has accumulated to show that this formulation is backwards, that racism precedes race, Americans still haven’t quite gotten the point. And so we find ourselves speaking of ‘racial segregation,’ ‘the racial chasm,’ ‘the racial divide,’ ‘racial profiling,’ or ‘racial diversity’—as though each of these ideas is grounded in something beyond our own making. The impact of this is not insignificant. If ‘race’ is the work of genes or the gods, then we can forgive ourselves for never having unworked the problem. (xi–xii)

That critics of African American literature continue to imagine its writers, like Morrison, and the content/characters of the literature as raced and, therefore, expect writers to write about race in specific ways—whether that be about anything tied to the “Black Aesthetic,” the “black experience,” “black culture,” or physical and metaphysical “blackness”—coincides with how Americans, broadly speaking, conceive and speak of or act toward race, including the conflation of race and culture. Most of the above-­ named critics use language like “multiracial,” “passing,” “mulatto,” “racialized,” “race,” “hybridity,” “racial difference,” “black culture nationalist,” and “racial identity” in their essays, which supports the assertion that people, for the most part, accept or, at minimum, reify the objective reality of race even as they argue that race is subjective. As Ron Mallon says in “Passing, Traveling, and Reality: Social Construction and the 7  For the Fields, the term race “stands for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank” (16). Through their definition of race, the writers point to each metaphysical philosophy of race and argue that “Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race” (17).

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Metaphysics of Race” (2016), society chooses to create and uphold conceptions of race. Further, in choosing to uphold and perpetuate ideas of race, society must also continue fighting the ramifications caused by America’s “raci(al/st) house.” Morrison, through her nonfiction, gives readers insight into how one might (re)analyze and (re)design the raci(al/ st) house that includes much literary criticism of her fiction, as with Song of Solomon, into a home. In this chapter, since I only analyze the part of Chapter 10 in Song of Solomon that introduces and engages Circe but does so still within the context of the novel as a whole, a brief summary of Song of Solomon is in order.8 Published before “Recitatif,” Song of Solomon opens in Michigan in 1931 with Robert Smith, a North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent and member of The Seven Days, an organization that kills white people in retaliation for killing black people, choosing how and when he will die by committing suicide. Ironically, Robert decides that he will “fly away on my [his] own wings” (3) and promptly falls to his death. His attempt at literal flight highlights and reflects the impact of madness caused by society’s hierarchies because the onlookers in the novel and the reader know that it is more likely than not that he will leap and fall to his death. However, the 8  The title Song of Solomon references King Solomon whose reign left such little historical evidence that some scholars refer to it as the “Dark Age.” The novel functions as a filling in of Milkman’s “Dark Age,” dark not because he is what Ruby residents in Paradise would call 8-rock but because little is known, and truths are obscured. King Solomon is shown in the Old Testament as being greedy and sinning by collecting vast amounts of gold and property and marrying “foreign” women, strangers to Christianity and women who led Solomon to worship false idols. His sins result in his judgment by God, who promises to divide what was the United Kingdom of Israel after Solomon’s rule and death, leaving Solomon’s son a smaller kingdom to rule and a lesson for Christians about not seeking excessive wealth and not worshipping other deities. Aside from the explicit connections between the Biblical King Solomon and the Solomon of Song of Solomon and each Macon Dead, the implicit connections, the invisible ink, of the novel’s connection to King Solomon also lies in how Solomon’s actions impact the future generations. So, while King Solomon lives how he wants and becomes legendary (he lives on in the Talmud, the Quran, and the Old and New Testaments), his son and grandson and so on become less and less prominent, less and less wealthy, and less and less important. Solomon (Morrison’s) has 21 children and a wife and abandons them all. Yes, he flies and shows other people that everything is possible. In this way, he intertwines with King Solomon, who became known in non-biblical circles as a magician or otherworldly. He becomes legendary and the source of countless songs, but readers are left to question, as Milkman does, what negative effects his abandonment caused and continues to cause. This is also Milkman’s coming-of-age journey: What negative effects do his behavior and abandonment cause?

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reader later learns that Solomon, the protagonist’s great-grandfather and “The Flying African,” literally flies into the air and goes back to Africa, according to the legend of the novel, making Robert’s hopes of flight seem, at least slightly, less foolish, less mad. Macon Dead III, the protagonist, is born when Ruth, Macon’s mother, witnesses Robert’s attempt at literal flight and is so impacted that she goes into labor. The first “colored” baby “born inside Mercy” (9) hospital, Macon Dead was born a Dead by name and “dead” in spirit, having “lost all interest in himself” (9) from the beginning.9 He gets the nickname “Milkman” when a family friend catches his mother still breastfeeding him when he is four years old. Like Twyla and Roberta in “Recitatif,” Milkman’s name comes to signify life, death, and revival, human and nonhuman, significant and insignificant, productive and unproductive, sexual and asexual, possibility and impossibility, freedom and restriction, and silence and voice. In other words, twilight and madness are written into Milkman’s name and into and onto his person. Similarly, Robert Smith does not literally fly but does take flight metaphysically and metaphorically, signaling the twilight space of the novel as a whole. Song of Solomon represents Milkman’s coming of age by his learning how to fly. He flies to Danville, Pennsylvania, where his paternal grandfather, Macon Dead, grew wealthy and was killed by white folks who then took and lived on his land. Macon Jr., Milkman’s father, and Pilate were kept safe and raised further by Circe, a servant to the Butlers, the family that murdered Macon. Eventually, Macon II and Pilate, a nomadic woman who knows how to make love potions and who is outcast wherever she lives because she was born with no naval, flee. They find a cave that holds bags of gold. Pilate does not allow Macon to take any of the gold because they think they killed a white man in the cave in what seems like a moment of self-­ preservation. She believes that taking the gold would ensure bad fortune. Macon and Pilate become estranged since he resents her for not letting him take the gold. She lives in different states collecting rocks from every state until finally settling back in Michigan, where she wants to raise her daughter, Hagar, near extended family. Pilate helps Macon and Ruth, 9  Although the common definition of dead certainly exists within the world of the novel and Macon’s characterization, dead also denotes the following meanings: inert, deprived of life, complete, absolute, those who have died, lacking power or effect, no longer significant, no longer in use, commercially idle, being out of action, not running, incapable of being effective, and the time of greatest quiet.

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Milkman’s mother, get pregnant by brewing a love potion because Ruth and Macon’s marriage is generally unhappy and loveless. As a young man, Milkman has a sexual relationship with cousin Hagar. His eventual rejection of her influences her psychological decline and subsequent suicide. Of all of the characters, Hagar does not take flight in any form. Strangely, though, she does seem to choose her flight like Smith does in the beginning. In the middle of the novel, Guitar, Milkman’s “friend” and foil, and Milkman talk about one’s ability or inability to choose how one dies. Guitar says that one should be able to choose. Milkman argues that one does not choose how one dies. Yet, the novel opens with Robert, in effect, making that very choice and ends with Milkman and Guitar choosing: “As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (337). Milkman’s growing dissatisfaction, discontent, and unhealthy and strained family relationships lead him to “really have to go away somewhere” (221). This is when he leaves Michigan in search of the cave with the bags of gold and instead finds out about himself and his family and finally learns what home is and how to fly. Although Song of Solomon ends ambiguously, it does end with both seemingly dissimilar men choosing. Milkman’s transformation is complete regardless of whether he only challenges Guitar because he knows Guitar is no longer armed. Suddenly, the “twilight had thickened and all around them it was getting dark” (336). The twilight of the novel shifts to darkness, not in a pejorative sense but to symbolize the shift and underscore the lightness of Milkman’s transformation. Like his mother, his sisters, each of whom could easily be characters in Paradise, the mothers and runaway girls in “Recitatif,” and the Convent women later discussed in this chapter, Milkman’s desire to “go away somewhere” reflects his need to rebuild the house handed to him into home. Just as “Recitatif” and Paradise reflect the stories and subsequent impact of generations of women from various backgrounds and families, the novel houses generations of both paternal and maternal songs and flights that inform the central character’s song and flight. For Morrison, flight and one’s ability to fly are synonymous with one’s discovery and recovery of home, of freedom. The architecture of home in Song of Solomon underscores and brings to the surface the function of twilight and madness within the text. The architecture of Morrison’s texts and the houses and homes in her texts

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hold each structure’s meaning. At PEN World Voices’ 2010 literature festival, Morrison says that architecture is “where meaning really lies” (7:05). Indeed, the architecture of Song of Solomon and the houses in the novel are the foundation for meaning within the reader’s and Morrison’s imaginations. The house that Milkman travels to, Macon Dead II and Pilate flee after their father is murdered (lynched), and the Butlers take over with Circe as a servant festers and writhes with the universe of wood life that did live there in layers of ivy grown so thick he [Milkman] could have sunk his arm in it up to the elbow. Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death—each took place on the hidden side of a leaf. From where he stood, the house looked as if it had been eaten by a galloping disease, the sores of which were dark and fluid. (Song 219–20)

In stark contrast to St Bonny’s in “Recitatif” and the Convent in Paradise, this gothic portrayal of the Dead-Butler house opens Chapter 10 and Part II of the novel and literally and metaphorically reflects the ghastliness and violence inflicted on the Dead family and onto the Butler family, whose literal and metaphorical deaths were self-inflicted. It also reflects the twilight of the literal, littoral, and figurative spaces Morrison creates, the bothness (inbetweenness) she encourages the reader to mine for meaning, and the madness perpetuating and dissembling hierarchy creates, and what, at that time, is invisible ink to Milkman is made visible to the reader. Milkman “knew that an old woman had lived in it [the house] once, but he saw no signs of life there now” (219). He is “oblivious to the universe” (219) that crawls and slinks all around him, much like he is oblivious to, dead to, humanity and himself before his trip to the Dead-Butler house. As it turns out, like Circe’s character, “birth, life, and death” (220) in and on the house she inhabits remain “indistinguishable” (220). Song of Solomon makes apparent that, for Morrison, home does not equal home for everybody. Whereas the Convent in Paradise is a house and home the Convent women voluntarily inhabit and repeatedly return to, Circe’s house, which she “owns” because the Butlers died and she stays and lives

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there, is not one in which some people would want to remain or even approach.10 Circe’s maternal energy (re)births the madness caused by society’s efforts to categorize and dominate and also fosters the novel’s twilight space in which everything is possible. Morrison significantly alters Circe’s characterization from the Odyssey by transforming Circe from a siren, trickster, and sorceress into an ideal host and home maker. In the original story, Circe provides an idyllic home for Odysseus and his men after she promises to stop tricking and cursing them. In Song, Circe becomes a mother figure to Dead II, Pilate, and Dead III and a spiritual siren and witch figure who perfumes the rot of her home and helps Milkman find his home. Whereas Circe in the Odyssey says she will stop tricking Odysseus, she continues to bait him and his men to stay with her as her seemingly willing guests by giving the illusion of freedom and a mirage of paradise that makes the men stay. Eventually, Odysseus leaves on his quest after receiving further instructions from Circe. Odysseus shifts from being a prisoner to a happy house guest to a memory of Circe’s. Her instructions enable and ensure Odysseus’ successful voyage and transformation, so she remains a somewhat ambivalent figure, like all gods and goddesses. Morrison’s Circe seems to live forever, like a goddess, has powers, and gives Milkman instructions on how and where to find the gold and, more importantly, enlightens him on his family’s history in a chapter and figures built on rememory. Morrison rewrites and rereads Circe (and Odysseus through Milkman) and her wiliness to make the twilight of the novel a little less obscure and the redesigned and restructured homes of the novel further imagined and defined. While every home is not for every body or everybody, every home must embody the characteristics created even by Circe’s dying and living home: twilight, madness, rememory, and maternal energy, which all, ultimately, create a space in which race that shades into racelessness without domination exists. In Song, Circe, the maternal and spiritual figure, delivers everybody. The physical space of her house, combined with her spiritual, emotional, and ideological positionality, create home not just for her (though very few people would want to stay in her literal home) but for those who know of her, too. Reverend Cooper tells Milkman that “she was a good midwife in those days. Delivered everybody. Me included” (231). Rev. Cooper 10  How Circe comes to own the house and redesign it is reminiscent of how the Convent women come to own the mansion in Paradise.

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becomes animated, lively, with the mention of Circe, exclaiming, “Circe? Yes. Lord, old Circe” (230) because after “Old Macon Dead was killed, nobody knew whether the children was dead too or what. Then a few weeks passed and Circe came to my daddy’s shop” (231) where she has his dad make an earring with Pilate’s name on it for Pilate. She does not tell his father about the children, but Rev. Cooper says, “we knew they was alive and Circe was taking care of ‘em. They’d be all right with Circe” (231). Thus, Circe embodies the action the town wished to have taken but did not in the wake of Macon’s murder. She is the stand-in mother figure for Macon Dead II and Pilate and then Macon Dead III. She works for the people who kill Macon and then hides Macon’s children in plain sight in the house taken over by his murderers. As Rev. Cooper starts to (re)member Milkman’s history, Milkman’s family history, the town’s history, Milkman “felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to” (231).11 The very talk of Circe and her transgressive behavior liven Milkman up to stories he had not previously paid attention to. Cooper’s praise of and fondness for Circe centers on her having moved oppressed people in the community to the center. He and Milkman continue, “‘You [Milkman] wouldn’t be here to even things up, would?’ … ‘No.’ … ‘Cause any evening up left to do, Circe took care of.’ ‘What’d she do?’ ‘Hah! What didn’t she do’” (233). Through her being, Circe helps deliver everybody in the town into the world as a midwife and then delivers them from their inaction against or support of racism and classism, which Milkman learns and experiences firsthand. As in “Recitatif,” Milkman acquires another central mother figure who necessitates and makes possible his ability to fly. After all, Circe delivers babies, nurtures Macon II, Pilate, and Milkman, rebirths residents of Danville who live vicariously through her resistance and (re)telling stories about her, and has this doubly erotic and maternal effect on Milkman. “[T]he gold loomed large in his mind” (238) when he approaches Circe’s house turned home and still does when he leaves “to find out what had happened to the gold” (256). However, when he finally theorizes that the gold is unrecoverable, he recovers from the house of class and race 11  Macon Dead III has a striking resemblance to the Macon men who came before him, which ignites and guns the memories of the men in the town (235). They see Macon’s look-­ a-­like and piece their histories, their memories, together, despite the trauma incurred when Milkman’s grandfather was lynched.

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(intertwined, at the least) that living in the US forces him into. When the Butlers reign and the children live there in secret, Pilate and Macon Dead II feel like the house is a prison. In other words, they recognize the architecture of the only house in the novel that is built literally on race as imprisoning and seek refuge. Before entering, Milkman thinks: It must have been beautiful, must have seemed like a palace to them, but neither had ever spoked of it in any terms but how imprisoned they felt, how difficult it was to see the sky from their room, how repelled they were by the carpets, the draperies. Without knowing who killed their father, they instinctively hated the murderers’ house. And it did look like a murderer’s house. Dark, ruined, evil. (238)

Pilate and Macon II hate the Butlers’ house, no longer their father’s house, and run away like the runaway girls in “Recitatif” and like Macon III in Song, which brings him, ironically, to what is now Circe’s house. They all “knew he [they] was fed up and he [they] had to leave quickly” (221). They feel the need to go anywhere but here within the architecture of race and class, which are sometimes conflated in Morrison’s work. Some build and rebuild, design and redesign, write and rewrite, read and reread, remember and (re)member a home for themselves while others are in the process of doing so. Others, still, fail to recognize the house or recognize it but do not know how to begin reconstructing or eliminating it. Circe reconstructs (i.e., reflecting Morrison’s social reconstructionism, at that time) and eliminates the house making her home, so Milkman’s presence in her physical, emotional, and spiritual home allows for Macon II and III’s reconstruction of home, too, with Milkman as the generational conduit. Milkman first reacts to Circe, who “must have been [older than] a hundred years old when she died” (233), according to Rev. Cooper, both erotically and, one would think, fearfully. Morrison’s Milkman only desires a woman who must now be well over 100 years old and who is not clearly alive or dead, much like himself. Like her namesake, Circe beckons. Her environment repels until she masks it with “a sweet spicy perfume” (239). The madness (disorder) of her existence and presence and the house she inhabits would scare some people away. However, the impactful presence and impact of twilight, madness, maternal energy, and rememory equate to home, according to Morrison, so Milkman wants to be there, wants to learn.

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Similar to Consolata’s characterization in Paradise, Circe simultaneously devours and rebirths. Her maternal energy is complex, like Ruth’s, and comprises spirituality, need, and desire, too. Whereas the men in Paradise fear and murder women who might want to devour them, women they cannot control, Milkman sees her at the top of the stairs of the house where he previously saw no signs of life, but which teems with life, and immediately, unthinkingly, ascends to greet and meet her. She has outstretched hands, her fingers spread wide for him, her mouth gaping open for him, her eyes devouring him. In a dream you climb the stairs. She grabbed him, grabbed his shoulders and pulled him right up against her and tightened her arms around him. Her head came to his chest and the feel of that hair under his chin, the dry bony hands like steel springs rubbing his back, her floppy mouth babbling into his vest, made him dizzy. (239)

Circe’s home elevates Milkman. He “ascends” (239) in a house absent of light with “A hairy animal smell, ripe, rife, suffocating. He coughed and looked for somewhere to spit, for the odor was in his mouth, coating his teeth and tongue” (239) and death indistinguishable from life. Circe embraces him like a long, lost boy or man, reminiscent of Ruth’s potentially inappropriate relationship with her father and Milkman, Milkman’s inappropriate relationship with his cousin, and what could be a relationship bordering on inappropriate between Macon II and Circe and now Circe and Milkman. The boundaries in Morrison’s homes are nonexistent or barely visible. The dark and dank space and Circe’s warm embrace give Milkman an “erection” (239). Circe shifts his prior pleasurable fear of “the witch who chased him down dark alleys, between lawn trees, and finally into rooms from which he could not escape” (239) into pure pleasure. She, a woman over 100 years old, a woman who must be dead, agitates his being emotionally, spiritually, and physically and edges him toward freedom, toward flight, toward his home. Circe’s madness reflects in how she behaves, looks, and sounds. She breeds Weimaraners, also known as “gray ghosts,” “which had the intelligent child’s eyes … [and] combed, brushed gun-metal hair” (240). Interestingly, the dogs are gray and live in a house absent of light, which gives an effect of them blending in with their surroundings. Morrison chose a dog whose breed with black coats is not recognized or accepted into competitions by national and international kennel clubs, highlighting a paradoxical relationship with the history of the house’s owners (i.e.,

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Macon Dead, the Butlers, and Circe) and the grayness the circle of ownership creates. Morrison further layers colorlessness and, by extension, hints toward racelessness, by describing the deracing of Circe further: “She was old. So old she was colorless. So old only her mouth and eyes were distinguishable features in her face. Nose, chin, cheekbones, forehead, neck all had surrendered their identity to the pleats and crochetwork of skin committed to constant change” (240). One letter short of spelling circle, Circe has a colorless and ever-changing body that is a central part of her home. She is not bound, unlike Milkman, by the architecture of race even if she was when the Butlers lived. She is not bound by the architecture of class or death either. She comes to own the house by simply staying there after the Butlers die. With their physical deaths, Circe is intent on letting the physical manifestation of the Butlers’ sins (be they racism or classism) die, too. Of course, the reader knows that the death of the house and the property within it gives and creates life to and for Circe, her dogs, fauna, plants, trees, insects, the town, and welcome visitors, like Milkman. With the Butlers’ deaths, Circe is completely free from the strictures of racism and race, and her body and house signify that shift. In addition to looking colorless, she looks “crazy …. wild and filthy” (240) and as old as death but has the “mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old girl” (240). The disjuncture between Circe’s voice and body, the madness it produces, overwhelms Milkman. He says, “It was awful listening to that voice come from that face” (241). Milkman reads her phenotype, as does the reader, and anticipates a different voice but is surprised and incorrect. She also has “dainty habits which matched her torn and filthy clothes in precisely the way her strong young cultivated voice matched her wizened face” (242). Her transcendence and transgression of the heteronormative hegemonic gaze build a space for her home and are its foundation. Even her mismatched voice, demeanor, and body reflect the twilight of the novel that finally fades into darkness at the end of Song of Solomon with Milkman’s own transcendence and flight. Whether she is dead or alive or both, she inhabits a womblike, generative, dark, and warm house that has only one room left standing, which is where Milkman receives her wisdom (though he does not actually receive it right away) and is born again. Before Chapter 10, Milkman is the following: ‘my [Hagar’s] home in this world.’ ‘And I am his,’ said Ruth.

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‘And he wouldn’t give a pile of swan shit for either one of you.’ They turned then and saw Pilate leaning on the window [sic] sill. Neither knew how long she’d been there. ‘Can’t say as I blame him neither. Two growed-up women talkin ‘bout a man like he was a house or needed one. He ain’t a house, he’s a man, and whatever he need, don’t none of you got it.’ (emphasis added 137–8)

He is home to Hagar and Ruth, which is why neither woman truly has a home, not in the way Circe does. According to Morrison, one must have one’s own home (not another person) to offer others the ability to design and build their own home, which is discussed further in this chapter. This is why Circe is such a central figure in the novel. She resides in a space that has “no light” (249) and no distinguishableness about it, but the space she builds, always, provides a home for flight, freedom. Circe, the classical one, is reborn into Circe, the contemporary one, in Song of Solomon, who is then constantly reborn within the world of the novel, which comes full circle with flight (pitiful or heroic as both flights may be). Her home embodies the Dead-Butler house, stretches out into other hearts, houses, and businesses in Danville, Pilate and wherever she goes with the earring, and now Milkman providing people with the tools needed to build their own homes, to redesign their own houses. Twilight, invisible ink, and rememory blend in “Recitatif” through the characterization of Maggie to ultimately aid in Twyla’s and Roberta’s potentially liberative transformations. Unlike in Song of Solomon, most of the characters in “Recitatif” are unraced, which combined with twilight, invisible ink, and rememory facilitates racelessness and home (i.e., liberation from hierarchies). In the end, the sustained racelessness of Twyla, Roberta, and the other characters is required for any character to achieve, (re)create, or find home (i.e., freedom). The ambiguity and inability of the reader to identify the race of any character illustrate the existence of race without domination. When the characters are explicitly raced, like the general racialized descriptions of the girls in the orphanage or when Twyla and Roberta argue over whether Maggie is black, race falls away during their dialogue, which causes them to have the most success at reconciliation and mutual understanding. Thus, while race exists in the world of the novel and imposes itself over the years into Twyla and Roberta’s relationship, both women heal themselves and each other through moments of deracing one another. The story is without raci(al/st) hierarchy and

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raci(al/st) language. It is, ultimately, without race. Rememory keeps the door to home always open, so one can oscillate and vacillate between freedom and the confines of the outside world, as the women in “Recitatif” experience and illustrate. Morrison’s invisible ink helps the characters and readers transcend all boundaries and recover and discover twilight, a central feature of Morrison’s home. Her home is a refuge for orphans, “put-­ out girls [and boys], scared runaways” (2), and people who want to exist freely without domination. These people are often running away from oppression and domination just as Milkman does, so for them, home must be sought after, discovered, built, and rebuilt just as Morrison searches for homes within her texts. In “Recitatif,” Maggie is the gatekeeper to home via twilight, rememory, and invisible ink. “Recitatif,” one of only two of Morrison’s published short stories, was her first attempt to derace a text and not just a character (i.e., Circe). The story first appeared in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (1983), edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka.12 In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), regarding “Recitatif” Morrison writes, “The only short story I have ever written … was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial” (xi). Although the reader knows that each girl is “from a whole other race” (“Recitatif” 1), Twyla and Roberta’s race remains unrevealed, leaving some critics guessing which character is black and which one is white. Like the French form of recitative, “Recitatif” encourages its audience to hover between blackness and whiteness within a twilight space, a liminal and subliminal space, that Morrison creates, enabling her characters to find freedom from race and dominance. Dialogic by nature, the story prevents or, at least, cautions against deciding definitively either way, and its extremely self-reflexive nature points to the reader’s very desire, need 12  Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected writers who played a prominent role in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and 1970s. He is often credited with participating in the creation and promulgation of the so-called black aesthetic. As a whole, the BAM was an African-American-led art movement whose focus was on instilling and conveying a sense of black pride and black power through art and education. In “A-World-in-WhichRace-­Does-Not-Matter” (2007), Jarrett points out that “Morrison belongs to the generation of black women writing against the Black Aesthetic” (165) and that “Recitatif” “also raises issues about an academic field emerging at that historical juncture, namely, African American literary theory” (165), which is informed, at least in part, by the idea of a black aesthetic.

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even, to race its characters. Often, how critics race Twyla and Roberta highlights the relative nature of identification, categorization, and race, as well as one’s need to own or dominate any character. Each argument (i.e., that Twyla is white or black) holds more salience depending on the page, the paragraph of the story, and the reader. In “Goodbye to All That: Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell” (2001), Morrison writes about the invisible ink she and all writers leave for readers to unveil or not, arguing, “I am not alone in focusing on race as a non-signifier” (Source 349).13 Yet, critics have not yet fully grappled with “Recitatif” in unraced or deraced ways. Morrison separates race from culture in her work, which is an important distinction. While culture signifies in her work, race does not or should not, according to Morrison. As a writer, she says that she is always and already “[e]raced,” and she critiques a former interviewer’s exclusionary focus on race, saying, “The point I am making … is that neither he nor his audience was interested in any aspects of me other than my raced ones” (Source 334). She continues writing about the numerous other subjects she had hoped he would ask her about but then says that one should not misinterpret her desire as an endorsement of deracination, of the fashionable term, ‘race transcendence,’ nor as an example of the dwindling impact of racial politics. I don’t foresee, or want, a color-blind, race-neutral environment. The nineteenth century was the time for that. It’s too late, now. Our race-inflected culture not only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it thrives as a virus or a bountiful harvest of possibilities. (Source 335)

13  Jarrett says that “the number of anomalous texts declined markedly” (171) after the Black Arts Movement. He defines “anomalous texts” as raceless texts. There was an increase in the 1950s and again after Barack Obama’s first term as President of the United States. Also, here, non-signifier connotes Ferdinand De Saussure’s semiotics in which there is a sign/signifier/signified/referent. Morrison’s non-signifier can be defined as anything that cannot stand for, signify, or represent something other than itself. In other words, race is not signified and does not signify if the text does the work she intends. Additionally, though, Morrison’s use of non-signifier denotes Gates’ The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-­ American Literary Criticism (1988), a seminal work of literary criticism and African American literature in which Gates analyzes the African American cultural practice of signifyin(g) and the intertextuality of texts written by African American writers. Ironically, just as Jarrett argues, Morrison’s words reflect and reify what they also work to disrupt.

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Here, Morrison’s eliminativist inclinations (partial and otherwise) that are reflected in “Recitatif” and Song seem to have been erased, forfeited, thereby calling her position on race and literature even further into question. In the same essay, however, she closes wondering what would happen “If, in fact, I was not a [raced] foreigner but a home girl, who already belonged to the human race” (emphasis added 344). In her closing, she plays on the colloquialism “homegirl” and harkens back to her metaphor of houses and homes and her attempts and desire to rebuild the US’s raci(al/st) house into a home for everyone, which necessitates, according to Morrison’s fictional worlds, racelessness. The audience’s ability to pin down her exact view on raci(al/st) discourse at any given moment becomes as unimportant as Twyla and Roberta’s race or the race of the Convent women in Paradise and Morrison’s imagined paradise. She forces her audience to remain in a dialogic, recitative space, a twilight space between race and racelessness, where productive discourse can occur.14 She lived and worked to “read the world, misread it; write and unwrite it” (337), which is evident between the essays, speeches, and meditations in The Source of Self-Regard and her fiction. She writes and unwrites what she means, which leads readers to read and misread her work but, ultimately, in doing so, she gets herself and readers closer to home. She did not shy away from contradicting herself, at times, and neither should critics in collective efforts to (re)member her attempts to take both race as a concept and racism to task. As in “Recitatif,” twilight, invisible ink, and rememory combine to undermine racism and, ultimately, race, which transforms the hierarchy that is built into concepts of race further into home sites for Morrison’s characters and Morrison, by extension. Part of Morrison’s invisible ink is often race. Significantly, in her worlds of fiction where race is a non-signifier, race does not matter. Further, according to Morrison’s texts, race does not exist in any natural or non-­ essentialized way. By “hiding” race in “Recitatif,” Morrison highlights the eliminativist position that people are born raceless, can exist without race, and would do so in more positive fashions than the continuation of raci(al/ st) ideology allows. Therefore, it does not matter if Twyla or Roberta is black or white or none of the above. What becomes crucial is the reader’s inclination to (e)race the characters and the evidence used in the process, 14  This is also why dialogue that includes but also goes beyond race must be dialogic in nature and not a mere replacement for what is currently overdetermined by race.

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just as Chase-Riboud’s Albino forces the viewer to (e)race or unrace the sculpture while recognizing that very self-reflexivity and participation. In “A-World-in-Which-Race-Does-Not-Matter,” Jarrett argues that “Recitatif” “demonstrates the postmodernist ability of African American literature to reify certain aspects of racial difference even as it tries, on various levels, to disrupt the conventions of reading and writing racial identity” (178). For some critics, the desire and ability, perhaps, to decode and classify Twyla and Roberta’s race becomes evidence of what many consider inherent raci(al/st) difference, which given Morrison’s attempts to non-­ signify highlights her strategies as inefficient and the reader’s ability to help her “write the book” (“Invisible Ink” 349) problematic since critics’ greatest focus remains race. It also becomes emblematic of what “Recitatif” critiques and highlights, which, again, centers on (1) the constructed and subjective nature of race (i.e., she relativizes race), (2) the conflation of race and culture, and (3) the potential impact of racelessness. Morrison’s attempt to remove all raci(al/st) codes had the effect of encouraging critics to focus primarily on race and not in ways conducive to continued discourse regarding the construction of race or imagining a world in which race does not matter. Critics of African American literature are so focused on race that other subjects that “Recitatif” illuminates remain largely overlooked. In “Maggie in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’: The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies” (2011), Sandra Stanley says, “Critics have regarded Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ (1983) as a tour de force of racial readings and misreadings—a work exposing society’s unspoken racialized codes” (71). Stanley’s essay examines Maggie’s characterization—positioning “disability as the ‘real’ limitation” (72) from which Twyla and Roberta must escape—as she poignantly points out that Morrison’s story “has excited little critical discussion beyond metadiscursive investigations of the racial and, to some extent, class markers associated with the two central characters” (71). Indeed, Juda Bennett asserts that “Recitatif” and Paradise are “two narratives that highlight the importance of racial identity even as they refuse to reveal” (206) race. She examines how “the dynamics of passing moves with a metafictional playfulness between text and reader” (206) within Morrison’s text. As outlined later in this chapter, the homes in Morrison’s texts cannot account for “passing” since, by definition, raci(al/st) passing accepts and is founded on racist conceptions of raci(al/st) constructions. Stephanie Li, Jessica Cantiello, and Lesley Larkin also examine Morrison’s

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“race-specific, race-free language and the ambiguity it generates” (Li 135) with the onus of (e)racing characters placed on the readers. Critics like Jarrett underscore the fact that race, raci(al/st) passing, and even raci(al/ st) pride are not synonymous with Morrison’s “Recitatif.” He says, “‘Recitatif’ illustrates [at] best an anomalous if postmodern defiance of racial-realist ideologies central to the Black Aesthetic” (167).15 However, as mentioned, Jarrett’s reading of the short story is anomalous, to an extent. While he briefly mentions the importance of “gender and sexuality to constructions of black identity” (167), as manifest in both the short story and Morrison’s other works, he continues saying that the story “unsettles the idea that race can be fixed in identity politics and that this solution should constitute the sole protocol for reading, writing, and defining African American literature” (168).16 Further, just as Bennett recognizes Morrison’s race-play as a conceptualization and negotiation of passing, Jarrett sees such race-play as highlighting “The ability to identify someone’s race is as imprecise as any sort of human perspective is subjective” (180), like this book’s albino theory. Consequently, the reader’s understanding of “African American literature and racial and cultural difference” (177) becomes complicated. Like critics before him, Jarrett does ultimately analyze “Recitatif” as a tour de force of raci(al/st) readings and misreadings disallowing Morrison and her characters to come and go freely, raced and deraced but not eraced. In the texts examined in this chapter, there is always at least one transformation-­ enabling maternal archetype who has herself been (re) birthed, (re)membered, and stripped of both the dominance society once held over her and the strictures associated with race, gender, disability, and  In this context, he defines “anomalous” as raceless texts.  Baraka argues that “High art … must issue from real categories of human activity, truthful accounts of human life … And aside from Negro music, it is only in the ‘popular traditions’ of the so-called lower class Negro that these conditions are fulfilled as a basis for human life” (172). His account of what constitutes real black art and experiences resonates with canonized texts from the Harlem Renaissance, like Richard Wright’s “Blueprint” and Langston Hughes’ “Negro Artist.” In “Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext” (Within the Circle, 1979), regarding African American literature, Gates helps to more fully move blackness from a physical concept to a metaphysical concept. “Metaphysical blackness” comes to represent “the decisive transition of African American literary criticism, beginning in the late nineteenth century, from discussing what was perceptible to the physical senses to what was not, namely, the more abstract thoughts and feelings that critics would essentialize as ‘black’” (Jarrett 175). In other words, “black reality” and the black aesthetic worked hand in hand and were supposed to be and supposedly centered in African American literature. 15 16

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class. She is centered within the text and yet standing at the periphery, too, sharing the center and the so-called boundaries, as free as she can be in Morrison’s houses turned homes to wreak havoc on other characters’ understandings of boundaries, hierarchies, strangers, foreigners, and, ultimately, themselves. In Song of Solomon, that maternal figure is Circe. In “The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’” (2013), Shanna Benjamin argues that in their focus on racing Twyla and Roberta critics overlook Maggie as the liminal figure in the short story. Benjamin says that Maggie represents a shared narrative that provides common ground for the protagonists to rewrite, even if they are unable to resolve, their conflicting version of history. Redirecting the scholarly gaze to Maggie allows readers to appreciate how parenthetical, interstitial storylines that exist between racial binaries inspire interracial connection and communication, not merely contact and conquest. Maggie, therefore, moves readers to see past the divisive quality of such binaries and instead gaze into a central space … where the narratives constructed about race become collectively interrogated, not unilaterally accepted. (91)

Maggie is indeed a liminal figure in “Recitatif,” as she remains the biggest source of contention in Twyla’s and Roberta’s rememories of her, and one that is often overlooked or whose role is understated, as Benjamin and Morris point out. However, both critics’ arguments operate under the assumption that race is inherent, which the text disrupts. In fact, in viewing Maggie as the mediator of Twyla and Roberta’s “black-white” (“Recitatif” 11) worlds, Maggie becomes a stand-in for the ambiguously raced figure described in the last chapter. She is “sandy-colored” (2) and a “poor old black lady” (14). Yet, “she wasn’t pitch-black” (15), so neither Twyla nor Roberta can definitively name Maggie’s race. Roberta says, “I really did think she was black. I didn’t make that up. I really thought so. But now I can’t be sure” (17). Thus, Maggie is described as someone whose phenotype is difficult to pin down to any raci(al/st) group. In focusing on the indeterminacy, though, readers remain in the raci(al/st) house that characters like Twyla, Roberta, and Maggie through rememory burn down or, at least, redesign. Racelessness is one vital aspect of Morrison’s home in “Recitatif.” The world around Twyla and Roberta perpetuates race and racism. As the girls and then women navigate their raced worlds, raced bodies, and racism,

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they struggle to remain connected to each other, often racing one another through their rememories of Maggie. It is only when they derace Maggie that they unrace themselves and each other and can stay in the twilight (i.e., dialogic) space. Morrison’s rhetorical strategy indicates that ultimately racelessness and recognizing how one is unraced by nature is central to home, to freedom. For her, home is not just a space in which race does not matter. If race did not matter, readers would be unable to continue to (e)race its characters, so there is a clear disjuncture between Morrison’s imagined home and reality. Home is a space in which even when race matters to its inhabitants and also outsiders, race becomes the least important aspect of a person to the point that it falls away, reversing the ways in which society races people in the text.17 In “Recitatif,” Morrison demonstrates racelessness in many ways. First, Twyla and Roberta are teasingly called “salt and pepper” by other girls at St Bonny’s orphanage, so the reader knows upfront that one girl is “black” and the other “white” and that race matters to Twyla: “[I]t was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race” (1). As mentioned earlier, Maggie is described as sandy-colored and black. The girls at the orphanage are characterized as coming from diverse backgrounds. Aside from these early moments in the story, all other characters are rhetorically unraced. Twyla learns that race matters from her mother, Mary, who teaches her that “they [white or black people] never washed their hair and they smelled funny” (1). Although Twyla and Roberta are homeless, they take with them teachings from their respective houses everywhere they venture. They need a space that literally and metaphorically erases the veil imposed by raci(al/st) discourse and reflects the racelessness Morrison creates in her work. They need a home, a place free from race(ism). In the short story, St Bonaventure or St Bonny’s, as the women call it, is that literal and twilight space. Originating from Saint Bonaventure, a very important figure in the Catholic church, the name of the orphanage, like the title of the story, comes upfront and in front of the story and encourages “outsider” thinking. As a theologian and philosopher, Bonaventure’s writings encourage and present the integration of reason 17  On May 1, 2010, PEN World Voices had their annual festival. That year’s festival featured Morrison, Marlene van Niekerk, and K. Anthony Appiah. In that discussion, Morrison says that in “Recitatif” and Paradise, she “was trying to say that’s [race] the least important information you’ve got about a human being. That [race] is the least” (47:00).

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and faith, which made him stand out compared to some of his peers and predecessors. His philosophical and theological ideas and efforts, though, are credited with the union of the Latin and Greek churches, which previously saw themselves as being completely and necessarily separate and different. Morrison’s evocation of Bonaventure at the opening of “Recitatif” invites readers of various backgrounds and ideologies into the twilight space with her, into her home, but not merely as an integrationist. Twyla and Roberta’s affectionate nickname for the St Bonaventure orphanage also invites the reader into the innocent and familiar space of the women’s psyche and connects with Morrison’s Catholicism and own renaming and nickname (born Chloe, she adopted the name of St Anthony of Padua and the nickname Toni upon her conversion). In both instances, the nickname (Bonny and Toni) evokes the feminine while the full name of St Bonaventure (and St Anthony) evokes the masculine. The orphanage then transforms from an orphanage for girls into a home for future women where one enters as “black,” “white,” “Indian,” Hispanic, or Asian (2) and leaves, potentially, as a person belonging to the singular “human race” (Origins 111). Morrison’s creation of twilight to usher home through racelessness is reflected in Twyla and Roberta’s characterization and the orphanage as sites of twilight, rememory, and invisible ink. The opening paragraph reads and Twyla narrates, “[W]e were the only ones assigned to 406 and could go from bed to bed if we wanted to. And we wanted to, too. We changed beds every night and for the whole four months we were there we never picked one out as our own permanent bed” (1). From the beginning, Twyla, whose name means twilight and resonates with the Hebrew Twila, which means light in dark places, and Roberta, whose name is the female form of Robert and means bright and shining with fame, automatically intertwine with their St Bonny aka St Bonaventure, the mobility and freedom associated with not having to choose a “permanent bed” (1), and the freedom and mobility of no longer (e)racing each other or society’s raci(al/st) teachings. They are as free from raci(al/st) strictures and codes as any eight year old can be, though they would not be so without St Bonny’s intervention. According to Twyla’s rememory, the orphanage brings the infinite meanings of their names into fruition and underlines their similarities, too. The hierarchies present at St Bonny’s include “real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky” (2), orphaned children, younger girls (like Twyla and Roberta), and the older “big girls on the second floor” (2). Race does not matter here as the hierarchies are not

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built along raci(al/st) lines, even as Twyla admits that Mary has attempted to encourage and emphasize raci(al/st) differences and beliefs before her stay. The twilight space the orphanage represents increases as the story progresses. For example, when Roberta’s mother shuns Mary, it is unclear if the public shaming is inspired by the mother’s racism, classism, or other prejudices based on gendered respectability politics, and when Roberta muddies Twyla’s idyllic recalling of the orphanage, Twyla’s joy at their reunion instantly fades: Twyla: ‘St. Bonny’s is as clear as daylight. Remember Maggie? The day she fell down and those gar girls laughed at her? …’ Roberta: ‘No, Twyla. They knocked her down. Those girls pushed her down and tore her clothes. In the orchard.’ (10)

Twyla’s rememory of the orphanage is as clear as daylight, according to her, but is made as clear as twilight to the reader. Twyla remembers getting bullied by the older girls and bullying Maggie but, inexplicably, does not remember the details of “What the hell happened to Maggie” (17). Roberta’s rememory of Maggie, like Twyla’s, shifts throughout “Recitatif,” forcing the reader’s memory to shift and revise, too. Roberta’s recollections, her (re)membering, transform Twyla’s memory into moments of rememory. Their dialogue changes not just each other’s perceptions of Maggie but of the paradisiacal orchard Twyla remembers in the beginning and the orphanage that fosters her openness toward Roberta in the first place and themselves and each other, which then changes their present selves, time and time again. Twyla: ‘You ran away from St. Bonny’s?’ … Twyla: ‘Are you sure about Maggie?’ Roberta: ‘Believe me. It happened. And we were there.’ … The Maggie thing was troubling me …. My ears were itching and I wanted to go home suddenly. This was all very well but she couldn’t just comb her hair, wash her face and pretend everything was hunky-dory. After the Howard Johnson’s snub. And no apology. Nothing. (11)

While Twyla remembers St Bonny’s in a mostly naïve and childlike way, Roberta talks about how she ran away from the orphanage when she returned at 14 years old and how “Bozo,” the head of St Bonny’s, was

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fired, indeed marring Twyla’s memory. Twyla abruptly becomes agitated and completely changes the tone, demeanor, and dialogue to years later at a restaurant when Roberta “snubbed” her. Roberta chalks it up to “black-­ white. You know how everything was” (11), but Twyla does not know how everything was because she “thought it was just the opposite” (11), which is ironic since the story opens with Twyla feeling sick to her stomach when she learns that she will “be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race” (1), and so it goes in “Recitatif.” The “opposite” (i.e., invisible ink) comes out in the story’s twilight, leaving Twyla forever changed: “Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie” (12), Morrison writes. Thus, the reader’s twilight is forever altered, too. Roberta’s rememory cannot be believed more than Twyla’s, especially considering Roberta’s apology and confession to adding details like that of Maggie’s “blackness” to hurt Twyla. The two characters that talk the most in the story and whose perspectives the story privileges are unreliable, but their unreliability mirrors the possibilities present in Morrison’s home. Here, Maggie figures as their catalyst for voicing their otherwise unvoiced views on “black-white. You know how everything was” (11). “Racial strife,” the crescendo of the story, directly follows their conversation that ends after their first explicitly expressed raci(al/st) note which a conversation about St Bonny’s and Maggie inspires. Morrison’s use of invisible ink through the gaps created by both silence and voice becomes an integral part of the architecture of her home that the twilight home both requires and inspires. Morrison’s invisible ink necessitates and obviates Twyla’s and Roberta’s searches for home. In the same way that dialogue is central to “Recitatif,” silence is also a source of power in the story, creating a sort of equilibrium between the black words on white paper and Morrison’s invisible ink and furthering the twilight.18 At first, Twyla is “sick to my [her] stomach” (1) when she learns that she must share a room with Roberta. She says, “‘My mother won’t like you putting me in here’” (1), to Mrs Itkin (Bozo) and assumes that “Roberta must have thought I meant that my mother would be mad about my being put in the shelter. Not about rooming with her, because as soon as Bozo left she came over to me and said, ‘Is your mother 18  Other writers during the same decades Morrison writes that use silence in the same way include Gayl Jones (e.g., Corregidora and Eva’s Man), Maxine Hong Kingston (e.g., The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts), and Toni Cade Bambara (e.g., Gorilla, My Love).

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sick too’” (1). Twyla assumes Roberta’s silence about what is a moment of prejudice and disrespect means that Roberta misunderstands and remains unaware of the disrespect and prejudice. Roberta, though, is not unaware since she voices the “black-white” (11) rift later on and snubs Twyla at Howard Johnson based on her belief that “black-white” people should remain separate publicly, at least, during that time. Where Twyla assumes naivety, Roberta demonstrates otherwise. Twyla prefers Roberta’s silence: “So we got along-what with her leaving whole pieces of things on her plate and being nice about no asking questions” (3). She likes “the fact that she didn’t say a word about Mary groaning all the way through the service and not bringing any lunch” (5). In part, it is Roberta’s silence that holds sway over Twyla’s experiences and later her rememory. Roberta does not ask or broach difficult questions until the middle to the end of the story, which is what makes her rememory and Twyla’s rememory so impactful. Even Roberta’s mother’s power is cemented in her silence and symbols, even though she is another seemingly nominal figure. She looks “down” (4) at Mary and Twyla literally: Twyla says, “I looked up it seemed for miles. She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross I’d ever seen …. And in the crook of her arm was the biggest Bible ever made” (4). Then she looks down at Mary and Twyla figuratively. “She didn’t say anything, just grabbed Roberta with her Bible-free hand and stepped out of line” (4), Twyla describes. Although Morrison transitions from being a practicing Catholic to a nonpracticing one during her career as an author, in “A Story of the Body: Toni Morrison” (2020) by Nick Ripatrazone, Morrison describes Christianity as a “theatrical religion. It says something particularly interesting to black people, and I think it’s part of why they were so available to it. It was the love things that were psychically very important. Nobody could have endured that life in constant rage” (120). She says it is transcending love that makes “the New Testament … so pertinent to black literature—the lamb, the victim, the vulnerable one who does die but nevertheless lives” (121). Twyla’s and Roberta’s mothers and Maggie are vulnerable for different and similar reasons and yet each nevertheless lives both in their imaginations and present day, regardless of when the present is, and the reader’s minds. In “Recitatif,” it is this backdrop of Christianity, like St Bonny’s, that informs Roberta’s mother’s size and the size and presence of the cross and Bible in St Bonny’s cathedral and orphanage. Roberta’s mother’s voice, again, is not in the short story and yet is there from beginning to

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end. A woman who is never well and who had “been brought up in an institution” (17), which Roberta translates as meaning she was “crazy” (17), does not have to say anything to completely undo Mary and Twyla, who turns a judgmental eye again toward her own mother after Roberta’s mother’s reactions. With each interaction, Twyla, with foul intentions and sometimes with sincere and heartfelt intentions, asks, “IS YOUR MOTHER WELL” (15) or Roberta offers “And mine, she never got well” (17). Roberta’s mother is simultaneously silent and, like Maggie, looms over the women in the story, unintentionally encouraging their rememory, their twilight, their rebirth, and the reconstruction of their houses into homes. Disability, as silence is often conceived, reads as ability in Morrison’s home, which amplifies her invisible ink. In her twilight, Morrison shifts the story’s years without warning, and, in Twyla’s childhood voice, topics without warning. She creates and encourages confusion between the voices and silence, the various and contradictory rememories, history and fiction, center and peripheral, abled and disabled, and spiritual and physical within the (non)fiction of the story to evoke visceral clarity. “So[,] for the moment it didn’t matter that we [Twyla and Roberta] looked like salt and pepper” (1) because the home Morrison creates becomes a conduit for girls and women bearing their own crosses to exist and be in relationship without heteronormative hierarchies (i.e., race, gender, class, and psychological and physical disabilities). Maggie, the “kitchen woman with legs like parentheses” (2), “rocked when she walked” (2) and “wore this really stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with ear flaps—and she wasn’t much taller than we were” (2). A foil for Roberta’s mother in some ways, like her mother, Maggie is silent. According to Twyla, Maggie “couldn’t talk” (2). She is “mute” (2). Her stature (her shortness and leg shape) and childlike hat stand in contrast to Roberta’s mother’s big stature and enormous Bible and cross. Whereas the Bible and cross are stand-ins for Roberta’s mother, Maggie’s legs, hat, and outright and consistent silence symbolize her and her significance and signification. If race is a non-signifier, Twyla’s and Roberta’s attempts to race Maggie and weaponize Maggie’s race signify the problematic conceptualization, utilization, and interconnectedness of race(ism). Morrison’s invisible ink signifies Twyla and Roberta’s need for twilight and rememory to (re)design their houses into homes. Twyla and Roberta (e)race and unrace Maggie through their rememories but the more they insist on erasing her, the larger she grows. Roberta says, “‘Dummy!

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Dummy!’ She [Maggie] never turned her head. ‘Bow legs! Bow legs!’ Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby-boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn’t let on” (3). An echo of when Roberta does not let on to Twyla that she likely understands the implications of Twyla’s greeting, but Twyla assumes Roberta misunderstands because of her silence, both girls assume that Maggie cannot talk, scream, or hear because she chooses not to talk, scream, or listen. In fact, Roberta “couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher” (1), so she fails most of her classes, but while Twyla sees Roberta’s not listening as a choice, both girls, at least through Twyla’s perspective, see Maggie’s muteness as a disability, a glaring difference, and something she was likely born with. Maggie’s physical and aural differences make her stand out in ways for the girls that is reminiscent of how differences in a person’s skin color stand out and get graded, categorized, dominated, or dominate. Twyla supplants her raci(al/st) notions onto Maggie as prejudice toward potential physical and psychological disabilities, but Maggie transforms the so-­ called master narrative(s) (here, Twyla’s and Roberta’s) by constantly shifting from being dominated to dominating without speaking a word.19 The open-ended ending of “Recitatif” suggests that the constant shifting and balancing, the constant equilibrium, is important to Morrison’s home. The reader cannot permanently pin down or decode the text or its characters in the same way that Twyla and Roberta cannot decide or (re)member what happens. In “Recitatif,” twilight, invisible ink, and rememory, largely through Maggie’s characterization and the homelessness of Twyla and Roberta, necessitate and make possible their (re)designing of their restrictive houses into homes, embodiments of freedom from raci(al/st) hierarchy and dominance. Although “[n]othing really happened there [St Bonny’s]. Nothing all that important, I [Twyla] mean” (2), Twyla and Roberta’s houses were under construction at the orphanage where everything important occurred. Maggie’s (e)racing and unracing remain unengaged by critics and both underscore Morrison’s imagining of home as necessarily raceless, which is different from the “interracial humanist connection” (90), Benjamin proffers. Maggie reflects both the women’s mothers and them, 19  In her review of Origins, Nell Irvin Painter points out that “Othering as a means of control is not just the practice of white people in the US, for every group perfects its self-­ regard through exclusion” (2017).

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which is why her fate and their role in it strikes fear and despair into both women’s hearts. Maggie was raised in an “institution,” like Roberta’s mother, and her presumed madness invokes the madness of the girls. They taunt her and abuse her while at the orphanage and then attempt to rehumanize her and themselves in recounting the incident. The reader will never know, just as Twyla and Roberta do not, “[w]hat the hell happened to Maggie” (17) but can infer that whatever happened to Maggie rests somewhere in the twilight of what the protagonists say happened over the course of “Recitatif.” What is clear, however, is that the mothers’ and Maggie’s experiences and their treatments of each of these women and how they (re)member them is central to redesigning their houses given them by society, by family, by community. These houses include race and also gender, disability, and class. As disparate as their experiences are—Twyla’s orphanage is mostly idyllic whereas Roberta runs away from the orphanage and one marries into money as the other is more working class, and so on—the female characters in the story essentially force Roberta and Twyla to (re)member and (re)envision their histories, (re)cognize their similarities, and (re)forge their union “behaving like sisters separated for much too long. Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed” (9). Through the figures of St Bonaventure, Maggie, Roberta’s mother, Mary, and each other, Twyla and Roberta are (re)born from apple trees “[e]mpty and crooked like beggar women when I [Twyla] first came to St. Bonny’s but fat with flowers when I left” (2). They blossom from girls and young women who do not ask questions and believe what needs to be believed into women who ask questions, difficult questions. They begin to (re) build their homes. At the start of “Recitatif,” Morrison shifts the focus from raci(al/st) categorizations of the girls to opening the door to an outside space where one can examine and see more clearly the madness race and other hierarchies create and encourage distinguishing this from the madness created by upholding hierarchies. The story ends in metaphorical racelessness and with the least important thing being race. Morrison’s twilight, a prominent feature of her home, is not a creolization or hybridization of her texts or characters, like the critics discussed above tend to interpret, nor is it a space whose function is to highlight both sides of the binary and the in-­ between (i.e., interracial or integrated possibilities). These types of

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analyses simplify the potential her texts imagine, engage, and encourage. There can be no “interracial” anything if there is only one human race, which Morrison writes in Origins and says repeatedly in interviews. Home, according to Morrison, is not idyllic or utopic in the traditional sense and, therefore, neither is “paradise.” Home and paradise (sometimes home is paradise) are made relative much in the same way that meaning is relative in Morrison’s work. In Paradise, consolation, twilight, and maternal energy function as the prerequisite for racelessness and the subsequent freedom racelessness ushers in the texts. For Morrison, patriarchy becomes white supremacy repackaged, and where patriarchy exists in place of white supremacy, freedom and home do not. The “houses” of gender, matriarchy, and patriarchy, in Paradise, function as highlighting when difference necessitates or inspires dominance. Patriarchy becomes confused and interchangeable with racism and white supremacy, rendering the race of the Convent women invisible and unknown and that much more dangerous to the town of Ruby. It is not just that the women live and thrive without men after their respective twilights but that they also live without regard for the hierarchies of skin color or race, which are deliberately demarcated within Ruby, reflected in Ruby. Like the orphans in “Recitatif” and Milkman in Song, all of the Convent women seek solace, freedom, home, and, also, like Milkman, they need to go anywhere but here. The characters are disconsolate because of the architecture of race and racism and gender and sexism. Morrison redesigns both houses into a home (i.e., the Convent) by (re)constructing a space in which the women can exist without domination caused by racism or sexism. In this story, Consolata is the gatekeeper to home. Thus, as with the gatekeepers in the other stories (i.e., Circe and Maggie), it is because of Consolata that the reader is able to recognize the twilight, through the madness, and read the invisible ink to, ultimately, (re)design their own houses and enter Morrison’s homes freely, as they are also always free to leave. Paradise—first titled War—solicits rounder critical discussions, some focused on race and some not. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Louis Menan, and Michiko Kakutani view the novel as focused on the dichotomy of gender. Similarly, in “‘Sisters Separated for Much Too Long:’ Women’s Friendship and Power in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’” (2013), Susana Morris says that Paradise “features a multiracial cadre of women whose friendships powerfully transform their lives and are so threatening to the repressive community of their town that the women are subsequently murdered” (159).

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While analyzing “Recitatif’s” treatment of women’s friendships, Morris asserts that many critics “focus on Morrison’s project of upsetting and undermining racial stereotypes” (emphasis added, 159–60). Her labeling of Morrison’s project thereby reflects a lengthy history of so-called black art, and African American literature, in particular, being assumed to fight raci(al/st) injustices in such ways, to protest. Yet, in “Race Matters,” Morrison says that one of her current projects is to “first enunciate and then destabilize the racial gaze altogether in Paradise” (Source 137), which is not the same as simply upsetting and undermining raci(al/st) stereotypes. Other critics analyze the book’s theme of motherhood. Many critics interpret the novel as a historical revision and Morrison’s commentary regarding nationalism and race. Others consider the utopic implications of Paradise. In “Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” (2002), Linda Krumholz writes, “What happens if difference is rejected in order to maintain the utopian harmony of paradise? … an unchanging Paradise inevitably loses its paradisiacal nature” (21). Like Krumholz, some critics agree that utopia, according to Morrison’s book and otherwise, does not and cannot exist. However, Annamarie Christiansen believes that the writer “translates paradise from a universalized concept that transcends race, class, nation, and gender toward a smaller, more local, and more ‘manageable’ version” (276). Critics such as Richard Schur and Christiansen theorize Morrison’s engagement with critical race theory. Christiansen argues that “In Paradise, Morrison portrays how African Americans have houses, but not homes …. Paradise thus testifies to the difficulties of building a real home within the racialized soil of the US” (277). In other words, there is no home, much less utopic, in the US for African Americans. Or, at the least, it is that much more challenging for African Americans to build literal or figurative homes in the US. Morrison’s success regarding her proclaimed intent is, of course, subjective since just as “The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion” (Source 152), neither will her texts have the effect she intends simply because she says. By analyzing how Morrison successfully or unsuccessfully (re)builds houses into homes, in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and now Paradise, critics move closer to the “ultimate liberation theory” (132), imagining its practice and doing its work just as Morrison dreamt and strived. For Morrison, the liberation theory is one that has to be imagined and employed and that would free all people from the constrictions and imprisonment of America’s

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racial/st house. Paradise takes readers closer to a potential liberation theory, closer to home. The structure of the novel mirrors the maternal energy required to usher racelessless and freedom (i.e., home) within the story and the inversion of patriarchy into matriarchy that the Convent and its influence comes to represent. The novel has nine chapters that are named after nine women: Ruby, Mavis, Grace (also known as Gigi), Seneca, Divine (also known as Pallas), Patricia, Consolata (also known as Connie), Lone, and Save-Marie. Except Ruby and Save-Marie, each section tells part of the namesake’s history and present day, taking place during the mid-1960s until 1976, and includes passages regarding other characters so that each woman’s or child’s (Save-Marie) history is built on, within, and outside of other people’s histories.20 The women, from the outset, are an integral part of Paradise, paradise, and, in turn, home. Aptly titled, the opening chapter tells part of the town of Ruby’s history and of some men from Ruby hunting and murdering women in the Convent (Mavis, Grace, Seneca, Pallas, and Consolata). As a novel whose “conflicts are gender-related and generational” (xvi), the irony of the town of Ruby’s name comes from Ruby, Oklahoma, being founded, controlled, and owned by men, which then foreshadows most of the novel’s conflict.21 In life, Ruby is Ruby Morgan, sister to twins Steward and Deacon “Deek” Morgan. She dies when she is refused medical attention because of her race. The town is then founded in 1949 by “pure blooded” black families with dark complexions because of their history of being excluded from other “black” towns that preferred “black” people with fair complexions. Of the 15 founding families, the reader learns in Patricia’s chapter that only nine are considered “racially pure” but that number dwindles to seven for reasons Patricia does not understand.22 Deek and Steward ascend to unquestioned power in Ruby because their father founded a bank, so they have the most property and money. The Convent is 17 miles away from Ruby. An embezzler built the mansion in the shape of a gun cartridge and was arrested and taken away shortly after living there, so Catholic nuns took over the property in mostly Protestant Oklahoma.  Some passages share the history dating back to the late 1800s, too.  The town’s first name was New Haven but seeking to completely disconnect itself from Haven, Oklahoma, the place the families leave because of colorism and racism, it is renamed Ruby after Ruby passes. 22  In Paradise, people with darker complexions are known as “8-rock” referring to the color of the earth eight layers deep. 20 21

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Over the years, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas, and Menus seek solace at the Convent while Connie and Mary still live. The Convent is transformed by Connie and Mary’s maternal energy, inhabiting and creating of twilight space, and innate ability to console its inhabitants and visitors, collapsing any raci(al/st) and gender hierarchies that otherwise exist in Ruby and the places from which its dwellers arrive. All of the Convent women seek consolation and maternal energy. Like the characters in Song of Solomon and “Recitatif,” they need a twilight space to foster both and reconstruct their restrictive houses into homes. Further, like the orphans in “Recitatif,” the women are “put-out girls, scared runaways most of them. Poor little girls who fought their uncles off” (“Recitatif” 2) and “detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room after being swept out the door” (Paradise 4). Like Milkman, they need to go anywhere but here. Their reasons for finding and staying at the Convent enlighten how and why they need both consolation and maternal energy. Additionally, their stories illustrate how they might benefit from the twilight space of the Convent and why Connie becomes such a significant figure. Mavis arrives first. She leaves her large family behind after her twin infants—Merle and Pearl—die in her car while she goes grocery shopping. It is unclear if she kills the babies on purpose in a reverberation of Sethe’s killing her child or if it is genuinely accidental. She finds the Convent by accident when her car runs out of gas on her way to California. She comes and goes freely, eventually staying permanently when she learns that there is a warrant out for her arrest. According to Mavis, Merle and Pearl live at the Convent with her in a sort of perpetual childhood. She fights constantly with Gigi. Gigi finds the Convent second. She is young, beautiful, and free-­ spirited. She walks around the Convent naked and does not care if anyone objects. She has a two-year affair with KD that ends badly and with KD hating the Convent and its occupants even more. Seneca is abandoned as a child and has lived in many foster homes. Her abusive boyfriend’s mother persuades her to leave him when he goes to prison. The boyfriend expects her to wait for him and get money for him for as long as he is in prison. Unlike Gigi, she is not free-spirited or confident. She cuts herself and has countless scars to prove it. She is Gigi’s roommate at the Convent. Seneca and Gigi’s relationship remains ambivalent. At times, it seems as though they have a romantic relationship. Regardless of the type of relationship, Gigi and Seneca are foils of each other and, as such, help heal each other. Mavis, Gigi, and Seneca flee their differently oppressive lives and seek

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consolation and maternal energy at the Convent. They each find both through the twilight space the Convent provides where race and color are absent, except for in the opening of the novel when, through the eyes of Ruby’s men, “They shoot the white girl first” (1). As with “Recitatif,” the reader is not privy to whether Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas, or Connie is the “white girl.” Morrison, through the story, delays, if not altogether prevents, any of the women from being raced and, subsequently, (e)raced. They are home.23 In addition to Mavis, Gigi, and Seneca, Pallas and Connie seek and, also, create consolation, maternal energy, and twilight. Pallas is a 16-year-­ old girl from a wealthy family. She runs away from her father’s house with her older lover Carlos who drives her to her mother’s house. There, she catches Carlos and her mother having sex and runs away, again, while always leading her father to think that she is coming “home” any moment. Billie Delia (a woman from Ruby) brings Pallas to the Convent when she finds her in disarray on the streets. Gigi gives Pallas the nickname Divine, which is Pallas’ mother’s name. Consolata is orphaned at an early age in another country and lives in destitution. Mary saves her by kidnapping her (mirroring Lone DuPres’ experience), taking her to the US, and raising her. After Connie’s affair with Deek, she turns wholeheartedly to traditional Catholicism but learns she has otherworldly types of powers under Lone’s guidance. Connie can enter a person’s body, like a small light, and make their light burn brighter, bringing them back to life. She does this for one of Soane’s sons and for Mary Magna, whom she has a difficult time letting die. While Lone delivers everyone in the town as a midwife, Connie delivers the people that come to the Convent seeking consolation, seeking her, seeking home. In addition to Lone, she plays the most crucial role in the novel, fostering the twilight space needed to construct a home without hierarchy and creating the maternal energy and consolation the other women need to transform and build their own homes. The women all 23  The characters sense that they are home when they can leave but choose to stay even when staying necessitates painful interactions and (re)memory. They define home as a space (physical, spiritual, and intellectual) from which they do not need to flee just to be anywhere else and to which they often return willingly. The characters who successfully (re)create home spaces, in Morrison’s texts, choose to stay in the twilight that then enables them to truly grapple with trauma and imprisonment and (re)member and (re)imagine themselves before and after the imposition of hierarchies. Mobility transitions from being a restrictive necessity to fortuity.

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experience a type of catabasis, like Milkman, that leads them to their freedom despite their apparent deaths. The men who murder Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas, and Connie include Deek, Steward, KD, Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood, Menus, Wisdom Poole, Sargeant Person, and Harper Jury. The novel ends with the women’s dead bodies vanishing, an open window or door at the Convent that leads somewhere but hangs in space, the women appearing to people from their pasts as alive beings and being alive, and Consolata in “Paradise” (318) waiting for more “disconsolate” (318) people to arrive. The women are home and free, unable to be controlled by anyone or any structure (i.e., racism, sexism, or classism). The Convent still offers visitors and readers optional entrance into twilight and home (i.e., metaphorical and literal). Connie’s power, her maternal energy, ability to provide consolation, and conjuring of twilight, transcends any physical structure of home or house. She is in “Paradise” waiting to help disconsolate readers find and feel home, and just as Paradise begins with a raced “white girl,” it ends with an unraced person who is neither (e)raced nor erased. Like Circe, Morrison implies that Connie and the other Convent women will live forever in their respective homes, which might be their reward—the liberatory theory. Morrison’s characters are disconsolate not just because of the architecture of race(ism) but also that of gender and sexism, which are race and racism repackaged. While some scholars agree that gender and race are different in significant ways, these concepts and the common strategies formed to resist and combat them are also very similar and intertwined in important ways that lend to this chapter’s analysis of Paradise. Dealt with to lesser extents in “Recitatif” and Song of Solomon, Paradise is about both the war created between the houses of race (colorism, by extension) and gender and the attempts to redesign the racist and sexist houses of the US. For Morrison, raci(al/st) hierarchy means dominance because of difference, and she consistently resists the “wearying vocabulary of racial domination, [so] the narrative seeks to unencumber itself from the limit that racial language imposes on the imagination” (xvi). Instead, she willingly replaces raci(al/st) language with what she calls gendered and generational language and discourse, which this chapter argues become transposable with the raci(al/st) language she seeks to “manipulate, mutate, and control” (xv). Historically, the raci(al/st) practices produced and perpetuated by suffragists that influenced and informed feminist discourse get excused, erased, masked, or shifted to encourage and increase women’s participation. However, the gendered practices of feminists

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create and reify further divisions within African American communities (i.e., pitting men versus women), like that of Ruby and the Convent, which help prevent further progress within and without the community. According to Morrison’s texts, one cannot find home, freedom, or consolation within the architecture of Western gender and patriarchy since “patriarchy” is “white” supremacy repackaged, which, at its core, is racism repackaged. The na(rra)tion building of feminists has always been and continues to be connected to racism and, therefore, cannot offer the liberation many women seek, as illustrated in Morrison’s Paradise. This is why Morrison’s women and girls are most frequently going anywhere else but here and searching for “home.” It is the architecture of race(ism) and gender/sexism that propels them to seek consolation and encourages men, like the Morgans, to try creating a Paradise, a town built on exclusions with women with darker skin that they can control since “neither one [Deek or Steweard] put up with what he couldn’t control” (278–9). Further, gendered discourse, a remnant of colonial and imperial Western discourse as it is solidly intertwined with the discourse of “white” supremacy and hierarchy, does not and cannot offer women a framework for resistance either, which is why the Convent women “must” be murdered and are destined to inhabit the twilight space between life and death, literally and metaphorically. One hierarchy replacing another hierarchy does not a home make, according to Morrison. Lastly, if the interrogation and undoing of gendered lenses present women with liberatory practices, here, I argue that Paradise illustrates that women should not embrace feminism (hyphenated or otherwise) as a strategy for resistance since there is “all of this struggle, chaos, and unbreakable conflict caused by power distribution within classifications of race and gender” (Origin 73). According to Morrison, concepts of gender and the strategies and ideologies of feminism continue to divide Americans rather than liberate them, as evidenced in Paradise aka War. Morrison’s characters rebuild and redesign both houses of race—racism—and gender—sexism—and the strategies of resistance these houses denote—racelessness and matriarchy or maternal energy, at least, which often gets conflated with feminism. Like Circe and her house turned home, the women come to “own” the Convent by happenstance. Mary and Connie live there as nuns when it is an actual convent and then proceed to convene there, allowing other women to stay, too. First, though, an “embezzler” (3) built and designed the mansion that has also been

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redesigned by the nuns and further (re)redesigned by the women that convene there. Morrison writes, Then there is the grandeur …. A mansion where bisque and rose-tone marble floors [that] segue into teak ones. Isinglass holds yesterday’s light and patterns walls that were stripped and whitewashed fifty years ago. The ornate bathroom fixtures, which sickened the nuns, were replaced with good plain spigots, but the princely tubs and sinks, which could not be inexpensively removed, remain coolly corrupt. The embezzler’s joy that could be demolished was, particularly in the dining room, which the nuns converted to a schoolroom, where stilled Arapaho girls once sat and learned to forget. (3–4)

Just as Circe is bent on ensuring that what the Butlers stole and died for is completely destroyed, the nuns are described as demolishing the embezzler’s joy. The strains of American capitalism and classism resound in Paradise as things that must be dismantled and destroyed, redesigned, too. The third-person, subjective narrator continues mostly sharing the men’s perspectives, describing the kitchen as “bigger than the house in which either man [unclear] was born” (5) and having “no windows” (5). There are eight bedrooms. Seneca and Gigi share a room and sleep in hammocks “not in a bed, like normal people” (7). One room is a nursery for a mystery baby. The other rooms, according to the men, are “normal” (8). Still, one man “knows this place is diseased” (8). It is (dis)eased because it has been (re)redesigned in such a way that hierarchy does not exist, which lends to the madness of the place (disease and disorder) and the madness of the men (anger and [dis]ease). Anything that cannot be easily read, understood, and thereby controlled puts those closed off to alternative ways of being and seeing at (dis)ease: “Yet here [Convent], not twenty miles away from a quiet, and orderly community, there were women like none he knew or ever heard of” (emphasis added 8), thinks one man from Ruby while he hunts the remaining Convent women. He thinks that every person in Ruby is “free and protected” (8) and that a “sleepless woman would always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight …. Nothing for ninety miles around thought she was prey …. On out, beyond the limits of town, because nothing at the edge thought she was prey” (9). This same man “does not want to see himself stalking females or their liquid” (9). Thus, he, whoever he is, recognizes his hypocrisy but justifies his actions as further protecting that

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metaphorical “sleepless woman.” Really, he protects himself and his image of himself by erasing and killing off the stranger, the foreigner, the other. The Ruby men, in a way, reflect the embezzler’s paranoia. The embezzler fears getting caught, so he builds a fortress of a mansion. The men from Ruby fear the town being (re)redesigned by women like those at the Convent to exclude them, again, and invert the hierarchy. They internalize the racism and colorism they experience outside of Ruby so that racism and colorism shift to be sexism and patriarchy within Ruby. To prevent any interruption of the repurposed hierarchy, they murder the women and what the Convent comes to represent (i.e., the inversion of patriarchy into matriarchy, a place where women do not need men). They avoid the twilight of Morrison’s homes by all means necessary. Just as Morrison uses similar Gothic conventions in describing Circe’s house and the Convent, Circe’s and Consolata’s roles as the sort of gatekeepers to home via twilight and maternal energy are similar. Like Circe, Connie’s chapter is short compared to the entirety of the novel, but her role lives throughout the novel and even after closing the book where she is the only main character left in a place called Paradise, which is a littoral space for “crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time” (318). Connie’s presence at the arrival of such travelers, like a type of messiah, provides some consolation considering her function is written in her name and deeds. In the section named after her, ironically, the narrator introduces Consolata as a lover of alcohol and waiter for death. She lives in darkness and dankness “in a space tight enough for a coffin, already devoted to the dark, long removed from appetites, craving only oblivion, she struggled to understand the delay” (221). The space sounds like both a coffin and a womb. She spends time in the wine cellar of the mansion waiting to die only “[s]everal times a week, at night or in the shadowy part of the day, she rose aboveground. Then she would stand outside in the garden, walk around, look up at the sky to see the only light it had that she could bear” (221). Like Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas, Consolata seeks consolation, twilight, and maternal energy. Only, unlike them, she must find each within herself. She must (re)construct her physical body and mind to be free, to find home, and to lead others home. Morrison writes, “[o]n her [Connie’s] worst days, when the maw of depression soiled the clean darkness, she wanted to kill them all. Maybe that was what her slug life was being prolonged for” (223). In fact, her life is prolonged because she is meant to rebirth the women, to heal them, to take them home.

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With help, Connie (re)births herself and starts to inhabit the twilight. Consolata’s delivery of Mary Magna immediately after her expressed desire to kill the other women foreshadows her future transformation as deliverer, as does her friendship with Lone, the midwife who delivers everyone or used to anyway. Consolata embraces Mary in her last moments: On that last day, Consolata had climbed into the bed behind her and, tossing the pillows on the floor, raised up the feathery body and held it in her arms and between her legs. The small white head nestled between Consolata’s breasts, and so the lady had entered death like a birthing, rocked and prayed for by the woman she had kidnapped as a child. (223)

In many ways, Mary delivers Connie, who is nine, from a life of destitution when she kidnaps her in 1925 in Portugal or another South or Central American country.24 Yet, the delivery is not just spiritual or religious; it is maternal. Consolata worships Mary and has a hard time letting her die when it is her time. Mary is the only semblance of home Connie has experienced besides her former love of Deek (also known as living man). When she meets Deek, she imagines home elsewhere for the first time in 30 years: “She would live in the field if she had to, or, better, in the fire-ruined house that had become her mind’s home” (233), she thinks. Like Hagar and Ruth in Song of Solomon, Connie thinks she has found home in a man but learns the hard way, as do the other women at the Convent, that one’s home cannot be a man. She repents, saying, “‘Dear Lord, I didn’t want to eat him. I just wanted to go home’” (240). At the Convent with Mary, Connie does not experience the raci(al/st) house in the ways many residents of Ruby and the other women at the Convent do.25 Additionally, aside from her interactions with Deek, which hurt her to the core, she does not know the gendered and patriarchal house of the US either. Ultimately, her position of seeing and being in-between worlds reflects in her language and eyesight:

24  Morrison writes, “They were six American nuns on their way back to the States after twelve years of being upstaged by older sterner Portuguese Orders” (223). Further, they travel to Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, so Consolata’s country of birth is located somewhere in that region. 25  The Indian girls who live at the Convent when Connie is there all run away and stay away. The irony is there for the reader to recognize but not Connie.

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The first to go were the rudiments of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in-between place, the valley between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second. The next thing to disappear was embarrassment. Finally she lost the ability to bear light. (242)

Additionally, she undergoes menopause or “[c]hange, I expect” (243), says Lone, when Connie passes out before their first meeting. For women, menopause reflects a shift from being a young woman capable of bearing children to a woman no longer capable of bearing children and who is closer to death and maleness, perhaps. She is literally and metaphorically the “outside woman” (279) that Deek and the other men from Ruby fear and want to blot out. It is in her state of twilight that she is “tricked into raising the dead” (242). Lone is for Connie what Connie transforms into for the other women: a simultaneously sisterly and motherly figure. Lone “practices” (244) what Consolata calls “magic” (244) and “witchcraft” (247) and what Milkman and the men from Ruby call witchcraft. Pilate and Circe’s connections to witchcraft correlate with Lone and what will be Connie’s “magic.” This is significant because the women who deliver children or deliver adults and who are capable of being both alive and dead at the same time, the people who reconstruct houses into homes and can fly, ironically, and help others take flight, in Morrison’s oeuvre are, in fact, “witches.”26 Connie’s first use of her powers happens when Scout Morgan dies in a car accident near the Convent and Lone, who senses the accident, brings her to the scene to save Scout. Lone says that she is too old to do what needs to be done and tells Connie to “‘[g]o inside him. Wake him up.’ ‘Inside? How?’ ‘Step in. Just step on in. Help him, girl’” (245). Consolata looks at the body with her weak eyesight and steps in: “Inside the boy she saw a pinpoint of light receding. Pulling up energy that felt like fear, she stared at it until it widened” (245) and with that, she brings Scout back to life. At first, she fears her gift, as Lone calls it, and sees it as something separate from God, but Lone, her elder, teaches her that God creates everything, so there is no sense in separating God from His work. Shortly after Consolata steps into Scout, she steps into Mary to save her life because she cannot let go of her 26  The men search for “witch tracks” (4) as they hunt the women. This chapter’s use of witch and witchcraft seeks to separate the stigma, as does Morrison, attached to witches and witchcraft, leaving the meaning to be: “A woman who has the power to influence the course of events by using mysterious forces.”

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mother yet. When she finally lets Mary pass away, she “was orphaned” (247) at 54 years old. She begins to theorize that her fear and attempts to deny witchcraft because of her faith and religion were “a question of language” (247). Morrison’s homes frequently require the homeowner’s reconstruction of language: Lone called it ‘stepping in.’ Consolata said it was ‘seeing in.’ Thus the gift was ‘in sight.’ Something God made free to anyone who wanted to develop it. It was devious but it settled the argument between herself and Lone and made it possible for her to accept Lone’s remedies for all sorts of ills and to experiment with others while the “in sight” blazed away. The dimmer the visible world, the more dazzling her ‘in sight’ became. (247)

It is only after Consolata reconstructs her house regarding language as it relates to religion and after Mary dies that she begins to more fully accept her other way of being and seeing and recognize her purpose in life other than being Mary’s caretaker. “Her colorless eyes saw nothing clearly except what took place in the minds of others” (emphasis added 248), Morrison writes. Although she is nearly blind, she sees more than everyone else. Soon, she will help the other Convent women see and be differently, thereby helping them reconstruct their houses into homes. First, Connie must (re)deliver herself or be delivered by someone else. She has to channel Lone’s maternal energy to shape and inform her own. Immediately following Mary’s death and Connie’s own subsequent wishes for death, she beseeches Christ to return into her life. There is a literal twilight outside—“the sky, in plumage now, gold and blue-green, strutting like requited love on the horizon” (251)—as she falls asleep longing for “the good death” (251), and the “skylight wavered” (251). At that time, she is not fully in touch with her purpose, her powers, or her home but the wavering twilight sky foreshadows transformative change. In the next paragraph, a man who resembles Deek, Christ, and herself appears to Connie while she sits on the porch. She feels “light, weightless, as though she could move, if she wanted to, without standing up” (252). Probably, she feels like she can walk on water. His “tea-colored hair” cascades down his back. He wears sunglasses like hers and has eyes that are “round and green as new apples” (252) like hers. His cowboy outfit and flirtatious attitude resemble Deek’s during her affair with Deek. His ability to move without moving, his long hair, his familiarity with her, and his effect on her each signal Christ.

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Consolata needs to be delivered from all three of these figures, which is why they appear to her as one. Firstly, she holds herself back the most, as do some characters and people, for that matter. Next, her memories of Deek and how things ended haunt her and keep her emotionally incarcerated. Lastly, her attempts to live by the strictest codes of Catholicism, by Christ, prevent her from better accepting her gifts and recognizing her abilities and purpose. His/Her visit to Connie inspires her to rise out of the dark cellar, reborn, to “teach you [Mavis, Gigi, Pallas, and Seneca] what you are hungry for” (262). She is ready to transform into the gatekeeper Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas need. The girls and women at the Convent need to be (re)delivered, (re) birthed, as does everyone who visits the Convent.27 This is a necessary part of Morrison’s fictional maternal energy (i.e., redelivery and rebirthing). After Consolata’s (re)birth, “they do not recognize” (262) her: She has the features of dear Connie, but they are sculpted somehow—higher cheekbones, stronger chin. Had her eyebrows always been that thick, her teeth that pearly white? Her hair shows no gray. Her skin is smooth as a peach. Why is she talking that way? And what is she talking about? They wonder. (262)

Not quite as old as Circe, Consolata’s description here differs drastically from earlier descriptions and from Circe’s appearance. Rather than looking as old as death, Connie’s transformation and discovery of her home makes her look younger, wiser, stronger, and more beautiful. The women choose to stay under her authority because “in no time at all they came to see that they could not leave the one place they were free to leave” (262). Their drift is caused by their metaphorical imprisonment that always encourages them to flee to anywhere else but here, like the raci(al/st) house Morrison says she is forced into in her essay “Home.” However, the Convent comes to represent a place they have the freedom to leave, so they stay. Their liberation begins with their descent into the dark, dank 27  Soane needs (re)birthing from her communication-void marriage with Deek. Lone needs (re)birthing from her loneliness that is, ultimately, created by her difference from the other residents of Ruby. She finds solace in Connie’s friendship. Menus needs (re)delivery from alcoholism and his lack of power and voice that pushes him to drink. Deek and the other murderous men need (re)delivery from their fear of so-called strangers and inability to see and be a different way found in the twilight zone.

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cellar. They scrub the floors and place a circle of candles around the room. They “undress and lie down” (263) however they want. Consolata outlines their bodies in paint and instructs them to “remain there. Unspeaking. Naked in candlelight” (263). Like dead bodies outlined in chalk foreshadowing, perhaps, the law entering the Convent to investigate their murders, the women are “reluctant to move outside the mold they had chosen” (263). Their bodies and the painted silhouettes represent the houses from which they run. Ironically, the women cannot run from themselves, their bodies, so it is not until they liberate their physical selves from the physical and metaphorical molds that they can truly (re)construct and (re)design their houses both physically and metaphorically. Then Connie says, “‘My flesh is so hungry for itself it ate him ….Hear me, listen. Never break them in two [the spirit and bones/flesh]. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve’” (263). It is within this spiritual, emotional, and physical space of wholeness, in-betweenness, bothness, that the women enter twilight with Consolata’s guidance. Together, they participate in (re)memory, therefore (re)membering their bodies, together as [h]alf-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above guttering candles, shifting dust from crates and bottles And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale …. Life, real and intense, shifted to down there in limited pools of light, in air smoky from kerosene lamps and candle wax. The templates drew them like magnets. (264)

In (re)membering their bodies in this way, the women free themselves to paint and color the outlines of their bodies, changing them from simple silhouettes to complex and enriched beings that reflect their pains and triumphs in a single image, so “seductive were the alive ones below” (265) that they “had to be reminded of the moving bodies they wore” (265). They (re)constructed their own bodies and spirits, metaphorical representations of their physical bodies. Rememory and remembering in the twilight space of the cellar function as prerequisites for the women’s liberation and discovery of home, their own Paradise. The air of the house, according to a neighbor (probably Lone), would feel “foreign” (265). “Then she might realize what was

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missing: unlike some people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted. Or hunted either, she might have added. But there she would have been wrong” (266), Morrison writes. Consolata becomes their midwife in the sense that she is there to assist and guide them in their (re) births as both the mother giving birth and the child being born. At the end of her chapter, the women find their homes. Of course, their homes are so foreign that the representativeness of their freedom (including the paintings) gets misread by the men as sexualizing infants and other misdeeds. Ultimately, the twilight zone found at the Convent and between the covers, the racelessness, rememory, twilight, invisible ink, and madness, ends when the men come: “Sunlight is yearning for brilliance when the men arrive. The stonewashed blue of the sky is hard to break, but by the time the men park … the sun has cracked through. Glorious blue” (285), says the narrator. Yet, the “day has just begun” (3), as the novel opens. In ways unclear, the women—their bodies and all—live, dead or alive. And Consolata is in Paradise, a littoral space. She is home, one which she created for herself of the raced and gendered houses that were handed to her. Ultimately, home, which is synonymous with freedom in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise, is a world in which race exists without hierarchy. And home, an embodiment of such freedom, cannot exist long term, in these texts, as long as race exists. As outlined in this chapter, Morrison’s home is a space where race(ism) does not exist or where race exists without domination, whereas houses are spaces where race and racism coincide (i.e., race[ism]). Through her work, Morrison explores race(ism)lessness and inspires readers to journey with her. There are six characteristics of Morrison’s home: rememory, maternal energy, invisible ink, twilight, madness, and consolation. These characteristics facilitate racelessness or race without hierarchy and Morrison’s subsequent revisioning of houses into home. Twilight, madness, rememory, and maternal energy blend in Chapter 10 of Song of Solomon through Circe’s characterization to aid in Milkman’s liberative transformation. While Morrison’s later (re)designing of houses into homes comes, in large part, by writing “Recitatif” and much of Paradise without race, home in Song of Solomon appears more through hints of racelessness. Twilight, invisible ink, and rememory blend in “Recitatif” through the characterization of Maggie to ultimately aid in Twyla’s and Roberta’s potentially liberative transformations. Unlike in Song of Solomon, most of the characters in “Recitatif” are unraced, which combined with twilight, invisible ink, and rememory

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facilitates racelessness and home (i.e., liberation from hierarchies). In the end, the sustained racelessness of Twyla, Roberta, and the other characters is required for any character to achieve, (re)create, or find home (i.e., freedom). In Paradise, consolation, twilight, and maternal energy function as the prerequisite for racelessness and the subsequent freedom racelessness ushers in the text. For Morrison, patriarchy becomes white supremacy repackaged, and where patriarchy exists in place of white supremacy, freedom and home do not. The “houses” of gender, matriarchy, and patriarchy, in Paradise, function as highlighting when difference necessitates or inspires dominance. As in the other stories, difference with dominance is the antithesis to freedom. In her Foreword to Paradise, Morrison writes, I was eager to manipulate, mutate and control imagistic, metaphoric language in order to produce something that could be called race-specific/ race-free prose, language that deactivated the power of racially inflected strategies—transform them from the straitjacket a race-conscious society can, and frequently does, buckle us into—a refusal to ‘know’ characters or people by the color of their skin. One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought is that it never produces new knowledge. It seems able to merely reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but static assertions. It has no referent in the material world, like the concept of black blood or white blood or blue blood, it is designed to construct artificial borders and maintain them against all reason and all evidence to the contrary. And while racist thought and language have an almost unmitigated force in political and social life, the realm of racial difference has been allowed an intellectual weight to which it has no claim. It is truly a realm that is no realm at all—an all-consuming vacancy that is both common and strange. (xv–xvi)

There is hope, though, for American society to join Circe, Maggie, and Connie because Paradise ends with a window or door available to those who can see it and choose to walk or climb through that offers the hope of freedom from such houses that do not make suitable homes: “What did a door mean? what a window? focusing on the sign rather than the event; excited by the invitation rather than the party …. Whether through a door needing to be opened or a beckoning window already raised, what would happen if you entered? What would be on the other side? What on earth would it be? What on earth?” (Paradise 305) Future projects would include analyzing Morrison’s A Mercy, Home, and other works of fiction and nonfiction to get an even richer sense of her home and philosophies on race and gender, by extension.

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Bibliography Bambara, Toni Cade. Gorilla, My Love. Vintage, 1992. Bennett, Juda. “Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative.” African American Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 205–217. Blake, Susan L. “Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon.” MELUS, vol. 7, no. 3, 1980, pp. 77–82. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/467030. Butler, Robert James. “Open Movement and Selfhood in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” The Centennial Review, 28/29, no. 4/1, 1984, pp. 58–75. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23739169. Cantiello, Jessica Wells. “From Pre-Racial to Post-Racial? Reading and Reviewing A Mercy in the Age of Obama.” MELUS, vol. 36, no. 2, 2011, pp. 165–183. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23035286. Christiansen, Annamarie. “Passing as the ‘Tragic’ Mulatto: Constructions of Hybridity in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts, edited by David S. Goldstein and Audrey B. Thacker, U of Washington P, 2007, pp. 74–98. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/j.ctvcwnj79.8. Coleman, James. “Beyond the Reach of Love and Caring: Black Life in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Obsidian II, vol. 1, no. 3, 1986, pp. 151–161. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44484867. Fletcher, Judith. “Signifying Circe in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” The Classical World, vol. 99, no. 4, 2006, pp. 405–418. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/4353064. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, Duke UP, 1994, pp. 235–255. ———. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1989. Harris, A.  Leslie. “Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” MELUS, vol. 7, no. 3, 1980, pp.  69–76. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/467029. Harris, Wilson. “History, Fable and Myth in The Caribbean and Guianas.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1/2, 2008, pp.  5–38. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/40655139. Jarrett, Gene. “‘A-World-in-Which-Race-Does-Not-Matter.’” Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature, by Gene Andrew Jarrett. U of Pennsylvania P, 2007, pp. 167–186. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Vintage, 1989.

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Krumholz, Linda J. “Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp.  21–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/2903362. Li, Stephanie. “Performing Intimacy: ‘Race-Specific, Race-Free Language’ in Political Discourse.” Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama, by Stephanie Li. Rutgers UP, 2012a, pp. 134–163. ———. “Violence and Toni Morrison’s Racist House.” Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama, by Stephanie Li. Rutgers UP, 2012b, pp. 31–67. Mallon, Ronald. “Passing, Traveling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race.” NOUS, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2004, pp. 644–673. Morrison, Toni. “Home.” The House That Built Race, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, Vintage Books, 1997. ———. The Origin of Others. Harvard UP, 2017. ———. Paradise. Vintage Books, 2014. ———. PEN America Literature Festival. “Toni Morrison and Marlene van Niekerk in Conversation.” YouTube, 2010. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JaOsMouZpJw. ———. “Recitatif.” 1983. ———. Song of Solomon. Vintage Books, 2004. ———. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Speeches, Essays, and Meditations. Alfred Knopf, 2019. Oforlea, Aaron Ngozi. “‘My Great-Granddaddy Could Fly!’: Negotiating Cultural History and Family Legacies in Song of Solomon.” James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity, by Aaron Ngozi Oforlea. Ohio State UP, 2017, pp. 114–144. Painter, Nell. “Toni Morrison’s Radical Vision of Otherness.” The New Republic, 2017. The New Republic, newrepublic.com/article/144972/ toni-­morrisons-­radical-­vision-­otherness-­history-­racism-­exclusion-­whiteness. Parrish, Timothy. “Off Faulkner’s Plantation: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon.” From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction, by Timothy Parrish. U of Massachusetts P, 2008, pp. 117–149. Powell, Timothy B. “Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 24, no. 4, 1990, pp. 747–760. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3041800. Schur, Richard L. “Locating Paradise in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Toni Morrison and Critical Race Theory.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2004, pp. 276–299. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3593567. Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. First Anchor Books, 1994. Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. “Maggie in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’: The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies.” MELUS, vol. 36, no. 2, 2011, pp.  71–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23035281.

CHAPTER 5

The Theory of Racelessness: Cutting Through the Madness of Race(ism)

In this chapter, I present an example of how a literature course could look alongside philosophies of race, ethnicity, nation, and culture that stem, largely, from other literary texts and those by philosophers. Students would learn the core tenets of the theory of racelessness and would be invited to consider its core tenets and utilize the race translator, which requires a level of rigor that benefits everyone, throughout the course.1 Alternative frameworks of analysis, like the theory of racelessness, expand knowledge in the classroom to inspire students to ask and answer critical questions that help stem race(ism) at its roots. Students learn about and practice ways of being and seeing that exist in a plethora of ways outside of the US but are not often, if ever taught, in the US. Race(ism)—raci(al/st) ideology—negatively affects all of us in America and countries influenced by American politics and cultural practices, but not in the ways previously experienced or presumed. The belief in “race” will keep the US fractured along imagined lines created, deepened, and

 Race does not exist in nature. Race does not exist as a social construction. Everyone is raceless. Racism is the belief in race as biological or a construction. Racism is not everywhere and is not the cause for every perceived “racial” disparity or negative interaction. Racism can be overcome. 1

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upheld by raci(al/st) ideology and practices. The theory of racelessness helps more people examine and better understand racism then and now without upholding any aspect of race(ism), a win for all involved. Now, I will provide a course description and rationale. Then, I will utilize the theory of racelessness and heterodox philosophies of race along with other more traditional philosophies of race to analyze four required readings from the course. This course asks students to consider the profound connections between the continued impact of race(ism) and discourses of madness, nation, and diaspora. It encourages students not just to navigate the architecture of race(ism) but to trace the outlines of the invisible ink present in every text and to name and describe the actual houses themselves. Ultimately, students will be encouraged to imagine a home in which race(ism) does not dominate. Students will analyze philosophies of race that are uncommonly, if ever, taught in African American literature courses in conjunction with fictions that can be interpreted as reflecting their own philosophies of race (i.e., eliminativism, skepticism, reconstructionism, and anti-race[ism]) to help them articulate and arrive, even if tentatively, at their own nuanced philosophy of race and home. By exploring and mapping madness, nation, and diaspora as each relates to the architecture of race(ism), the course poses the following questions: How have writers used literature and literary form to dramatize the ideological dynamic of raci(al/st) identity and formation? Is part of the solution to racism the elimination of raci(al/st) concepts, language, and ideologies and the recognition that race does not exist but racism does, that is, the creation of a post-racist world? Can you imagine a world in which race(ism) does not exist as an integral part of one’s identity but exists as a historical concept? What is the architecture of America’s “raci(al/st) house?” How does the architecture of “home,” a space without race(ism), in the US look? The course is divided into four thematic elements that appear across authors’ work, time, and geographical spaces: madness, architecture, and nation and diaspora. Importantly, although titled “Unit I,” the unit on architecture happens alongside the other two units, which serves to highlight the concept of invisible ink made visible and tangible and stands as part of the course’s own visible architecture. Although there are four central themes, there is a persistent interconnectedness between madness encouraged and created by race and how both function and the role of nation, diaspora, and architecture, representative of the conceptual and ideological breakdown of race(ism) within the literature. This course is about the liberatory potential of recognizing and even imagining another

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way, just like the writers featured throughout the class.2 This course is designed to encourage students to identify racecraft (i.e., when racism masquerades as race) and race(ism), in the literature, with the express purpose of inspiring discourse about race(ism) that is often diminished when students focus on race and perceived raci(al/st) difference. Finally, students will be able to recognize and discuss various philosophies of race through the literature, which disrupts American assumptions and philosophies of race(ism) and offers alternative strategies of resistance and, at minimum, encourages anti-racist action and thought. The readings included in this course illuminate and expose raci(al/st) thought as a crazy-making (i.e., part of its madness) regime in which one is encouraged to believe in a singular and often monolithic social and cultural construction of “raci(al/st) identity” to be acceptable and considered “normal” within their respective communities, while those considered “abnormal,” “different,” and “other” evoke anger, disorder, mental illness, and isolation. In “Managing the Unmanageable” (1990), Marlene NourbeSe Philip says, “European thought has traditionally designated certain groups not only as inferior but also, paradoxically, as threats to their order, systems, and traditions of knowledge. Women, Africans, Asians, and aboriginals can be said to comprise the groups and together they constitute the threat of the Other” (295). As a strategy for subverting and interrogating such paradoxical notions of inferiority and presumed order, at different historical moments, some writers represent madness as a form of unmanageability and resistance and as indicative of a search for a language of empowerment. Further, though, these writers illuminate many other binary modes of thought (good/bad, black/white, sane/ insane, man/woman, and so on) as catalysts for madness, too. While thinking within the binary of black/white, for example, generates and perpetuates certain types of madness, that is, (dis)order, some writers use madness to also highlight individuality and universality between characters and communities, making madness a paradoxical and generative way to view the literature. Subsequently, and perhaps consequently, madness informs and provides the foundation for other writers’ depictions of nation and diaspora. Discourses on nationalism have become other components of the philosophy of race. Morrison notes that race functioned as a metaphor necessary for the construction of Americanness and the creation of the national identity of American as white (Origins). “White” 2

 The required readings for the course are listed at the end of this chapter.

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suffragists and then feminists shaped and perpetuated a nationalism rooted in white supremacy. In “Nationalism and Suffrage: Gender Struggle in Nation-Building America” (1996), Philip Cohen says that the “suffrage movement became a struggle over national identity” (724) and was not simply a struggle for white women’s suffrage. White women began to present white womanhood as hegemonic and fundamentally different from white men in ways that would increase and maintain white male power via the power of the US the nation. As “black” people fought for emancipation and then their political power, white women’s strategy for gaining their symbol of citizenship and political power included essentialist and exclusive nationalist rhetoric and practices to gain the support of white men. The conflation of American and whiteness has persisted over time, leading to “anti-American” rhetoric aimed at former President Barack Obama, which would not have likely been part of the anti-Obama strategy had he not been “black,” as well as at Muslim or Mexican Americans or immigrants. “People of color,” here meaning people seen as not “white,” are more readily recognized as outsiders, as the Other, in America. In Debating Diversity: Clashing Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (2002), Ronald Takaki says that the “overarching theme of this anthology is the debate over the master narrative of American history—the powerful and familiar story that this country was settled by European immigrants and that Americans are ‘white’” (3).3 Indeed, the collection extends beyond the black/white binary to “include Indians, Mexicans, Asians, as well as ethnic minorities like the Irish and Jews” (3). Takaki seeks his own version of “multicultural democracy” (3), not unlike the raci(al/st) democracy Freyre imagined for Brazil. Multiculturalism took hold of many imaginations in the late 1980s through the 1990s around the world (whereas Locke’s view of multiculturalism was less accepted and embraced during 3  In 1980, Takaki and Nathan Glazer presented two diverging papers at the University of Wisconsin’s conference on “Ethnicity and Public Policy.” In “The Emergence of an American Ethnic Pattern,” Glazer argues that “the state should only outlaw racial discrimination” (Takaki 5). He says that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reshaped public policy in ways that, essentially, eliminated racism and allowed for formerly marginalized communities to achieve equity for themselves. He argues that Takaki and most other people focus too much on race and reify racism by focusing, yes, on race. Takaki argues that the 1964 law was “a first step toward the realization of equality of condition” (Takaki 5). He notes that structural inequity and institutionalized racism mean that there is much more to be done to rectify America’s violent history and create true equity for all people in the US.

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his time). Unlike what Kenneth Aslakson seems to imagine, Takaki firmly believes that people in the US cannot depend on law revisions to overcome raci(al/st) inequality and discrimination. People must actively work against master narratives and write the Other into existence, in a way. For Elizabeth Martínez, a writer whose essay is housed in Takaki’s collection, people must call for a new national identity. Like Baldwin, Martínez believes that choosing whiteness is a moral choice that “white” people need to recognize, as is equating Americanness with whiteness. Martínez asks, Will the future be marked by ongoing denial or by steps toward a new vision in which White Supremacy no longer determines reality? When on earth will we transcend the assumptions that imprison our minds? (Takaki 85)

Eliminating concepts of race, raci(al/st) thought, and raci(al/st) language would have nationalistic benefits, too, in addition to revising the outdated and deconstructed notion of the Black Diaspora, as Chude-Sokei points out. Both Takaki and Martínez appear to be partial eliminativists, conservationists, and reconstructionists, for new definitions of what it means to be American must be found (3, 82), and Americanness is steeped in whiteness, which brings race(ism) to the center of the national conversation. In the literature, the discourses of madness, nation, and diaspora are often intertwined and redesigned alongside the architecture of race(ism). It is largely because of race(ism) that madness impacts the nation and/or diaspora in troubling ways, according to the literature. However, twilight spaces, liminal spaces, the raceless spaces, create opportunities for discourse and healing that otherwise might not occur. The violence, the anger, the (dis)ordered chaos, the enthusiasm and necessity, the extreme folly with which both diaspora and nation are created, help illustrate and outline the architecture of that which influences and produces ideologies of difference and otherness, which hinge on the imbalance of power. Using Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994) as part of its theoretical and analytical framework, the present chapter analyzes and theorizes madness in Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001) and Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1974) and navigates madness, nation, and diaspora in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Finally, after illuminating how such a course would achieve the above-named teaching objectives, this chapter underscores the course’s

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key replicative components and names other methodological strategies and resources to consider. A one-woman documentary play and an example of what is now referred to as verbatim theater, Twilight consists of approximately 30 interviews out of the over 200 Smith conducted. In Twilight, madness is simultaneously a vehicle for individuality and a catalyst for recognizing universality. Race(ism) obscures the specific from the collective within public discourse, like when people assert that “all lives matter” in response to “black lives matter.” Raci(al/st) discourse enables Americans to hear and see “the specific” and overlook “the collective or universal,” which results, in part, in the perpetuation of race(ism) and the perceived inhumanity of oppressed people. Madness, then, lights the reader’s way into the twilight space. Ultimately, the confusion, the chaos, and the uncertainty produced in this course’s readings make way for the twilight, transformative, in-between space. The reader simultaneously sees each character’s ideological differences and their similarities, with emphasis on similarities. Intragroup and intergroup representations of madness suggest that the critical path to productive discourse and national, cultural, and political concord includes the recognition of both the particular and universal humanness present across cultures, nations, and politics. Ultimately, the madness in Twilight manifests through society’s unwillingness or inability to recognize the architecture of race(ism) as an impediment to productive and necessarily healing dialogue. In “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), Audre Lorde writes, “If women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism, it will require recognizing the needs and living contexts of other women” (2). Although she is speaking about women in academia, Lorde’s sentiment applies to people, broadly speaking, regarding their “others,” too, as indicated in Twilight. When read through a theoretical lens of racelessness, madness, and twilight, Smith’s path to productive dialogue about the constricting ideologies of race requires the recognition and acknowledgment of other people’s histories, needs, and lives. In her Introduction, she says, “Few people speak a language about race that is not their own. If more of us could actually speak from another point of view, like speaking another language, we could accelerate the flow of ideas” (xxv). Through excavating the “twilight moment[s]” (232), the “in-between moment[s]” (232), the universal moments found among the interviews she conducted, Smith simultaneously and necessarily points out the similarities and differences

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even within the same groups. Her project provides an illuminating framework for examining the function of madness (i.e., especially anger, chaos, and mental illness) in Erasure and Corregidora, since each also reflects a desire and need to speak different languages about class, culture, history, race, gender, and nationality. Part of the madness shown in and created by Twilight is Smith’s use of genre to reflect the shiftiness of history and memory, making both less dependable and stable than Westerners often credit them with being. In her Introduction, she states that the book is “first and foremost a document of what an actress heard in Los Angeles” (xxiv) and that the “performance is a reiteration of that” (xxiv). Although the book and play consist of direct quotes of what people interviewed said, like fiction, the realities included in Twilight are strategically included and ordered to highlight specific intersections of nationality, class, race, ethnicity, and gender. The interviews are arranged by their general and overarching themes into six sections: “Prologue,” “The Territory,” “Here’s a Nobody,” “War Zone,” “Twilight,” and “Justice.” Also, the words of each interview are placed on the page like poetry; at times, the line breaks indicate a person’s self-­ consciousness, nervousness, emphasis, or complete thought but also expose Smith’s own emphasis and imagination. In his interview, Homi Bhabha defines a “twilight moment / [as] an in-between moment. / It’s the moment of dusk. / It’s the moment of ambivalence / and ambiguity” (232). Similarly, in his interview, Twilight Bey talks about being in an intellectual limbo, “an area not many people exist” (256), being able to see from and inhabit various perspectives. When she imagines her work resulting in the “examination of problems” (xxiv), which necessarily includes “a more complex language” (xxv) to discuss identity and a representation of “all voices” (xxv), her inclusion of people ranging from ex-­ gang members to renowned scholars to politicians to movement leaders to shop owners to college students and so on results in the reader’s reception of and exposure to multiple histories and (re)memories—the twilight—all through a single text and/or woman on stage. The polyvocality of Twilight, ultimately, works to fill in the blank pages some people tend to have regarding any event (including one’s own) but notably a series of events that were so highly racialized and racist, publicized, and controversial. Through the outrage and violence race(ism) and corresponding ideologies instigate in cases like that of the gross injustice and beating of Rodney King, the subsequent riots, and the expression of society’s attempts to

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control and manage difference through the production and enforcement of hierarchy, readers must learn about multiple histories and subjectivities to understand and learn about that of any “other” individual suggests writers like Smith and Toni Morrison. Smith extends the experiences and perspectives of particular individuals to reflect the histories and memories of families and nation—here, correlating with the country the US—in addition to that of an individual. Importantly, her methodology (having many dramaturgists) for completing a project that reflects her hope of reflecting a diverse set of voices aligns with her call to the community to act (xxiv) by recognizing the humanness of others and having a conversation, a dialogue much like that in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif.” Also, Smith exposes the multivalent nature of (re)memory and history and how a subscription to particular narratives (i.e., perspectives), without exposing oneself to other points of view, continues to cause social unrest in the present, which make projects like hers critical today. One’s ability to speak another language in the way Smith suggests is conducive to interand intragroup healing and discourse, though it can be fleeting; the longstanding conversation and healing happens between the reader and the text. Smith uses genre to complicate the viewer’s or reader’s understanding of memory, history, imagination, nation, and unification. Each writer presented in the class would be read through this proposed lens of madness and twilight that promotes the inclusion of multiple histories and memories to depict a single, but still polyvocal, history, and unification. It is not about replacing one method with another but about productively engaging and presenting other parts of the same book that embodies the complexity of US and African American literature. The conversation outlined here between twilight and madness take special resonance in relation to Erasure, Corregidora, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Published in 2001, Percival Everett’s Erasure, a satire that is at least partly about the madness raci(al/st) ideology afflicts, America’s “eagerness to consume racialized images of the ghetto” (Farebrother 117), the publishing industry’s consistent insistence on and acceptance of stereotypical, homogenous images of “blackness,” and “American eyes,” according to Everett. Erasure inspired my coining of the terms eracesure, erace, and eracing. In “Race under ‘Erasure’ for Percival Everett, ‘A Piece of Fiction’” (2005), Margaret Russett argues that race is not the only or even the primary concept dealt with in Erasure, which is true. Like, Jones and Díaz, Everett “raises questions about genre, mimesis, authorial identity”

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(360) and so-called “racial heritage” (emphasis added, 360). In “Percival Everett: Erasure” (2010), Tara Powell argues that Erasure is one of Everett’s many novels that comments “directly on race in America” (76), saying that “old Jim Crow is always looking over this South Carolina native’s shoulder as an author” (76). Powell’s sentiment about Everett reverberates with Toni Morrison’s assertion that the keys of race(ism) were always tinkling in the background as she sat down to write (The Source), a sentiment that writers of European descent are presumed not to share and, for the most part, not expected to share. Powell notes, “Monk [Thelonius Monk Ellison, the protagonist] is living evidence that ‘Black America’ has other faces than the ones in We’s Lives in da Ghetto” (77–8). It is, in fact, because the novel is “a departure from his other work, dealing as it does directly with race, class, and, to some extent, regional difference [that] it is still a particularly good place to begin an appreciation of Everett’s sizable body of work” (85). Her assessment inadvertently reifies the race(ism) the novel lambastes. Whereas she says that Monk reaches “a point where he does not want to think, write, or even see race at all” (78), she misses an opportunity to explore how Monk’s reaction to race is indicative of the absence of race even and, perhaps especially, with the presence of color. Monk, in many ways, is a walking negative, especially when he “transforms” into Stagg. Importantly, critics explore Erasure as a post-black/post-race narrative. Like Joe Weixlmann’s argument that Everett does not recognize “meaning” as having fixity and that Erasure serves as an erasure of Western hegemony, Jose Saldívar illustrates how the novel “satirizes representations of race” (525), opens up space for new conceptions of race, and, as a post-­ race text, shows how race continues to be “‘shaped as a consequence of’ imperialism and racism” (520). He connects his meaning of post-race with that of postcolonial, not like that of poststructuralism, meaning that, in identifying Erasure as a post-race novel, Everett is “imagin[ing] something that, does not yet exist in the real world, a place where ‘race’ might truly not matter at all” (529) and not willing away race(ism) by wishing it away. Post-race and post-blackness are two sides of the same coin. Thus, their limitations and inadvertent reification of race(ism) remain. It is outside of and within the context of these limitations that this book illustrates how Everett undoes race and renders race(ism) clearer. For this class, students will tease out the invisible ink that has been erased and eraced to outline and articulate Everett’s house and, if he has one, home. In other words, students will work to identify how racism

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functions as race in Erasure (i.e., race[ism]) to better confront race(ism) and theorize Everett’s potential philosophical standing on race, at least, as portrayed in the novel. Also evoking questions about nation and diaspora, Erasure raises questions and critiques raci(al/st) ideologies and raci(al/st) language, like black and white, and African American, a term conflated with race but also indicative of ethnicity and culture, terms that are also often conflated with race.4 Over the course of the novel, through a series of breakdowns in communication, several characters transform by losing their minds or their values and, ultimately, their identities, due to their constant and consistent eracesure either by themselves or others. Race(ism) impacts the characters so that madness ensues and eracesure becomes permanent. Thelonius Monk Ellison, the protagonist, metaphorically stands “in the dark signing furiously to the blind” (“Signing”), a signifier of the “craziness” (Morrison) that racism and, ultimately, race represent and cause, because he cannot get books published unless he conforms to an existent model. The model is ideologies of race and racism and, more specifically, fiction that presents stereotypical images of “blackness” and “black” people. Publishers want the “black experience,” which students will identify and translate into the experience of those people most impacted by race(ism). Monk feels forced to reflect what readers expect because he is the only person left to take care of his mother financially and otherwise. His need for money motivates him to produce a “realist” text fitting into the expectant model of African American literature, which is perpetuated and shaped by all readers. In an interview, Everett says, “We [Americans] should be about the business of undermining the racist thinking which generates a need for such a construction of a literary canon in the first place” (Kincaid), and this sentiment extends, of course, to the category of African American literature. In “Erasing Precious: Sapphire and Percival Everett” (2015), Lesley Larkin says that there is an “ongoing dispute about the ethical responsibilities of black artists within an asymmetrical and prejudice-laden context of reception” (126). Therefore, as in Twilight, the madness of Erasure includes highlighting both intra- and intergroup inclinations of narrowly defining both people and literature by their perceived raci(al/st) 4  Locke argues in “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture” (1924) that the terms race and culture are conflated and should be disjoined. He concludes that whereas most Americans think that culture is a product of race, race is better thought of as a product or subset of culture.

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categorization. Everett through Monk writes, “Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people who the society calls white tell me the same thing” (2). While critics like Candice Jenkins argue that the novel is about the “black and bourgeois dilemma” (134) where Monk dreams about being in a post-racial world that fails to liberate him in the end, the novel critiques the so-called creative “possibilities for black nuance” (Jenkins 153). And Monk’s dream about being in a post-racial world fails to liberate him because he still lives in a racist world. In the novel, Monk connects ideas of post-racial with post-racist. If he lived in a post-racist society, one would find difficulty in arguing that he was not liberated. Post-racial is synonymous even within our imaginations with post-racist. Ultimately, in the novel, Monk’s eracesure and ensuing madness is only partly due to his rewriting of a Greek tragedy being categorized in a bookstore as “African American literature” or his editor telling him that publishers want the “gritty” stuff of the so-called black experience or his embodiment of a popular folklore badman Staggerlee, who is named after Lee Shelton, who purportedly shot a man over a Stetson hat he lost in a bet. Monk’s eracesure and madness are caused by the raci(al/st) house he is forced into by those around him and then, ultimately, himself. He opens the novel rejecting society’s raci(al/st) categorization. He ends the novel having transformed into a figure who lives up to America’s expectations. Still, the ending leaves open the possibility for his further transformation. Everett tasks the reader with finishing Monk’s story. One chooses to race and, thereby, erace Monk, or one chooses to liberate Monk from race(ism). Thus, the novel reflects back onto itself in an act of simultaneous erasure and liberation because the reader is left with the ability and option to open or keep shut the door, gifting them “new” eyes, a different way of being and seeing if they so choose. Society tells Monk that he is “black,” part of America’s raci(al/st) hierarchy, and so madness ensues. Monk has “dark brown skin, curly hair, [and] a broad nose” (1). Thus, he asserts that “the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race” (1). Race(ism) is written onto him as it is written onto walking negative characters or characters that are unraced by nature and then (e)raced by humans and as it is written onto his art. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison asks, “If I take your [“white” person’s] race away and there you are all strung out and all you got is your little self, what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? You still smart? You still like yourself” (1993).

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Rhetorically, she likens taking one’s race away with taking one’s racism away, an idea this course critically engages. This course, through works like Twilight and Erasure and the framework of madness and twilight (reflected in the blank pages of the story, the erasure that Everett has told readers to fill in), will encourage and inspire students to think about characters who are “obviously black” (typically based on their phenotype or society’s identification of them), like Monk, as potentially raceless, colorless, rendering race(ism) realer, which redirects the conversation to that regarding race(ism). This type of intellectual work is significant and has profound implications because “racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race” (Fields 17). While not all African American literary texts reflect ideologies of race(ism), the US cannot begin to be actively anti-racist until more sustained and in-depth conversations about race(ism), not race, occur. This course inspires students to recognize the fallacy of race, its racist origins, and the interconnectedness of race(ism) today that allows racism, ultimately, to persist, and to look for solutions to racism within literature. This ideological shift is not the same as envisioning a post-racial world, but rather a post-raci(al/st) world. If race (or if society believes it) exists, hierarchy will, too. Instead, rather than take any character’s “race” for granted or as objective reality, the architecture of the class and of the US’s raci(al/st) house brings the foundation of the house, typically unseen but understood to exist, to the foreground. Erasure interrogates race(ism) and illuminates the existence of racecraft. Everett does not (re)write or (re) define blackness like artists of the post-black movement. His novel rejects the conflation of race and culture and highlights how race functions as part of racism and vice versa. Erasure rejects race, not just blackness, and redirects attention to race(ism). Who is Monk? He “graduated summa cum laude from Harvard” (2). His family owns a “bungalow near Annapolis” (2). His grandfather, father, brother, and sister were doctors (2). Among other things, Monk writes Greek tragedies and has difficulty getting publishers to accept and publish his work. His editor often relays comments concerning the “blackness” of his writing from said publishers, and Monk becomes frustrated with the publishing world and the world, broadly speaking. The reader learns quickly that his father committed suicide (10). His brother—Bill—is a plastic surgeon who is gay and, in coming out as such, has lost his wife, children, house, and job. His sister—Lisa—works at an abortion clinic. Their mother has Alzheimer’s disease. And Lorraine, the woman who has been their live-in nanny and

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housekeeper for years but has no savings, falls in love with Leon and finally “moves on” from her attachments with the Ellisons. The metafictional nature of the novel has inspired much of its criticism to focus on Everett’s postmodernism and the intertextuality of the novel. Erasure is a combination of Monk’s journal, his most recent and imagined novels, philosophical meditations on fishing and woodworking, another full text satire, and letters between his father and his father’s mistress. It is a novelist’s journal, which contains a novel. Early in the novel, before he moves back to D.C. more permanently, Monk goes to a bookstore and searches for his published books. He finds them in the African American Studies section. His books are reworkings of Greek tragedies, so he wrestles with the understanding that people interested in African American studies would not necessarily be interested in his books, and people looking for Greek tragedies would not think to look in the African American literature section. Monk returns to Los Angeles only to receive a phone call that delivers bad news: Lisa has been murdered by an anti-abortionist. Monk returns to D.C. to make funeral arrangements and take over the care of his mother. Back in D.C., Monk sees Juanita Mae Jenkins on television promoting her new book titled We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. She pens the novel, which ends up getting a three-million-dollar movie contract and is believed by readers to be an “authentic” depiction of “African American life,” after visiting relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Monk writes Fuck, initially titled My Pafology, and parodies Jenkins’ We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. He sends it to his agent under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh as an indictment of America’s obsession with race and color and stereotypical views of “black” art. Monk thinks that his parody will somehow illuminate the raci(al/st) views of the publishers, who will, in turn, change their mad ways and liberate Monk and all writers from America’s raci(al/st) house. Surprisingly, his book is well received by publishers, editors, reviewers, movie makers, and even the National Book Award Committee. Since money is tight, Monk accepts all of the offers under his alias. The reader watches him masquerade as Stagg, a figure of substantive exteriority and little interiority, as he meets with the publisher, receives and accepts a movie contract, and gets chosen by a committee he (as Monk) is on to receive the Book Award in Fiction. The novel closes with Stagg/Monk facing live television cameras and a crowd when he is ostensibly prepared to reveal his “true” identity. Aside from being Everett’s protagonist, Thelonious Monk Ellison is a fusion between the names Thelonious Monk and Ralph Ellison. Thelonious

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Monk is an African American jazz pianist known for his unique improvisational style and contributions to the jazz repertoire. Monk was highly rated by peers and some critics. Still, like the fictional Monk, his records did not sell in significant numbers. His music was regarded as “too difficult” for mass-market acceptance. Markedly, the record labels wanted him to play interpretations of Duke Ellington, but in 1956, he was able to release a compilation of his own music. In 1951, Monk was pulled over by police and refused to give them evidence that would indict his friend on possession of narcotics. In 1958, Monk was held by police in Wilmington, Delaware. When Monk refused to answer the officers’ questions, they beat him. Speculation has been made as to whether Monk’s “quirky” behavior signified some sort of mental illness: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or Tourette syndrome. It is also possible that the musician’s perceived madness was inspired by the raci(al/st) and artistic (sometimes the same) confinements placed on him and his art. Like the pianist, Everett’s protagonist jumps stylistic and generic boundaries. Just as Everett expresses in his interviews that he should not be defined as an “African American [as it gets conflated with race] writer,” his protagonist’s name underscores that rejection. Experience, community or individual, cannot be voiced in a singular manner, as also evidenced by the madness in the twilight. However, Monk’s ultimate transformation into Stagg and the invisible man, as both capitalize on the political and commercial value of “blackness,” illustrates an embrace of Monk’s identity as a so-called black writer. Yet, the book ends more uncertainly and messily than his mere acceptance, which provokes and invites the reader to (re) write and (re)imagine race(ism) and its interconnectedness to American art and American ways of seeing. Although Monk seems to have a sense of who he is, his last name is Ellison. Ralph Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man (1947). According to Russett, Ellison’s position in the dialogue of writers’ artistic obligation is to “assault not just the styles of other writers but against his own previous work as well.” Everett, Monk, and Ellison (and Smith) share this bond of experimentalism. Monk’s self-proclaimed journal is avant-­ garde. Everett’s career is highly guided by his own efforts to write in styles and genres he has not yet written in. Furthering the protagonist’s connection to Ellison’s invisible protagonist, Monk consistently endures the madness eracesure produces. Consequently, by the end of the novel, the reader is left with an invisible and raced man just like Ellison’s invisible narrator. Monk’s invisibility is caused by society’s (e)racing of who he is.

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His invisibility, though, reflects more of a walking negative that can transcend raci(al/st) boundaries if read in uncommon ways, such as alongside the architecture of race(ism). The reader can erase and (e)race Monk and Erasure itself by misreading both or through the madness and twilight can (re)read both as vacillating between being created and (re)created. Monk writes, de Kooning: You sold my picture? Rauschenberg: No, I erased your picture. I sold my erasing. (228)

At times, the protagonist seems cognizant of his eracesure and the architecture of race. As the novel progresses, though, and his mother’s illness worsens, his consciousness lessens, thus likening him to an Alzheimer’s patient. In this way, there are deeper connections to be made in such a course between Erasure, Paradise, Eva’s Man, Linden Hills, Corregidora, and “Recitatif.” In each text, there are one or more characters that present as disabled or crazy but definitely “abnormal” and “different,” and, in each text, the presence of these characters offers the reader an opportunity to play in the twilight, recognize and transcend the madness and irony, and transform themselves and the society the characters inhabit, too. Based on the novel’s invisible ink, Monk’s paradise ends up being one that necessitates the undoing of race to forego racism and intragroup prejudice because his attempt to construct a post-raci(al/st) world in which race exists but does not matter still operates and depends on race(ism), which means that the world is not yet post-racist. In Erasure, two brief encounters increase Monk’s invisibility and overall eracesure. First, Marilyn Tillman and Monk meet shortly after My Pafology’s publication and just before Mrs Ellison’s hospitalization. Marilyn has “near blonde dreadlocks” (163). She works “as a federal defender for the Sentencing Guidelines Group” (166), and, Monk says, “she is very much like my sister” (166). Like Monk, Marilyn’s parents are also physicians. She studied at Columbia. He went to Harvard, so they are both Ivy Leaguers. She represents a sort of foil for Monk. Whereas he cannot appreciate forms of “blackness” that do not reflect himself, she, who comes from a similarly privileged background, can and does. Marilyn does not intentionally erace Monk; rather his increased anxiety, guilt, and invisibility cause him to act hypersensitively. Eventually, he explodes when he

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discovers a copy of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto on Marilyn’s bed stand. When he asks if she finds it offensive, she replies, “No” (188). Monk responds, “It’s just that I find that book an idiotic, exploitive piece of crap and I can’t see how an intelligent person can take it seriously” (188). Like some writers, he wishes to stomp out all “negative” and stereotypical portrayals of so-called black people, but his motivations seem reasonable. After all, Jenkins’ exploitation of acceptable and yet despised versions of “blackness” and America’s history of producing and consuming raci(al/st) images of “blackness” continue to have profound impacts on his personal and professional lives. Within the world of the novel, though, Monk’s rash reaction to America’s raci(al/st) house proves to be a nonstarter. His madness thrusts him into the throes of, well, blackness. Their relationship ends irrevocably fractured by Marilyn’s acceptance of the existent model of both blackness and literature and Monk’s tiredness of resisting those same models in literature and in life. Leon is another character who eraces Monk. Although Leon participates in eracesure, the tension is caused by class differences (i.e., race[ism] and capitalism intersect). Leon is annoyed that he is an “electrician’s helper” (194) and that Monk is a novelist and a professor on leave for a year without pay but can still afford a housekeeper. In Leon’s psychic distress, he rephrases Monk’s term of Lorraine as “housekeeper” to “maid,” so Monk says, “She’s like part of the family,” (194), which is, of course, true to an extent. As his defense and “proof,” Monk quickly exclaims a ten-thousand-dollar bridal gift. He tries to present a façade of familial ties and unity between him and Lorraine in a moment of raci(al/st) performance. Suddenly, Lorraine is the model of servitude, patience, loyalty, and nurturance; she cooks, cleans, and remains unwed in order to adhere to her “civic” duties. Leon brings Lorraine’s position to the forefront. But in doing so, he eraces Monk, signaling that “black” people and wealth do not and, perhaps, should not compute in America’s raci(al/st) house: “I saw myself exactly as I had never wanted, but always did, awkward and set apart, however unfairly and incorrectly…. The problem was the one I had always had, that I was not a regular guy and I so much wanted to be. Can you spell bourgeois” (195), Monk writes. His “abnormality” is partially rooted in the fact that his “normal” is being unraced or raceless and that he is made to appear abnormal, mad, by the placement of race(ism) over his person to the exclusion of all else. However, his class status obscures and convolutes the society’s race(ism) in the novel.

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Bill, Monk’s brother, is eraced. Initially, he fits the “down-low ‘black’ man” stereotype. His delayed self-acceptance and self-denial cause him to lose everything in the process. He waits until he is married and has children before explicitly identifying himself as gay. He is characterized as promiscuous. Every time Monk talks to him, Bill’s partner’s name is different. First it is Claude (135), then Tad (138), then Adam (158), then Rob (181), and, finally, Monk asks “‘How’s—’ I searched for his friend’s name” (207). Monk also implies that Bill is a drug user. Bill’s loss of everything takes its toll on Bill and, consequently, Monk. Although Bill loses everything in finding himself, like Monk does later, the novel signals the possibility of renascence and earned healing. The first step must be naming and self-acceptance, or eracesure takes over and wins more permanently. The madness created by eracesure deeply impacts everyone involved. By the end of Erasure, Bill loses everything including his ability to communicate with his brother: “I watched his lips and realized I understood nothing he was saying. His language possessed an adverbial and interrogative geometry that I could not comprehend. I could see the shapes of his meaning, even hear that his words meant something, but I had no idea as to the substance of his meaning. I nodded” (214), Monk says. Unfortunately, there is no twilight between them, only madness and the architecture of race(ism). Monk does understand Bill’s next few words, “I was wrong to think you’d understand. Actually, I didn’t expect you to at all. You’re just like Father. You always were and you’re growing up to be him” (214). Their father, who takes his life in an act and as a symptom of madness, is the last person Monk aspires to emulate. At times, he is rigid, cold, unknowable, and unwilling to have any dialogue necessary to heal himself or his family. He is too confined in his house and takes his own life, chooses his own flight. Yet, Bill sees similarities between his brother and their father, as does the reader. The complete breakdown in communication between Monk and Bill foreshadows Stagg’s revival. After Bill loses everything and tells Monk to “[f]uck off” (216), Monk changes back into Stagg. As he expresses frequently throughout the novel, “In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend” (139). Although he seeks to defy and undo definitions of himself and his art, he simultaneously affirms those definitions. In an act of unwitting but still prophetic self-­ fulfillment, he erases his drawing, sells his erasing, and then Everett sells

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his erasing of the erasure. Monk writes, “Ain’t you Rine the runner?” (216), again, alluding to the narrator of Invisible Man. Indeed, Stagg is a Rinehart figure. He is accepted as a “real” writer and a “real black” man when he lacks substance while the real writer Monk remains rejected and eraced. When the narrator in Invisible Man wears dark glasses for a day in Harlem, people mistake him for Rinehart. Just as people in Harlem mistake the “invisible man” wearing dark glasses for Rinehart, people in Erasure mistake Monk in “dark glasses” (216) for Stagg. Monk’s “disguise” in dark glasses is not so much a disguise as it is an explicit connection between Monk and Ellison’s invisible narrator and reflects the profound and sometimes silly and madness-producing eracesure happening in the world of the novel. In “disguise,” Monk/Stagg meets Wiley Morgenstein, who offers Monk/Stagg 3 million dollars for Fuck, and further eraces Monk into Stagg. Morgenstein (e)races Monk/Stagg, saying, “‘Hey, I love that damn novel. I laughed my ass out. Oh, it’s sad too, don’t get me wrong. And real as hell. We can just lift the dialogue right out of the book’” (217). He furthers his account of what Monk calls the existent model of the “normal” and expected so-called black person’s identity: ‘You know, you’re not at all like I pictured you.’ [Morgenstein] ‘No? How did you picture me?’ [Stagg] ‘I don’t know, tougher or something. You know, more street. More…’ ‘Black?’ ‘Yeah, that’s it. I’m glad you said it. I’ve seen the people you write about, the real people, the earthy, gutsy people. They can’t teach you to write about that in college.’ (217)

Monk’s eracesure as Stagg is clear. Monk knows that all “black” people do not speak and live the way Fuck or We’s Lives In Da Ghetto portrays them to live and speak. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now (2012), Touré notes that there are as many ways to be “black” as there are “black” people in the world. In Erasure, society does not privilege differences within raci(al/st) categorizations, so they enforce (dis) order and, thereby, create madness. They impose these beliefs over him in what is a painful process to control and dominate him. Racist ideology is the foundation for race, in the novel, and institutionalized eracesure causes invisibility and inauthenticity: “Behold the invisible” (219), Monk writes. After his meeting with Morgenstein, Stagg is “confused and angry.

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Outside, he scratched the dark glasses from his face and disappeared” (219). These lines reflect Stagg/Monk’s subsuming invisibility and increasing transparency and eracesure. Everett’s raci(al/st) house becomes more apparent even as his protagonist becomes transparent and invisible. Monk’s invisibility, as a “black” man, stems from the fact that all people are, by nature, raceless but racism writes race onto their being (i.e., race[ism]). Monk is chosen to be on the book award committee that serves to be a decent distraction until Fuck is published early due to its highly anticipated release. The novel is sent to the committee for review. The members of the committee are Wilson Harnet, Ailene Hoover, Thomas Tomad, Jon Paul Sigmarsen, and Monk. At the first meeting, Sigmarsen has not read it yet. Monk claims it did not “capture” (238) him, which is accurate both literally and figuratively. Hoover thinks it is “marvelous” (238). Tomad claims it is “A gutsy piece of work” (238). Lastly, Harnet thinks “it’s the strongest African American novel I’ve read in a long time” (238). None of them recognize it as a parody of novels like We’s Lives In Da Ghetto and of America’s “irrational obsession with race and color” (Chase-Riboud 350). His next interaction with the judges is even less fruitful. In fact, his template is almost completely invisible, at this point, with Stagg coming more and more to the forefront of his being. The judges rate Fuck as the “best novel by an African American in years” (254), a “true, raw, gritty work” (254), so “vivid, so life-like” (254). The “energy and savagery of the common black is so refreshing in the story” (254). The judges say: “I believe it will be taught in schools, despite its rough language. It’s that strong” (254). The further the architecture of race is exposed, the further (e)raced Monk and other so-called black people become. Who are these judges without race(ism)? Given the prominence of race(ism) in the novel, who is Monk? What type of books would Fuck and Erasure be if the characters lived in a post-racist society? These are the types of questions students will grapple with throughout the course. The madness of race becomes clearer, too, and precedes the twilight moment of the novel. Monk has the identity of Stagg R. Leigh placed over the eracesure that was his identity. In part, the XXXs that interrupt the novel and are on the various covers represent this eracesure and twilight because the reader must interpret, analyze, and, perhaps, fill in the invisible ink. These XXXs increase as Monk’s eracesure increases. Other people suffer significantly as well. Lisa, Monk’s sister, is murdered by anti-­ abortionists who misread her for a “Murderer! Murderer” (29) when, in

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fact, she practices medicine well and helps people. Her consequence is death by homicide, a physical eracesure. Monk’s father leads a double life: he is a doctor, has a wife and three children, and a British mistress and an illegitimate child. His consequence is that he commits suicide, also a physical eracesure. Bill fits the down-low stereotype. His consequences are that he has an eraced identity, a lack of familial bonds, mental anguish, financial hardships, a failing medical practice, and he is unable to cope with social intolerance, which prevails. The effects of eracesure on Monk’s mother deserve examination. As erasures—here meaning the marks left where something was erased—and invisibility increase in the novel, Monk’s mother’s illness worsens. For example, when Monk’s father is alive his mother is mentally and physically healthy. After his death, she begins to depend on Lisa and Lorraine to help her with activities of daily life. When Lisa is murdered, Monk’s mother’s mental health steadily declines. Her psyche shifts into the madness and stays there. She mistakes Monk for her dead husband, saying, “My baby is dead. My little Lisa is gone” (49). Not too long afterward, she forgets that Lisa is dead, “Will Lisa be coming by later today?” (61), she asks. If her progressive state of Alzheimer’s disease is linked to increased eracesure and invisibility, then it is no surprise that directly after Monk completes and has Yul, his book agent, send out Fuck, Monk returns home one day to find Lorraine locked out of the house. Monk scales the house, climbs through a window, and meets his “wild-eyed” (140) mother who says, “Monksie, there’s a man at the door who won’t go away” (141). She calmly hands him the 32-caliber pistol saying, “You might need this,” (141) and Monk “checked the pistol to find it loaded” (141). The man at the door, of course, was him. The next day the doctor informs him “that the disease is progressing somewhat rapidly” (142). The doctor also tells Monk that her “personality will disappear” (142). Monk’s mother is experiencing an organic sort of eracesure. Her eracesure progresses according to the pace and extremeness of what is happening around her. Everett seems to be giving credence to W. E. B. Du Bois’ idea of African Americans being “sick men” in America and that the “sickness” or “pathology” (136), the madness, is created and imposed by society’s racism. Erasure also suggests that this pathology is unpreventable, as Alzheimer’s disease is unpreventable, if society refuses to see anything other than race and complexion. The parallel between Monk’s mother’s deterioration and the eracesure and invisibility around her is striking. Once Lorraine is moved from her

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home and just before Monk meets Morgenstein, Monk’s mother—who remains unnamed in the novel—is in such bad shape that she needs to be permanently hospitalized. Monk expresses the urgency of the situation: “I was completely distrustful of any measure of stability the old woman exhibited that evening of Lorraine’s wedding” (199). He writes, “Her face showed no recognition. I was a blank space in her universe” (204). For a while, she does not recognize Monk or Bill even as they misrecognize each other. The staff tells Monk that “Mother was more out than in lately” (223). He finds it ironic that “as her mind failed, her body became healthier” (223), although this turns out to be a short-lived side effect. Monk states, “still seeing Mother’s head rolling toward me and her vacant eyes pointing my way” (229) haunts him. His mother “was dying” (236), Monk says, just after deciding to ignore the dilemma of having Fuck entered in a contest he is judging (234). Finally, the last scene with Monk’s mother comes right before “The Book Award” ceremony. Monk remembers, “She gazed up at me from her darkness and said, ‘Monksie, we are all such vain creatures. The hard part is seeing myself, what I’ve become. I see for a couple seconds and then I don’t know where I am. I wish I could tell you I’m in here looking out’” (256). Mrs Ellison’s poignant words resonate for everyone in Erasure. All the characters struggle with self-definition and hierarchies and, as a result, they are blind to each other, leaving little, if any, space for individual or communal healing. Monk’s consequences of eracesure include psychic (i.e., interior) invisibility since his exterior identity is replaced with Stagg’s identity. Other consequences he faces are delirium, public exposure, depression, and lack of self. Monk frequently expresses his perceived awkwardness: “Of course, no one cared about my awkwardness but me, I came to learn later, but at the time I was convinced that it was the defining feature of my personality. ‘You know, Thelonious Ellison, he’s the awkward one’” (167). His sense of abnormality and difference is deraced, at times, but still impact him just as deeply. Late in the novel, his suicidal thoughts are only thwarted because “there was a nagging fear that upon waking from a three-year coma I would find the identification bracelet on my wrist reading Stagg R. Leigh” (253). The two circulating paperback covers for Erasure are one with a little boy smiling and holding a gun to his head and another with a young man extending his arm toward the camera with his hand in the shape of a gun. Both covers signal the intragroup and intergroup eracesure and architecture of race(ism). This course includes analyses of novel covers and their histories, too, like the various covers for Erasure. In the end (or the

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beginning, perhaps), Monk is publicly exposed. The closing scene, and arguably the climax of Erasure, is subtitled “The Ceremony.” Harnet announces “Stagg R. Leigh” as the winner of the Book Award in Fiction, and when Monk rises to walk to the stage he says, “Ah, here comes one of my fellow judges. Perhaps Mr. Ellison has heard something about the whereabouts of our winner. It’s a black thang maybe” (264), receiving laughter, whistling, and applause from the crowd. Monk says, “To my left were my father, my mother and the woman I knew to be Fiona [his half-sister’s mother] on either side of him and behind them my brother, sister and half-sister” (264). Everyone urges him forward. Monk’s visions metaphorically represent society’s madness, his own madness, and twilight, the potential for dialogue and healing if he unveils himself to himself on live television. The twilight is “from time and out of time” (265) and in reality and unreality. In yet another moment of simultaneous delirium and clarity, Monk, and it is Monk, again, narrates, “Then there was a small boy, perhaps me as boy, and he held up a mirror so that I could see my face and it was the face of Stagg Leigh. ‘Now you’re free of illusion,’ Stagg said. ‘How does it feel to be free of one’s illusions’” (264). Monk replies, “The answer is Painful and empty” (265). Erasure ends the same way Fuck ends. The narrator looks straight into the television cameras and speaks, only instead of saying, “Look at me. I on TV” (131), Monk says, “Egads, I’m on television” (265). As in Smith’s Twilight, Everett provides the reader a twilight, an in-­ between moment, a space just outside of the madness created by the architecture of race(ism), where transformation and healing are possible. The process is “difficult and my [Monk’s] head was spinning as if I had been drugged” (264). The only way one can truly liberate oneself is in self-­ ownership, which is inherently attached to names, adjectives, and nouns attached to oneself, according to Erasure. While Jenkins’ statement that Monk’s efforts to move “beyond” race ensnare him within race(ism) rings true while he shifts to Stagg and becomes invisible, in the end (or the beginning), he stands under “flooding light” (265), like the invisible man, and his being, his body, and his subjectivity are literally and metaphorically whitewashed and left uncolored for him to do what he will along with the reader. With a final stroke, Everett erases the discourse of race(ism) and art, writing, “hypotheses non fingo” (265), and leaves the hypothesizing to the reader. Ultimately, the reader decides whether to climb through the window or open and walk through the door Everett leaves. Similarly,

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Corregidora ends with a window or door and the reader feeling mad, probably, as in destabilized and in disorder and maybe even angry. Published in 1974, the reaction to Gayl Jones’ Corregidora has been controversial and varied, to say the least. Morrison says that Jones reshaped the genre of “African American women’s fiction” and the characterization of “black” women in fiction: “What was uppermost in my [Morrison’s] mind while I read her manuscript was that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this. This girl had changed the terms, the definitions of the whole enterprise” (14). However, a slew of other critics repudiated the content of Corregidora. Ishmael Reed accused Jones of accepting and perpetuating stereotypes of black men and black women. Perhaps the most talked about aspect of Corregidora is the end when Ursa reunites with Mutt, her seemingly abusive ex-husband. Some critics argue that Ursa’s identity and voice are unrealized since she impulsively returns to Mutt and performs fellatio. What critics have failed to recognize is that the form and content of Corregidora illustrate and call for the recognition of transnational, transcultural, and transregional identities and the madness evoked by the imposition and restrictiveness of the architecture of race(ism). Thus, the novel fits and makes clear connections between the units on architecture, madness, and diaspora and nation. Jones suggests through Corregidora that the process and acknowledgment of the mixing of history, identity, and culture and the eracesures that occur when society (e)races people are necessary parts of the solution to unification and healing. Recognizing this call for the recognition of and the need for reconceptualizing and reconstructing the architecture of race(ism), history, identity, and culture in Jones’ novel is important because it synthesizes key interpretations of Corregidora instead of producing typical unilateral readings and highlights the madness associated with current raci(al/st) thinking. Combined, these interpretations expose a potential solution and undoing of raci(al/st) thought and the architecture of race(ism). By recognizing the transnational, transcultural, and transitory nature of the novel, students will find evidence of the nonexistence of race even if they disagree. Students will be able to better imagine a post-racist society. Critiques, in focusing on race or sex in relation to the novel, fail to recognize how Jones metaphorically undoes and argues against race(ism), like Everett; decouples race from culture; and promotes a broader conceptualization of humanity, the specific and the collective, the individual and the universal. Instead of being read only as an indictment against the “black” community, as Reed, for

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example, read the novel, if read through the twilight lens and the madness associated with “order,” the process of healing can begin and upholding of raci(al/st) discourses can end, at least regarding race(ism). Jones firmly places Corregidora in the Latin American context by having her protagonist—Ursa—descend from “Old man Corregidora, the Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger” (8). Brazil is not part of the Caribbean but shares the colonial history of the Caribbean and the US. Therefore, while Ursa is from Kentucky, her family is from Brazil and, ultimately, Portugal and Africa. Ursa is labeled “mulatto” and descends from a matriarchal line of so-called mulattos: “And you, Grandmama, the first mulatto daughter…‘Was your mama mulatto’” (59). Ursa is raised to be a keeper of culture and familial history. As a genealogical representation of twilight, in-betweenness and bothness, a walking negative, her keeping of culture and history aligns with defining twilight as being a catalyst for a necessary and unavoidable renascence and as an “argument for (re)claiming power” (Allen 53). Renascence is unavoidable because language, history, and culture are interchanged, alternated, transmuted, and transformed. Not unlike the role the “mulatta” typically plays especially in early African American literature, Jones gifts a walking negative the ability to be the key to the necessary healing and empowerment. Ursa also represents her community’s need for self-reflection since her story unveils how racism and sexism are internalized by the community. Ursa’s grandfather, Corregidora, is also her great-grandfather and her great-great-grandfather: “The ‘old man’ produced three generations of daughters who are also sisters, women who are bound by the determined and ritualized repetition of their history of abuse” (Athey 177). Jones illustrates the paradoxical effects of twilight and madness by showing the continuation of slavery through Ursa’s incestual matriarchal lineage and through the Corregidora women’s storytelling or bearing witness to the injustices of slavery: “He wouldn’t sleep with her, so for five years I was sleeping with her and him. That was when I was from about thirteen to eighteen.… ‘You telling the truth, Great Gram?’ She slapped me.… I was five years old then” (13–14). Decoding the cover design also illustrates Jones’ attempt to recreate, to transform, to creolize the novel’s content. The way Corregidora is printed on the cover also harkens back to the novel’s central themes. Corregidora, Ursa’s surname, translates from Spanish as “the chief magistrate’s wife” and “correctly conveys the fact that well into the twentieth century… [the Corregidora women] are all

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effectively his wives” (Monier 101). Jones’ use of a Spanish name to represent a Portuguese slave owner and, by extension, an African and Portuguese family living in the US serves her project of madness and twilight; the history the name reflects is one of colonialism, immigration, and transformation. The Spanish name reflects the sort of identity and cultural confusion Ursa inherits, as well as the patriarchal structures, deeply intertwined with racist structures, which inhibit her based on the literal translation relating to, as Monier points out, a type of male ownership. The cover’s display of “CoRregidora” also suggests the separation or isolation of the “Co” from “Rregidora.” Regidora, translated from Spanish, means an alderman’s or governor’s wife (Ramondino 408). Within one definition of a wife’s submission to a husband, there is yet another definition of a wife’s submission to her husband. This revelation of what could be called a double-double jeopardy, however, becomes a triumphant display, or perhaps a more optimistic display, of Jones’ subversive intent: embedded within the two names is a capital “R.” This unusual capitalization suggests a (Re)reading, a (Re)remembering, a (Re)rejection of the ideology present in the name and in the text. It is not “CorRegidora” but is “CoRregidora,” as if suggesting a doubling of the “re.” Corregidora symbolizes Jones’ call for (re)cognition of the architecture of race and gender and racism and sexism and the inherent tensions created because of it and the celebration of what could be a productive renascence and stripping of the psychological shackles inherited and perpetuated within marginalized communities. In “‘Toward an All-Inclusive Structure’: The Early Fiction of Gayl Jones,” Casey Clabough posits that “[i]n order to surmount their personal and cultural pasts, Jones’ characters must retell and reinvent their histories” (emphasis added, 636). Indeed, her characters must reinvent their houses into homes, too. (Re)invention is what Jones suggests is the key to healing and to better interrelationships. It is how one escapes the madness and turns twilight into daytime or nighttime depending on one’s preference. Through Ursa, Jones illustrates the tensions between the colonized and colonizer: “How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love” (131). Ursa’s great-grandmother and grandmother simultaneously feel love and hate and pain and desire for Corregidora “the Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger” (8). Corregidora rapes women. In explaining Corregidora’s corruption, Ursa retells a story her grandmother passed on to her: “They [women Corregidora raped and impregnated] had to be the color of his coffee beans” (173), and “He wasn’t buying up them fancy

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mulatta womens though” (173). While Corregidora is responsible for producing evidence that undoes race(ism), he rejects the evidence. He also rejects his own ambiguous image; Ursa describes him as Portuguese but explains that “[h]is hair [was] black and straight and greasy… He looked like one a them coal Creek Indians but if you said he looked like an Indian he’d get mad and beat you” (11), and “Corregidora himself was looking like a[n] Indian” (124). Here, the tension between the colonized and the enslaved women is rooted in phenotype and race(ism). Everything expressing the collapse of hierarchy and “order” is suppressed, masked, or unacknowledged, so characters continue to be eraced and to erace each other. Such suppression of naturally unraced identities in the New World was common since colonizers recognized that discourses involving raci(al/st) and ethnic, often conflated, barriers “were generating a cross-ethnic imagined community at the popular level” (Puri 44) and served as political resistance against the colonizers. The goal was to divide and conquer and keep divided and conquered, which ideologies of race(ism) help achieve. Jones illustrates the ways in which New World identities are suppressed even after the end of chattel slavery. In “Strategies of Subversion: The Deconstruction of Madness in Eva’s Man, Corregidora, and Beloved,” Clara Escoda Agustí interprets the novel as exploring “the effects of both present and inherited oppression in the black female psyche, focusing on the psychological pain of the protagonist” (30). Thus, Agustí speaks to the novel’s self-reflective nature, interpreting the novel as a subversion of the “patriarchal idea of female madness” (29). Jones does work to subvert the idea of madness caused by the tensions described above; her subversion extends beyond Ursa’s psychological pain and “madness,” though. Jones subverts race(ism) and racecraft and worries the (re)membering of history. Ursa’s twilight continues in the form of a hysterectomy. Losing her womb (6) forces her to reexamine her identity as a woman and transform how she will keep the Corregidora story alive. Jones ascribes Ursa the power of bearing (and baring) the Corregidora history but not by making generations (9), as she has been told she must. The novel tells of Ursa bearing witness to her history and attempting to bear witness to her different, her abnormal, self. In fact, the novel ends with Ursa owning a transformed view of the nature and method of bearing witness. Ursa is called a “half-white heifer” (130) and a husband stealer (105) because of her “mulatto” status; yet, she cannot keep her own husband (105). Additionally, she is told that she looks Spanish (70–71) and could “pass”

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(70). Her reality and (mis)representation of being (e)raced caused by the history of the enslavement of Africans and rape stand in contrast to labels her community places on her difference: George Handley says, “Ursa’s straight, red hair and light skin means, in addition to the hatred of other women, Ursa also must contend with self-loathing for her unwanted, invasive Caucasian features” (645). She must learn a new way to navigate society’s oppressiveness. Despite such oppression, Ursa discovers a “new” way of keeping her family’s history alive: singing the blues. Her ability to learn something new, while representing something new, makes her the physical embodiment of twilight and madness. Ultimately, Jones creates a novel that reinvents a way to sing and hear the blues and which is also a New World neoslave narrative. Donia Elizabeth Allen quotes Jones as saying, “Blues acknowledges all different kinds of feelings at once…. That’s what interests me. Ambiguity” (258). Ursa cannot fight “the Man with the womb” (Athey 181), as she has been taught to fight. She must find another solution, then, for resolving the traumas caused by sexism and race(ism). This resolution is related to the transmutation of language and genre (both literary and musical). Agustí concludes that Ursa “meditates on the role that… [racist and sexist] discourses have forced her and Mutt to adopt, exposing their constructed, enforced and ideological nature” (36). In effect, Jones illustrates how the mixing of language and genre is the key to unification via twilight by 1. having Ursa be a blues singer and 2. writing Ursa’s blues song in the form of a blues novel. Normative and hegemonic raci(al/st) and sexist ideologies prevent Ursa from truly separating herself from definitions placed on her, even as she represents the possibility of something new and a discontinuation or transmutation of oppressive discourses. Jones shows how identities are painfully blurred and illustrates how Ursa tries to define herself or how she unconsciously subverts definition. Ursa attempts to separate her family’s history from herself: “That was when I told her [her mother] I wasn’t no Corregidora” (147). Tadpole describes her behavior after her womb was removed, stating, “You was cussing everybody out…. They said they didn’t know what you was” (167). Ursa’s mother says, “People didn’t know whether you was a boy or a girl … I knew you’d be a girl. I knew my body would have a girl” (117). These examples indicate how Ursa’s identity is consistently constructed by those around her, not by herself, and the subsequent madness these confinements create. Ursa’s attempts at self-­ definition are futile under the oppressive and hegemonic structures in

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which she lives. Other characters insist on defining her by her gender, race, and sexuality. Her history also defines her. Near the end of the novel, a drunk man who sexualizes Ursa has a sobering moment: “I could tell them about you, but they wouldn’t listen. And you could come over there and tell them about me, but they wouldn’t listen” (169). The man is referring to the silencing and ignoring of so-called black and gendered voices. Ursa suffers both intra- and intergroup oppression. The unifying effects that twilight can achieve through extensive self-­ reflection and acceptance of the renascence that twilight represents come at the end of the novel; the novel ends with Ursa’s and Mutt’s subjectivities showing, finally, their reconstructive potential. In an interview with Charles Rowell, Jones expresses her affinity for ambiguity, which is what also draws her to the blues (38). She does ask, though, a question that implies her intent for the ending of Corregidora to be more clear than ambivalent: she asks, “most blues transcends, doesn’t it?” (48) If the novel is a blues, specifically Ursa’s, the contradictory ending aligns with the inherent contradiction of the blues but also aligns with the contradictions present in literary twilight. Still, if the blues transcends, there must be key indicators at the end of the novel that signify the potential for a different outcome. Agustí and Stephanie Athey conclude that Ursa is whole again by the novel’s end. Athey says, “[Ursa] bear[s] down her teeth, reenacting, she believes, her Great Gram’s daring act of sexual assertion, the act that made possible her escape” (185). She believes that Ursa bears down her teeth while performing fellatio on Mutt, though it is unclear if Ursa does or does not. In Eva’s Man (1976), Jones’ second novel, Eva murders and castrates a man, which echoes the division caused by sexism and race(ism) in Corregidora. Everything that precedes this moment in the novel shows the madness caused by the repetition of history. Ursa says, “A moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin” (Jones 184). In a moment of literal repetition, a blues motif, what is different this time has to be Ursa’s refusal to repeat history. It is the subconscious reenactment of history, (re)membering of history, that enslaves Ursa and Mutt. Therefore, it is the conscious decision not to reenact history that creates an alternate dialogic space for Ursa and Mutt to (re)reread, (re) remember, and (re)reject the constructed, enforced, and ideological discourses that enslaved them before. Ursa says, “It was like I didn’t know

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how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora—like Mama when she had started talking like Great Gram” (184). Jones blurs the identities and histories of each woman in Ursa’s family line in order to illustrate the ramifications associated with the continued oppression of twilight, which is connected to the remembering of history “because stories have the power to remember the past, to shape the present, and move us toward the future…the way the past is remembered shapes how we live and identify ourselves now” (Handley 640). At the end, for the first time in the novel, Ursa’s renascence is complete: “But was what Corregidora had done to her, to them, any worse than what Mutt had done to me, than what we had done to each other, than what Mama had done to Daddy, or what he had done to her in return” (Jones 184). In this moment, Ursa recognizes the paradoxical nature of her identity, history, and culture and finally decides not to repeat history (stopping before breaking the skin). In fact, she starts a new history by crying in Mutt’s arms and verbalizing her needs (185), as he does in return. The Corregidora women, historically, have been unable to voice their fears and desires to men, like the Convent women in Paradise. The ending is the beginning of Ursa’s new beginning and reflects Jones’ call for the transformation of how society views and tells history, which includes a more nuanced understanding of twilight and madness: “Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the beginning” (54); everything said at the beginning of Ursa’s new beginning has to be said better than in the beginning of the novel and the beginning of her life. Ironically, Ursa’s epiphany happens during a sex act, which has been interpreted as evidence of Ursa’s continued enslavement. However, Clabough asserts that Jones’ book articulates Jones’ “theory [of being all-inclusive] as an encompassing aesthetic ideal: which would theoretically include everything…it would [even] see the erotic as an authentic method of expression” (635); thus, the inclusion of “everything,” including the erotic, in Corregidora serves simultaneously as the hope and hindrance Jones’ characters represent which, again, aligns with the tensions found within the twilight and Twilight. Mutt, whose name implies a type of “mixing” and newness, and Ursa want each other but do not want each other: “Then you don’t want me” (185), Ursa says. Ursa and Mutt both represent a potential rebirth or renascence. However, overcoming society’s raci(al/st) and gendered architectures, creating their own new identities, and fighting to be recognized and accepted by society as liberated leads to an ending in which they

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simultaneously need and reject each other (185). The difference, though, and the key indicator that they are, in fact, reborn and free of their own psychological shackles, is that they verbalize their wants and needs to each other. The word nothing is used over 100 times in Corregidora, which is only 186 pages long, to describe what someone says or how someone feels about something. The nothings are often indicative of everything but speak to the need for reconstructing and inventing language and hegemonic discourse, that is, the architectures of race(ism). Ursa and Mutt communicate their needs to each other at the end of the novel following Ursa’s conscious decision to not repeat the history of her Great Gram who bit Corregidora’s penis and likely broke the skin (183). This ending of the cycle of enslavement, both the literal and the psychological, highlights the need for renascence, the hope for renascence, and the ties renascence has to language and history. In illustrating twilight in a way that exposes its complexity and turns one’s eyes inward, like Morrison and Everett do, Jones is calling for the recognition and acceptance of twilight and unity through difference and similarity. Jones is not suggesting that a perfect synthesizing of culture, history, and identity is possible or even required, but that recognition and acceptance of newness (as opposed to trying to replace one hegemonic discourse with another) is necessary. A few of the novel’s characters have names that symbolize their potential for breaking the cycle of madness the architecture of race(ism) creates and creating a new home out of the twilight. Several of the main characters’ names in Corregidora coincide with an animal: Ursa (bear), Mutt (mixed-breed dog), Tadpole, and Catherine Lawson (her nickname is Cat). Since Jones muddies, not pejoratively, language and identity in the novel, considering the other meanings of these names is crucial to understanding how layered, how in the twilight, everything in the novel is. The metaphorical meanings of Ursa (“bearing witness to” and “bearing children”) are widely accepted. However, the literal translation is bear, as in the animal. Ursa’s connection to what bears represent adds another layer of ambiguity; bears represent strength and confidence, while simultaneously representing danger and child abandonment. Albert LeCount explains how female black bears raise their cubs and abandon them once they are able to hunt on their own (266). Ironically, the Corregidora women reflect a sort of emotional distance and abandonment but also tremendous strength and will to endure their unbearable history of violence, slavery, rape, and exile. Between the names “Ursa” and “Corregidora,” it seems that Ursa is predestined to experience her

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hardships and the difficulty of self-definition based on the essence of her name. Still, within her name, there is also an implied strength and hope for her own redirection of history and identity. She can transcend the madness. Mutt’s oppressed identity is also predestined. He is named after what one calls a mixed-breed dog. He is haunted by his own history: “He said that his great-grandfather…had worked as a blacksmith, hiring hisself out, and bought his freedom, and then he had bought his wife’s freedom. But then he got in debt to these men, and he didn’t have any money, so they come and took his wife” (Jones 151). She was considered his property, having been purchased by him. Here, the patriarchal-racist-classist discourses that the novel examines collide: Mutt’s great-grandfather owns a woman; his great-grandmother is “black” and this is why she is considered property by law; his great-grandfather is poor and has property taken from him to cover his debts. Through Mutt’s history, Jones more explicitly connects Brazil and the Caribbean’s history of colonization and slavery with that of the US. She connects the African diaspora and illustrates the transnational, transcultural identity the novel calls attention to. Mutt reassures Ursa, saying, “Whichever way you look at it, we ain’t them [their ancestors]” (151). However, he displays, as Ursa does, his likeness to “them” when he reenacts the selling of “black female” bodies on the auction block and threatens to “sell” Ursa to an admirer at Happy’s (the local bar Ursa sings at): “I said I got a piece a ass for sale, anybody wont to bid on it” (159). Mutt tells Ursa that he will sell her “as soon as you [Ursa] get up on that stage” (159). Typically, Mutt’s name expresses the ambiguous nature of his characterization. Mutt, too, suffers from the same architecture that Ursa experiences: “Stained with another’s past as well as our [Ursa and Mutt’s] own” (45). Ursa does not remember what happened when she fell and needed a subsequent hysterectomy but ascribes the blame, in a display of “madness” (Agustí 29), to Mutt. Her misremembering muddies Mutt’s identity and how the reader might see him. Furthermore, his muddiness is reflected at the beginning of the novel: “That was when I fell” (3), Ursa says. In this way, he does not just represent his creolized status but also represents the dog Ursa believes him to be. Every man in Corregidora is subject to the Corregidora women’s love and hate, disdain, and desire. Mutt’s identity is minimized to his raced and gendered body, in as much as Ursa is minimized to hers. Similarly, Tadpole’s name reflects twilight, the possibility for renascence. Tadpoles morph into frogs or toads, not quite a caterpillar into a

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butterfly image but representative of an unavoidable metamorphosis, indeed. Tadpole is another “mixed” character in the novel: “‘My grandmother was white’ he [Tadpole] said. ‘She was a orphan and they had her working out in the fields along with the blacks and treated her like she was one’” (Jones 13). His physical identity and his name represent his potential for reconstructing America’s raci(al/st) and gendered/sexist houses. He shows signs early on which indicate his potential for being the catalyst for his own and Ursa’s enlightenment: “Procreation. That could also be a slave-breeder’s way of thinking” (22), he says. He recognizes the psychological impact of hegemonic discourse and holds up a mirror to Ursa, who until the end of the novel denies the paradoxical aspect of her experiences and how her experiences affect her identity. Like Ursa and Mutt, Tadpole is not too far removed from injustice himself; he tells Ursa about how his father bought land for his family to flourish on but when his mother went to the courthouse to claim the land, “somebody had tore one of the pages out the book” (78). He encourages self-reflection but, unlike Mutt, falls very short of his own redemption when he cheats on Ursa with a young girl. Thus, his nickname also represents the shape of a sperm and the creation of life, which is ironic since his marriage to Ursa would have left him childless. Tadpole is subjugated—by Ursa, society, and himself—to sexualize women and, therefore, reduces himself to the content of testicles. Just as Ursa’s and Mutt’s names simultaneously represent what seem to be dichotomies, Tadpole’s does, too. Corregidora not only examines heterosexual relationships, like that of Tadpole and Ursa or Mutt and Ursa, the novel also includes discourses of homosexuality to trouble the house of gender. Cat’s name complicates her characterization, too. Cat is Ursa’s best friend and plays the role of caretaker when Ursa is recovering from surgery. Her identification as a lesbian drives Ursa away from her and causes her to exile herself to another city. Cats are known for having nine lives, and Cat seems to live a few herself. Her marginalized status aligns with Ursa’s marginalization: she is a woman operating within a raci(al/st) society. Cat is further marginalized by society and by Ursa, who operates within the strictures society has given her, since being a lesbian goes against the teachings of patriarchy. Adrienne Rich describes the compulsory heterosexuality that is displayed in Corregidora as a sort of “chastity belt; child marriage; erasure of lesbian existence (except as exotic and perverse) in art, literature, [and] film” (1596). Indeed, Cat’s sexuality is depicted as violent and perverse when she threatens to hurt her teenage

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lover Jeffy: “If you bother her again I’ll give you a fist to fuck” (Jones 47). She slaps Jeffy (47) and says, “I grab the shit out of you, you little nigger” (47). Here, Cat’s previously sympathetic and loving characterization turns lesbian, cruel, predatory, and vicious; this also serves as a repetition of Corregidora, Mutt, and Tadpole’s treatment of the Corregidora women. Later, Cat says, “You don’t know what it’s like to feel foolish all day in a white woman’s kitchen and then have to come home and feel foolish in the bed at night with your man” (64). Ironically, Ursa does, in fact, know how it feels to feel foolish in bed with a man. Suddenly, the distinction between Cat’s and Ursa’s sexuality is blurred. What could be interpreted as Jones’ repudiation of homosexuality still reads as her repudiation of sexism and race(ism). Hegemonic discourses influence how Cat, a lesbian, interacts with her love interest. The twilight (and madness) Cat, therefore, represents through her lesbian status is, then, suppressed, just as the other characters’ twilight is suppressed or prevented. Cat’s name mimics her life experiences or vice versa: cats are sometimes referred to as pussies, a vulgar word for vaginas. The word pussy is also used to imply that someone is a scaredy-­ cat. Like Ursa, Tadpole, and Mutt, Cat is predestined to be a lesbian, to hide within society’s raci(al/st) and sexist houses, and to somehow land on her feet. Through Cat, in conjunction with the other characters, Jones calls for the recognition of what has become a new type of enslavement and what can be a new house, a new home. As in Twilight and Erasure, it is only through this recognition, though, that healing can happen. In addition to its content and characters, the form of Corregidora also represents a twilight. Allen explains how Jones “improvises and adapts various blues techniques to fit the need of her fiction” (261). From the call and response to the use of repetition within the novel to the ambiguity and tension to the very presence of a blues singer, Jones rewrites not just the genre of historiographic metafiction but the blues. She maintains some blues conventions, as described above, but recreates the genre by writing a blues novel. According to Athey, Houston Baker’s model of the blues posits that “African American literature, like the blues, explains what one can’t explain creating a space in which some new representation of daily and communal experience might be born” (183). Similarly, Jones says the following in her book: “New conditions and actions create new expressions, while the older words often have a modified meaning since the objects for which they stood have now disappeared or have been substantially changed” (Clabough 637). Jones’ recreation of the blues through a

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blues text that extends into discourses on reconstruction illustrates her acknowledgment of the old stories and her call for the displacement and recontextualization of these stories to prevent traumatic repetition through raci(al/st) discourse and teachings. Although Ursa sings frequently throughout the novel, the reader does not hear Ursa’s own blues songs within the text. Her song is the novel. The novel displays all her hate and love, desire and disdain, forgiveness and transgressions, and confusion and clarity. All these components of the novel are salient aspects of the blues. These are all also salient aspects of how writers presented in this course illustrate twilight and madness. In the end, Ursa’s subjectivity is reinstated because of her creation of something new (the novel), acknowledgment of something old (the blues and her family’s slave narrative), subversion of hegemonic discourse (she stops repeating her family’s history and her own history by finally expressing her needs and fears), and her reunion with Mutt, who also represents a necessary newness, a rebirth. She gains so much from the twilight of the novel and begins to transcend the madness. Ultimately, she stands apart from her society’s raci(al/st) house and begins to create a home for herself and others, like Mutt. Reading Corregidora through the theory of twilight and madness illustrates the effects of globalization: transnational, transcultural, and transregional identities, according to Jones and many other writers. Recognizing how authors participate in such discourses can lead to more nuanced interpretations of their novels and help steer readers away from more unilateral readings. Many writers aim to reconstruct and redesign society’s raci(al/ st) houses. Discourses on twilight encourage the recognition of differences and similarities, the acknowledgment and celebration of newness, and the recognition of tension to overcome tension from within frequently oppressed communities. Texts illustrating twilight, as described in this book, ask the reader to become more self-reflective; these texts also target the people the text portrays, which matters against claims of perpetuating stereotypes. Jones’ target audience is the so-called black community. She identifies ways the community is fractured and shows how and why it can and should heal and transform by forcing a full reckoning with America’s raci(al/st) history and present while also imagining and encouraging a post-racist future. Similarly, Junot Díaz creates a twilight and illustrates the madness of the architecture of race(ism) in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to inspire healing and the reconstruction of the architecture. Although his novel can easily be used as an argument against race, too, it

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is better read as a novel illustrating and supporting Caribbeanists’ theories of creolization, which depends on the acknowledgment and definition of “blackness.” Students will be encouraged to recognize how blackness, though, even in such contexts, extends and, ultimately, does not include race. They will be encouraged to think about alternative ways to describe what one means by “blackness” that reject raci(al/st) language and conceptions. This novel (in addition to Erasure and Corregidora) enriches the discussion of race(ism) and architecture in other texts because polyvocality is required even in a class designed to educate students about other existing (and unpopular) ways of being and seeing literature. Published in 2007, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (TBWL) is narrated by Yunior. Yunior “embodies the stereotypical Dominican machismo” (19) but also reflects an ability to subsume other languages and cultures, like that of the stereotypical nerd. He is definitely the “opposite” of Monk in several ways but, like Monk, he writes. He also appreciates a vast array of artistic expression, unlike Monk. Coincidentally, the novel is Yunior’s (re)telling of Oscar’s life based on Oscar’s writings and shared stories and, it seems, Yunior’s imagination. Whereas Monk often feels awkward, Yunior can mesh into any place and space and “fit in.” Yunior narrates the brief wondrous life of Oscar de León in a narrative form that highlights Yunior’s and, therefore, Díaz’s “extreme blending of genres and traditions” (Miller 92). The language of the prose weaves in and out of both high and low languages and cultures, including that of hip hop and science fiction to historiographic texts. The novel breaches geographical and even universal boundaries and encompasses numerous speculative fiction references. Oscar Wao is a bastardization of Oscar Wilde, who Yunior’s friends mistake de León for when he dresses up as Doctor Who for Halloween (Díaz 180). Unlike Yunior, Oscar is a stereotypical nerd and a “very un-Dominican” (11) American whose mother (Beli) was exiled from the Dominican Republic (DR) to the US after her life was threatened by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina’s dictatorship. In the end, Lola, Oscar’s sister, is the only survivor of the de León family because Beli dies from breast cancer. Yunior ascribes the de León family’s “bad luck” (Díaz 7) to fukú: “The fukú curse is a type of original sin of the New World that derives its power from the outrage of slavery… [F]ukú drives the novel to its bittersweet end” (51), says Christopher González. The ending is indeed bittersweet: as the title foreshadows, Oscar is murdered when he is only 23 years old by corrupt Dominican policia.

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Díaz’s use of “intertexts as a crucial narrative feature” (González “The Brief” 52) in TBWL has caused critics to analyze his use of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four, along with other science fiction and comic references. Fremio Sepulveda posits that Díaz “strategically adapts them [The Lord of the Rings and Fantastic Four] to construct a narrative that intervenes in Dominican history to critique and subvert official national discourses of Trujillo’s repressive political regime and to represent his [Díaz’s] characters as heroic survivors” (15–16). González also focuses on Díaz’s use of these texts and argues that “the stories of Kirby and Tolkien give Oscar and Yunior a means not of escaping the world, but rather a means of understanding their world” (79). He concludes that it is the “inherent hope of the science fiction references” that draws Yunior’s and Oscar’s attention. Like Sepulveda, González concludes that TBWL “affirms the power of an author, and fiction more generally, to bring to light what the historical record omits” (58). Furthermore, T.S. Miller expounds on the other critics’ analyses, saying that “Oscar’s fanatical devotion to science fiction, his own appreciation of the genre ultimately legitimates it as a powerful lens through which to view the world” (92). In another essay, González says that the novel’s “scope aligns itself with the epic, spanning both time (as evidenced through generational links within the narrative) and geographic space” (145). He analyzes how the intertexts and footnotes “highlight issues of race” (164) and considers what these features mean in relation to the entire novel. Ultimately, he concludes that the paratextuality and intertextuality of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao illuminates how Díaz seeks to inscribe the African página en blanco of Dominican culture with a significant insistence of Afro Latinas in U.S. fiction. What is interesting, however, is that Díaz uses both historical accounts related to the African ancestry of Dominican Americans and fictional works in order to tell the story of his tragic hero, Oscar de León. (165)

This chapter identifies the novel as a national epic whose nation is the African diaspora, which is something critics have largely overlooked even if they mention its national (Timothy Brennan) or epic (González) qualities, or the significance of Africa or diaspora within the novel. Rune Grauland, Tim Lanzendörfer, and Elena Machado Sáez center their discussions on the Afro-Dominican American diaspora or the Dominican

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American diaspora. Rachel Norman analyzes the connection between language and communal identity in the book, stating, Through Wao, Díaz announces his ethnic particularity and the reader’s own specificity while simultaneously making a move back to a universalism that recognizes how we are all unknowable humans who cannot know everything. (47)

It is within this twilight space of the particular and universal that this chapter argues that not only does TBWL illustrate how diaspora is nation and nation is diaspora, but that the diaspora in question is African. This chapter examines how TBWL, if read as a national epic that names diaspora as nation and, inversely, nation as diaspora, transmutes our understanding of genre—speculative fiction, epic, and historiography—language, nation, and diaspora. Through the architecture of the novel, Díaz erases the monoisms and unilateral readings and calls for the recognition of diaspora as nation and, perhaps, nation as diaspora. He answers Édouard Glissant’s call for modern epic literature with an epic that is so epic it resists categorization and can be studied in African American, American, Latin American, and Caribbean literature courses. The madness the architecture of race(ism) causes in the novel lends to the magnitude of the novel and the effect of madness on the reader, too. Just as Twilight, Erasure, and Corregidora end ambiguously and by offering a twilight moment to the reader, TBWL leaves open a door or window to a new home, too. First, this chapter contextualizes the novel with the brief wonderous history of the Dominican Republic according to Yunior because the history informs the analysis in immeasurable ways and is included in the novel. Second, the chapter examines the novel as a national epic—diaspora as nation and nation as diaspora—based on its own historical foundation and the present chapter’s backdrop of madness and twilight. The Dominican Republic’s history began before colonization of the island occurred but, for the purpose of this discussion, this chapter focuses on the history following its colonization. Admiral Colon arrived on Hispaniola in 1492, “unleashing a great planetary curse on the New World Americas” (Saldívar 121), according to Yunior. In the novel, Yunior calls this curse fukú americanus; fukú “came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved;…it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began” (Díaz 1). Here, Díaz places the novel firmly in the context of Africa in his opening lines and the Caribbean

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immediately after, both with his reference to the Tainos and the Antilles: “it [fukú] was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles” (1), Yunior writes. In his explanation of a Dominican superstition that originates from Africa—fukú— Yunior connects the novel and the Dominican Republic to other Caribbean countries that share a similar history of colonization, the Middle Passage, and slavery. Yunior argues that the Dominican Republic’s fukú lives through Trujillo’s subsequent dictatorship. Trujillo, also known as El Jefe, “the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface” (2), ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and saw himself as “a paternal absolutist” (Higman 259). Historically, he maintains a “supernatural” (3, 246) type of reputation because of how pervasive his control was. Yunior explains, “If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fua, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea, fua, a boulder would fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fua, the shrimp you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow” (3). The historical record that González and Sepulveda allude to as being expunged from Dominican discourses on history is present in the novel and key to interpreting the novel through the Caribbean epic lenses suggested above. One of Trujillo’s “Outstanding accomplishments include[s]: the 1937 genocide against the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican community” (3, 218). The fukú Trujillo represents, then, is one that includes the erasure of “blackness,” almost the opposite of eracesure, in the Dominican Republic and, as mentioned above, is a driving force in the novel. This, of course, is ironic since fukú stems from tragedies imposed on “black” people by Europeans but simultaneously causes the eradication of “blacks by blacks.” The book cover history of this novel is generative, too, because Oscar is described as having very dark brown skin and curly hair. An audio edition whitewashes Oscar’s image. Another common edition depicts a bloody profile of Oscar. The profile illuminates this chapter’s assertion that Oscar transcends, in life and death, his society’s race(ism) and prejudice. Yunior calls Trujillo a “sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin” (2, emphasis added), indicating that Trujillo, at least according to him, literally attempts to embody “whiteness.” Talk about madness. Through Yunior, Díaz illustrates the painful history of race(ism) “that has been neither celebrated nor mourned” (González 64) in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. The architecture of race(ism) in the Dominican Republic and the US is relativized and problematized within the novel,

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and the class, because both inspire extreme madness. In an interview with Edwidge Danticat, Díaz says, “[t]here are, as you and I well know, certain kinds of people that no one wants to build the image of a nation around. Even if these people are in fact the nation itself. Poor dark people are not usually central to a nation’s self-conception” (89–90). Indeed, TBWL puts “blackness” at the forefront of the “history” both of the Dominican Republic and the US; it relays and depicts the “consequences of the efforts of whitening, or blanqueamiento” (González 59). Yunior explains how Trujillo “came to control nearly every aspect of the DR’s political, cultural, social, and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror; [he] treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master” (Díaz 2). Trujillo’s rule was “one of the longest, most damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere” (3). Indeed, according to B.W. Higman, Trujillo was supported “at almost every point” by the US (260). Yunior also mentions Joaquin Balaguer’s rule (Balaguer’s era was on and off from 1966 to 1996); Balaguer was like Trujillo and was also supported by the US government (Higman 260–61). There was much civil unrest in the 1990s, according to Higman, and the Dominican people elected a “government committed to act against corruption and promote reform” (261) in 1996. The country has been working toward repairing the damage caused by the previous dictatorships and the aftermath of colonialization and slavery (Higman). TBWL summarily connects Europe and Africa with the Dominican Republic, the Dominican Republic with the Caribbean, and the Caribbean with the US in its first three pages, which explicate the Dominican Republic’s history and the history of fukú before narrating Oscar’s story. TBWL is often assigned to the Latin or American literary canons, and Díaz begins by situating the novel outside of both Latin and American geographical spaces, pointing the telescope toward the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. He then turns the telescope toward the US.  Jose Saldívar explains the geographical connections Díaz makes, saying that Oscar Wao grows “up in the age of Ronald Reagan’s imperial United States of America but with Admiral Colon in 1492, unleashing a great planetary curse on the New World Americas, and with the afterlife of the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Leonides Trujillo, who ruled the island from 1931–1961” (121). Indeed, the quest for the rediscovery of the characters’ roots proves to be a central trope in TBWL because of Díaz’s rhizome-like depiction of identity. Historically, this “journey identity” “consolidates itself implicitly

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at first (‘my root is the strongest’) and then is explicitly exported as a value (‘a person’s worth is determined by his root’)” (Glissant 16). In other words, the poetics of relation, according to Glissant, are influenced, in part, by a Western ideological premise that one’s root is singular, identifiable, and superior and, thus, gives value to its holder much like the discourse of race(ism). He continues saying that “[t]he conquered or visited peoples are thus forced into a long and painful quest after an identity whose first task will be opposition to the denaturing process introduced by the conqueror. A tragic variation of a search for identity” (17). Although Glissant is not talking here about Western concepts of race(ism), it is applicable. This chapter accepts the task of opposing the denaturing process (by rejecting human nature, i.e., unraced and eracing them) introduced and continued by the West. One issue behind this identity journey is that the conquered or visited peoples he refers to become defined by the colonizers and conquerors. They effectively become othered and are defined by their difference, as opposed to their differences. Thus, their search for identity, or their root(s), is problematic and “a limitation from the beginning” (17). Díaz illustrates and complicates this search for identity through many of his characters. Just as Díaz turns the telescope toward Africa, the origins of humanity, and also people who would become “black” in Western ideology and spaces, in the first lines of the novel, Glissant turns his toward Africa in the opening chapter of Poetics of Relation. One section in particular merits attention: Experience of the abyss [the Middle Passage] lies inside and outside the abyss. The torment of those who never escaped it: straight from the belly of the slave ship into the violet belly of the ocean depths they went. But their ordeal did not die; it quickened into this continuous/discontinuous thing: the panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed. The unconscious memory of the abyss served as the alluvium for these metamorphoses. (7)

Here, Glissant describes what he explains is the fodder for Caribbean art and imagination. While the Middle Passage is “history,” it continues within the present experiences of people within the “black” diaspora, focusing on the Caribbean and the Americas (33). This “unconscious memory” fosters an understanding of multiplicity, of creolization (32), since creolization and multiplicity, as we know it today, was caused by the

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Middle Passage (Allen 47). Saldívar agrees, expounding on TBWL and saying that colonization in the novel “continue[s] in the form of a socio-­ cultural hierarchy of European and non-European” (123). The continuation both Glissant and Saldívar reference includes the postcolonial dictatorships many Caribbean countries endured after gaining independence and the complicated dwindling of the US, often backing dictators like Trujillo until it did not benefit them anymore, which impacted the countries in ways similar to colonization. This continuation also includes the raci(al/st) rhetoric of the US, or fukú, that, within the Dominican Republic specifically, “fueled an already entrenched disdain for blackness within the upper echelons of Dominican society” (Sepulveda 19–20). It is this history of colonization, the Middle Passage, and neo-colonization that perpetuate the painful search for identity among people in the Caribbean and the US, as described in TBWL. The quest for identity for members of the “black” diaspora, then, coincides with the feeling of rootlessness since the fukú Yunior describes and the neo-colonialism Glissant describes are inextricably connected to history and hegemonic discourse. The quest for identity for the “predominantly black Caribbean arrivals, coming into the U.S. almost always translates into relocating into ethnic enclaves where they encounter stagnant socio-economic prospects similar racial constraints and struggles similar to those of black Americans” (18). When speaking about the connections between history, rootedness, and identity, Glissant mentions the “linked histories of peoples” (33). Society’s binary—black and white— way of thinking often depicts history as being one event or another; every event happens in a linear fashion; there is a good/bad, superior/inferior, winner/loser, and victor/victim. Yet, writers like Díaz, Everett, Jones, and Smith work to undo hegemonic ideologies, highlight the madness wreaked by said ideologies, and trouble society’s vision of history and identity. One traditional convention of the epic genre, according to John Sutherland, is that the epic “evolves out of myth” (14). Díaz’s novel evolves out of many myths—here, meaning the traditional stories that both explain the early history of a people and explain social or natural phenomena (Thompson). One of these myths bears further discussion because it drives the narrative: fukú. TBWL’s opening lines, as mentioned above, begin what Yunior says is a factual telling of Oscar’s family and the historical context surrounding the narrative as it relates to a popular Dominican myth or superstition. Fukú “ain’t just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare” (Díaz 2). While fukú can be

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understood as an evil force within the comic-book quality of the novel, at a basic level, fukú derives from Dominican myth. Yunior tells the reader about the power of fukú: “It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions.’ In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (5), he warns. Fukú is so powerful that it meets its victims in many forms and sometimes “works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral or the U.S. in paddies outside of Saigon…it always—I mean always—gets its man” (5). Fukú is responsible for Beli’s beating and exile to the US, Oscar’s maternal grandfather’s imprisonment, torture, and death, and Oscar’s death. In fact, Yunior says that he is motivated to write TBWL, a “fukú story” (6), as a zafa—counterspell—against fukú. The connections critics make between the novel and speculative fiction are easily made in relation to fukú and zafa (evil force and counterspell); however, the narrator designates the novel as a “Fukú story” (6) and speculates that Oscar would be displeased with “this designation. Fukú story. He was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in” (6). Yunior’s designation of the novel is, then, at least in his mind, outside of the realm of sci-fi and fantasy and, perhaps, into the realm of epic. Further, fukú is a metaphor and synonym for the madness the present chapter theorizes.5 A second traditional convention of epic writing is that epics must “deal seriously with the question of death. It must involve the fate of a large group of people. It must explore a vast spatial and temporal expanse” (Shankman 72). Not only does fukú drive the narrative, it determines the fate of generations of people, both within Oscar’s family and in the larger communities of the Dominican Republic and the US. Like Grendel or the dragon in Beowulf or the Cyclops in the Aeneid, fukú is Díaz’s monster who threatens the fate of the diasporas—Afro-Latino—and the DR and the US.  In addition, Díaz “could have followed in the tradition of his birth nation [the DR] and ‘whitened’ his protagonists and narrators” (González 62). Instead, the novel spans several continents and centuries. Race(ism) is going to be the end for many societies operating within its realm, according to Díaz. He acknowledges (quotes explicated above) that the collective acknowledgment of fukú in the Caribbean by Caribbean nations is what is necessary to overcome fukú (Danticat 90), but until that happens, according to Díaz, the fate of millions of people is still in 5

 Fukú and madness are used interchangeable for the remainder of this chapter.

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jeopardy. Fukú represents the attempt to erase “blackness” in the novel, which equates, in many ways, to the attempt to erase race(ism) from history in the US and from the present day without actually addressing it. “Supernatural” beings intervene, in true epic form, to save Beli and Oscar, though Oscar eventually loses the battle. Epics often include the intervention or interference of supernatural beings. The mystical mongoose plays this role in the novel. According to National Geographic, mongooses are native to Africa and Eurasia; however, in the 1800s, mongooses were introduced to the Caribbean cane fields (National Geographic). Indiscriminate predators and known for being able to kill snakes and being immune to snake venom (National Geographic), mongooses protected the cane fields from pests. A mongoose protects Afro-Latinos in TBWL. Yunior says, “The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Africa and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean” (151). He continues asserting that the Mongoose is an enemy of “kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies” (151). The Mongoose, a black one, saves Beli after she is brutally beaten by Trujillo’s supporters: “[s]o as Beli was flitting in and out of life, there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt…You have to rise” (149). Beli realizes later that “she was saved” (151). Similarly, the Mongoose appears to Oscar when he is suicidal: “he [Oscar] would call it the Golden Mongoose…It was very placid, very beautiful. Gold-limned eyes that reached through you” (190). Thus, given the other “supernatural” force of fukú, the Mongoose’s role in this epic is to counteract fukú. It represents rootlessness (known as a traveler and having experienced its own sort of Middle Passage) and, therefore, is assigned to protect Afro-Dominicans. The Mongoose appears in the US (Oscar) and the DR (Beli), so it travels with the diaspora and attempts to protect them from fukú (i.e., madness). In his epic, part of Díaz’s depiction of death and fate involves neo-­ colonialism. As presented in the novel, Díaz draws parallels between Yunior the narrator and Trujillo the dictator. Critics have devoted much attention to “Yunior the Dictatorial Narrator” since, after all, he determines what to tell and how to tell it. His motives are unclear, though speculation has it that his guilty conscience causes him to write Oscar’s story. His reliability is questionable, to say the least. He represents the very machismo Dominican values Oscar lacks and Díaz critiques: “[I] [c]ouldn’t

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keep my rabo in my pants, even though she was the most beautiful fucking girl in the world” (311), Yunior explains after cheating on Lola. Trujillo exhibits these values tenfold: “Hiding your doe-eyed, large-breasted daughter from Trujillo, however, was anything but easy… If you think the average Dominican guy’s bad, Trujillo was five thousand times worse” (217). Díaz does illustrate the paradox that exists between dictator and author by choosing to have Yunior narrate TBWL; Sepulveda asserts that Díaz uses Yunior to call into “question his community’s troubling adherence to machismo values and a European racial aesthetic” (16). Yunior’s narration and ownership of these values, though, also aligns with another convention of epics: epics “carry values which are ‘heroic’ in tone…they show mankind we may say, at its most manly” (Sutherland 13). Indeed, Díaz uses the values attributed to masculinity in his epic in order to subvert them, which is also not unlike epic tradition; Virgil’s Aeneid, according to Steven Shankman, undermines the poet’s “avowed intentions, for there are many passages in Virgil’s epic that appear to cast doubt on the poet’s complete commitment to the ideological certainties which his patron, Augustus, wanted his commissioned poet to affirm” (74). Epics are not told by the characters but by an outsider of sorts. Thus, Yunior has to tell the hero’s story, and since Oscar does not exhibit the required “manliness” depicted in epics, other men in the narrative have to possess “manly” qualities. Yunior’s reliability should be questioned but should not be doubted, at the same time. This is, perhaps, one benefit to reading TBWL as an epic. Edward Baugh’s essay on the West Indian’s quarrel with history echoes Wilson Harris’ discussion of history in that both scholars point out the writers’ reliance (or suggested reliance) on imagination. Harris posits that to break free from the hegemonic ideological view of history and identity the (wo)man must use his/her/their imagination: Harris strives “to concentrate in some degree on those vestiges as part and parcel of the arts of imagination. In this respect I believe the possibility exists for us to become involved in perspectives of renascence which can bring into play a figurative meaning beyond an apparently real world or prison of history” (10). He continues, stating that “a cleavage exists… between historical conventions in the Caribbean and Guianas and the arts of the imagination” (10). In other words, Caribbean writers especially, according to Glissant, Baugh, Harris, and Derek Walcott, must transmute the meaning of “history” to include fictional historiographical texts. Imagination is key, as are epic stratagems (Harris 10). Yunior is not completely unlike Trujillo, which is

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easy to interpret as having a negative connotation. However, Yunior is the unsung hero of the novel; he brings to fruition much of what Glissant and the scholars named above describe. He testifies to the madness and offers readers a twilight exit and entrance. Like an epic, TBWL is shaped from historical and legendary materials that describe the “birth of a nation” (Sutherland 15). While Sutherland argues that epics cannot be written in modern times, Díaz’s modern epic disproves Sutherland’s theory. The birth of a nation the novel narrates is that of diaspora, which is radical. Yunior is figuratively the writer of TBWL and, as such, he makes the editorial decision to include an epigraph that places the novel in the Americas, the Caribbean, and a fictitious galaxy. Critics have already extensively treated Díaz’s use of Fantastic Four; however, more time needs to be spent looking at his use of an excerpt from Derek Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight.” The section Yunior includes ends with “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” (Epigraph). Immediately following “I’m a nation,” the narrative opens with a telescope facing Africa, Europe, and the US, as expounded above. The bridges Yunior builds between the continents and countries accomplish three feats: 1. he gives nuance to the hegemonic and homogeneous definitions of identity and rootedness some authors write against, 2. he links the “histories of peoples” (Glissant 33), and 3. he suggests that diaspora is nation. However, the rest of the novel indicates that diaspora as nation is in its infancy and will remain there if fukú, and all the curse represents, is not acknowledged, battled, and defeated. This is why TBWL is a fukú story, as Yunior calls it. “Traditionally, epic has dealt with war” (72), Shankman writes. The war one expects in an epic is, in fact, a war against fukú, a war against the erasure of “blackness” and the eracesure caused by race, in the first place, a war against neo-­ colonialism, a war against unilateral narratives and mono-isms. Isis, Lola’s daughter and Oscar’s niece, represents the beginning of what could become a great nation. Díaz mentions believing that Caribbean nations need to acknowledge the existence of fukú at “a collective level” (Danticat 90). He also asserts that, in his view, the novel ends in a hopeful way because Oscar’s family will not “openly admit that there’s a fukú” (90) but do whatever they can to protect Isis from fukú, something Oscar’s mother did not do for her children. According to Díaz’s own beliefs regarding the necessary acknowledgment of fukú, Yunior is a hero because he acknowledges fukú and shares his knowledge with the reader; however, Isis is also destined for greatness. Isis means “throne” (Tyldesley). Isis is

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also the namesake of an Egyptian goddess known as “the ideal mother and wife, as well as the patroness of nature and magic. She was the friend of slaves, sinners, artisans and the downtrodden, but she also listened to the prayers of the wealthy, maidens, aristocrats and rulers” (Tyldesley). Thus, as written within her name, Isis is destined, hopefully, to “take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it [fukú]” (Díaz 330–331), Yunior writes. Not only does TBWL start by metaphorically raising a national flag of the African diaspora, it shows us how “[c]ivilization, the epic tells us, had to fight to the death to come into being” (Sutherland 16) by fighting fukú. Furthermore, it ends as Sutherland says all epics do: “An epic is a long poem [text] with a great nation behind it—or, more precisely, in front of it” (16). Isis and Yunior are, potentially, the start of a great diasporic nation. This diasporic nation has to continue to recognize fukú and fight against it, protect its children from it, and use its imagination to bear witness to its history: a part of Walcott’s poem not included in the epigraph of TBWL says, “I had no nation now but the imagination” (Section 3). Yunior’s muse is Oscar. After his death, Oscar comes to Yunior in dreams with “pages [that] are blank” (325). González posits that the blank pages “remind the readers that there is always some aspect of Díaz’s fiction (and consequently, Dominican history) that keeps full knowledges just out of a reader’s reach” (65). The blank pages, though, also represent the need for Caribbean authors to write and fill those blanks pages one by one and the reader’s need to imagine what those blank pages say. It is after having recurrent dreams with Oscar holding blank pages or approaching him with “no face” (65) that Yunior changes his life (65) and starts writing. Oscar, truly, lost the war to fukú, as did his mother, but Yunior and Isis represent hope. Regardless of why Yunior writes Oscar’s story, Yunior writes Oscar’s story. He recognizes the blank pages of history, the quarrel with history that Baugh and Walcott address, and writes, as do Oscar and Lola, as a coping strategy and as a form of imaginative resistance. He references the silencing of writers and actually points out the tension and similarities between writers and dictators: “What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway?… Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like” (97). Jesus de Galindez, Oscar, and Abelard (Beli’s father and Oscar’s grandfather) are three silenced writers that Yunior mentions and, in a way, gives voice to. Although he lives in New Jersey and the dictatorships of the DR have been quenched, fukú still exists and can and will “get its man” (5). Oscar’s

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missing manuscripts (334) imply a continued silencing; still, Yunior writer TBWL despite the risks involved. Sepulveda says: “[o]nly when this past [of fukú] finally becomes history for the Dominican people can we begin to, as Karin Usanna calls for, ‘open ourselves to a hybrid Afro-Diasporic vision of the Americas and close the gap between myth, folklore and social history’” (31). Thus, the dangerous repetition of history that Yunior calls attention to—“If they noticed similarities between Past and Present they did not speak of it” (Díaz 301)—is potentially, thanks to Yunior, stopped. Therefore, he is less Trujillo-like and more heroic. Another salient aspect of epic literature is extreme acts of courage and heroism. Aside from Yunior’s courage, the novel is littered with heroic individuals. Unlike most epics, TBWL has a female heroine: Beli. Sepulveda says, “the Cabrals [Beli and Abelard], who become local legend and equated with tragic Greek heroes, for they too seem incapable of altering their impending doom” (24). Indeed, Beli endures the patriarchal, racist, and classist (fukú) ideologies of her time “living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated” (Díaz 80). Consequently, she is in a constant state of turmoil and exile, which is also a convention of the epic. Before her death, she speaks “about how trapped they all felt” (81) under Trujillo’s rule. Her fighting spirit is what makes her heroic and, Sutherland would say, manly: She wasn’t una pendeja. I’d seen her slap grown men, push white police officers onto their asses… She had raised me and my brother by herself, she had worked three jobs until she could buy this house we live in, she had survived being abandoned by my [Lola’s] father, she had come from Santo Domingo all by herself and as a young girl she claimed to have been beaten, set on fire, left for dead. (59–60)

Beli almost dies three times before escaping to the US and dying of cancer. Yunior calls her “the Empress of Diaspora” (106) and a “Founding Mother” (115) whose “Last Days” (113) are attributed to disease which, Yunior says, was ultimately caused by fukú. Her dysfunctional nation comprises “the hospital, her children, her cancer, America” (113). Her inability to acknowledge fukú and protect her children from it causes Oscar and Lola to “inevitably suffer the transmission of a trauma” (Sepulveda 29), as with Ursa in Corregidora. Yunior’s use of capitalization and his alternate naming of Beli both highlight the epic aspects of the novel, including the fact that Díaz is saying diaspora is nation. Immigrants like Beli are the

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kings and queens of diaspora, but only children like Yunior and Isis can save the “kingdom” and beat fukú. They can turn twilight into day or night depending on their preference. True to conventions of the epic, like Yunior and Beli, Oscar’s actions generate a lot of the novel’s action. He exhibits internal exile and errantry caused by his seeming uprootedness. His uprootedness is not caused by his mobility (his mother having immigrated from the DR and returned to and from the DR) but by his liminal position as each society’s outcast. He is “un-Dominican” (11), un-American, called a “faggot” (19), and is a nerd. His affinity for literature—“Genres” (20)—and movies or TV shows “where there were monsters or spaceships or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil villains” (21) does illustrate his inability to escape fukú. Sepulveda points out that Oscar is deeply affected when he reads certain lines from Lord of the Rings: “‘and out of Far Harod black-­ men like half-troll’ (307) which instead of allowing him to escape into an imaginary world where he can find solace from his quotidian troubles reinforces a Europeanist bias and causes him to relive the affliction” (21). In fact, most of the references to speculative fiction would, indeed, reinforce society’s binary way of thinking; even the anime references add layers of fictional colonization, “whitening,” and marginalization. However, González concludes that speculative fiction becomes “a means of understanding their world” (emphasis added, 79), as opposed to causing additional affliction. Oscar’s identity journey does depict how he falls victim to hegemonic ideology of rootedness, race(ism), nationality, and identity: “The white kids [in the US] looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy” (49). Unlike Yunior’s ability to “get in where he fits in,” Oscar works unconvincingly to convince others and himself that he belongs. Like Monk and Ursa, he is “abnormal.” He does not belong. His failure to assimilate into a “single” culture (American and Dominican) and his physical representation of in-betweenness (Afro-Latino) cause him to remain in liminal status until the end of the novel. Yunior names Oscar “[o]ur hero” (11) because he knowingly battles fukú (306). Unlike Oscar, Yunior, having immigrated from the DR when he was nine years old (253), is able to mask his “otakuness [Japanese term for nerd]” (21). His ability to flow in and out of different cultures and languages underscores Glissant’s views on exile and errantry: “the root is

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monolingual… Epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Chanson de Geste, the Aeneid… tell of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root)” (Glissant 15). Yunior does go against the root by creating a multilingual narrative and illustrating Oscar’s epic quest for rootedness. Glissant asserts that in the context of an epic “uprooting can work toward identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial” (18). Yunior’s rootedness—rhizome-­ like, not singular like Western ideology promotes—stands in contrast to Oscar’s errantry but should not be interpreted as subjugating Oscar as being inferior. In the end, Oscar’s courage illustrates the end to his identity journey and his acknowledgment of fukú: “The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once” (321), Yunior describes Oscar’s last moments, which are the product of Yunior’s imagination since Oscar does not live to tell this part of his story. Oscar’s bravery, regardless of the facts, proves true because Yunior imagines his last moments to be heroic ones and that is the story the reader gets: “he’d be a hero [on the other side]. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be” (322). Oscar lost his life to fukú but faced the force bravely, according to Yunior, which is a requirement of an epic. In true epic form, marking the birth of the diasporic nation and, inversely, nation as diaspora, the novel’s last lines are “The beauty! The beauty” (335). Oscar’s words harken back to how the novel starts with “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” (Epigraph). Indeed, TBWL does display extraordinary strength and beauty found within diaspora despite the extreme violence included in the novel. The horrors caused by fukú and neo-colonialism do not, should not, dwarf the implications of the novel. While Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness echoes a foil of Oscar’s words: “The horror! The horror” (71), Oscar (and by extension, Yunior) focuses on the beauty of love. Shankman quotes Masaki Mori, saying that “transitional epics…point the way toward more fully realized, but yet to be written, epics of peace” (73). In other words, according to Mori, more recent epics “replace martial concerns with epics that celebrate peace” (72) (see, for example, The Fall of Hyperion [1989] by Dan Simmons and Night on the Galactic Railroad [1934] by Kenji Miyazawa). Díaz’s epic does fulfill Mori’s definition of transitional (modern) epics by ending with the word “[b]eauty” (335), as opposed to any other word. This evidence of Oscar’s (and Yunior’s) growth, or Yunior’s authorial decision to depict Oscar as bravely facing fukú and his death, underlines Glissant’s definition of identity within the Caribbean: Yunior and Oscar have the “knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation”

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(18). Relation, according to Glissant, “is spoken multilingually… [and] rightfully opposes the totalitarianism of any monolingual intent” (19). Relation opposes totalitarianism of any form. As an epic ultimately exposing Relation, TBWL illustrates the causes and effects of errantry and exile, which are superseded or exaggerated by fukú, madness. Díaz exposes diaspora as nation and vice versa, in part, by giving nuance to the idea that immigrants and their future generations are fully disconnected from or connected to their home-country or are disconnected from or connected to their country of residence. He also troubles the idea that immigrants move to countries like the US and achieve the “American Dream.” Members of the diaspora are either “nobody, or a nation” (Díaz “Epigraph”) and, given the epic qualities of the novel, they are certainly not nobodies, nor is their allegiance to only one place (or race) necessary, preferable, or required. Glissant explains his vision of a modern epic: A modern epic and a modern tragedy would offer to unite the specificity of nations, granting each other’s opacity… yet at the same time imagining the transparency of their relations. Imagining… [a modern epic and a modern tragedy] would express political consciousness… [and] would make the specific relative, without having to merge the Other (the expanse of the world) into a reductive transparency. (55)

Díaz’s novel links the histories of peoples and, more specifically, the Caribbean and those within the Caribbean diaspora; TBWL also acknowledges the blank pages, ascribed to the reader to fill in or leave blank, of its own narrative. These blank pages include Oscar’s and Abelard’s manuscripts and literal blanks in place of words (305, 301, 322, 327, 329). Thus, Díaz does not collapse “the Other into a reductive transparency.” Through his employment of epic stratagems, Díaz also effectively illustrates political consciousness. The blank pages, as in Erasure and Corregidora, are left for the reader to fill in, expose the invisible ink, or both. The traditional epic conventions Díaz uses are multiple and reflect a desire to create something new and call for a sustained examination of race(ism) in the US and the Caribbean. First, the story stems from myth (fukú). Second, the novel “deals seriously with the question of death and involves the fate of a large group of people, and it… [explores] a vast spatial and temporal expanse” (Shankman 72). Third, supernatural beings and forces (the Mongoose and fukú) intercede and drive the narrative.

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Fukú is a direct result of race(ism). Fourth, the book tells the stories of a hero or heroes (for the sake of brevity, only Yunior, Oscar, and Beli’s heroism are explored). Fifth, TBWL deals with war (against fukú). Sixth, the novel narrates the birth of a nation (Isis). Seventh, TBWL illustrates many acts of courage and heroism. Lastly, the narrator is inspired by a Muse (Oscar and the many other “brief, nameless lives” [Epigraph]). In writing an epic, Díaz simultaneously participates in American and Caribbean discourses on epics, history, identity, nation, and diaspora. In his discussion of epics, Glissant explains that epics like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Old Testament “are the beginning of something entirely different from the massive, dogmatic, and totalitarian certainty (despite the religious uses to which they will be put). There are books of errantry, going beyond the pursuits and triumphs of rootedness required by the evolution of history” (15–16). Likewise, TBWL illustrates the impossibility, really, of rootedness and exposes parts of history typically ignored, both by the US and the DR, which are still ever present today in the form of race(ism). His novel reflects the madness of the architectures of race(ism) and nation simultaneously making way for an escape into the twilight, the blank pages. The door or window, both are there, in the end, which is, of course, the beginning. [I] [a]lways wanted to write epic books.… In the Dominican Republic all my dreams were about a future in the U.S. but in the U.S. all my dreams were about a future…elsewhere. (Danticat 90) “Zafa.” (Díaz 325)

In conclusion, the course would be structured in a way that encourages the recognition of similarities and differences between authors, texts, times, and places, with particular emphasis placed on where each story implodes or explodes in madness and twilight through varying philosophies of race. The overlap between such texts would inevitably connect the three units, relativize race and render race(ism) clearer within a single course, and encourage students to consider transgressing the boundaries set even by the potentially liberating philosophies of race to be expressly anti-racist. Students would leave the course asking questions like the following: If the ideological dynamic of raci(al/st), national, ethnic, or cultural formation creates and necessitates madness, what are alternative worldviews and frameworks that could extend beyond such dynamics to develop and generate truly liberatory spaces? If Orlando Patterson is

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correct and it is “the universal culture that [has] emerged and continues to develop” (emphasis added, 115) globally, when will American ways of differentiation and othering become archaic and out of place? Could and should the solution to race(ism) include the undoing of race? How are discourses of race(ism) and sexism intertwined? What is nation? What is diaspora? What is African American literature? This course aspires to help create and present alternative worldviews in literature through which one can be liberated from certain forms of madness and from raci(al/st) ideologies. Students would learn about the theory of racelessness, other forms of skepticism, constructionism, and eliminativism, and more common philosophies like constructionism, naturalism, reconstructionism, and conservationism. They would use their newfound knowledge and language to analyze typical texts by writers racialized in the context of the US and elsewhere. The theory of racelessness would show students how to stop reifying the problem of race(ism) and start to recognize and elevate their shared humanity over the metaphors and metaphysics encouraged by raci(al/st) ideology. Additionally, the theory of racelessness would help students stop internalizing “race” as racism, an important aspect considering current efforts to “decolonize, liberate, and inspire antiracism.” Required Readings and Viewings: Unit I: Architecture Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Kwame Anthony Appiah: The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.” Eagleton Institute of Politics. YouTube, https:// youtu.be/NOEHm2jM-­sk, 2019. Baldwin, James. “On Being White and Other Lies.” Essence, 1984. CWS, www.cwsworkshop.org/pdfs/CARC/Family_Herstories/2_On_ Being_White.PDF. Fields, Karen and Barbara. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2014. Selected chapters. Locke, Alain. “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture.” The Idea of Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, 2000, pp. 187–199. Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger.” 1997. Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (the performance). PBS, https://www.pbs.org/video/great-­p erformances-­t wilight-­l os-­ angeles-­1/, 2001. Unit II: Madness

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Everett, Percival. Erasure. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Beacon Press, 1974. Selected chapters. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. Vintage Books, 2014. Selected chapters. Unit III: Nation & Diaspora Chase-Riboud, Barbara. From Memphis & Peking. Random House, 1974. Chude-Sokei, Louis. “The Newly Black Americans.” 2014. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books, 2007.

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Díaz, Junot, and Leah Price. “Junot Díaz.” Unpacking My Library, Edited by Leah Price, Yale UP, 2011, pp.  42–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j. ctt5vm5vw.6. Dubey, Madhu. “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition.” Signs, vol. 20, no. 2, 1995, pp. 245–267. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3174949. ———. “Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (review).” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 21 no. 1, 1993, pp.  120–121. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1993.0026. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. Everett, Percival. Erasure. Hyperion, 2001. ———. “Signifying to the Blind.” Callaloo, vol. 14, no. 1, 1991, pg. 9–11. Farebrother, Rachel. “‘Out of Place’: Reading Space in Percival Everett’s Erasure.” MELUS, vol. 40, no. 2, 2015, pp.  117–136., www.jstor.org/ stable/24569977. Fields, Karen and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2014. Freed, Joanne Lipson. “Gendered Narratives of Trauma and Revision in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” African American Review, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 409–420. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23316194. Gil Zehava, Hochberg. “Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Genealogies in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie Et Vent Sur Télumée Miracle.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 2, 2003, pp.  1–12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4618289. Gilliams, Teresa L. Writing Identity, Authenticating Culture: The Black Female Sexed Body in Gayl Jones’s Novels. Dissertation, Howard U, 2000. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, proxyhu.wrlc.org/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/304597391?accountid=11490. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. U of Virginia P, 1999. ———. Poetics of Relation. U of Michigan P, 1997. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. “Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora.” Callaloo, vol. 26, no. 2, 2003, pp. 446–472. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3300872. Gonzalez, Christopher. “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: (2007).” Reading Junot Díaz, U of Pittsburgh P, 2015, pp.  49–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt19705td.6. Gottfried, Amy S. “Angry Arts: Silence, Speech, and Song in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” African American Review, vol. 28, no. 4, 1994, pp. 559–570. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3042218. Gundaker, Grey. Signs of Diaspora/diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America. Oxford UP, 1998.

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Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-­ Colonial Theory a Reader, edited by Patrick Williams, Colombia UP, 1994, pp. 392–403. Harb, Sirène. “Memory, History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 31, no. 3, 2008, pp. 116–136. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25167557. Harris, Janice. “Gayl Jones’ Corregidora.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 1980, pp. 1–5. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3346500. Harris, Wilson. “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1/2, 2008, pp.  5–38. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/40655139. Higman, B.  W. A Concise History of the Caribbean. Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 259–261. Horvitz, Deborah. “‘Sadism Demands a Story’: Oedipus, Feminism, and Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, 1998, pp.  238–261. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/1208986. Jenkins, Candice. “Interiority, Anteriority, and the Art of Blackness: Erasure and the Post-Racial Future.” Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh, by Candice M.  Jenkins, U of Minnesota P, 2019, pp.  131–156. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/10.5749/j.ctvr695mr.8. Johnson, Cheryl L. “Participatory Rhetoric and the Teacher as Racial/Gendered Subject.” College English, vol. 56, no. 4, 1994, pp.  409–419. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/378335. Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Beacon Press, 1974. ———. Eva’s Man. 1976. Kenji, Miyazawa. A Night on the Galaxy. One Peace Books, 2014. Kester, Gunillat. “The Blues, Healing, and Cultural Representation in Contemporary African-American Women’s Literature.” Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, Edited by Lilian R. Furst, UP of Kentucky, 1997, pp. 114–128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130j9g5.10. Khanmalek, Tala. “Making Generations: Gender, Reproduction, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2019, pp.  1–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/ fronjwomestud.40.3.0001. Kincaid, Jim. “An Interview with Percival Everett.” Callaloo, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pg. 377–383. King, Lovalerie. “Resistance, Reappropriation, and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho.” Callaloo, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 755–767. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3300842. Larkin, Lesley. “Erasing Precious: Sapphire and Percival Everett.” Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival

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Everett, by Lesley Larkin, Indiana UP, 2015, pp. 124–163. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/j.ctt17t75c3.8. LeCount, Albert L. “Evidence of Wild Black Bears Breeding While Raising Cubs.” The Journal of Wildlife Management, vol. 47, no. 1, 1983, pp.  264–268. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3808082. Li, Stephanie. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora.’” Callaloo, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, pp.  131–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/3805699. Locke, Alain. “Enter the New Negro.” The Survey Graphic Harlem Number, 1925. McKible, Adam. “‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s History’: Thinking History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts.” African American Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 1994, pp.  223–235. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/3041995. Miller, T.S. “Preternatural Narration and the Lens of Genre Fiction in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2011, pp.  92–114. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/ sciefictstud.38.1.0092. Monier, Tanya. “Recontextualizing Women’s History: Ursa Corregidora as a ‘Blues Arachne.’” Postcolonial Perspective on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, edited by Martin Japtok, Africa World Press, Inc., 2003, pp. 91–112. Morrison, Toni. “Interview with Charlie Rose.” Charlie Rose, 1993. charlierose. com/videos/18778. ———. Paradise. Vintage Books, 2014. ———. “Recitatif.” 1983. ———. “Toni Morrison on a Book She Loves: Gayl Jones’ Corregidora.” Mademoiselle, vol. 81, no. 14, 1975. Naylor, Gloria. Linden Hills. Open Road Media, 2017. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. “Introduction.” Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women. By Evelyn O’Callaghan, Macmillan, 1994a, pp. 1–16. ———. “Early Versions: Outsiders’ Voices/Silenced Voices.” Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women. By Evelyn O’Callaghan, Macmillan, 1994b, pp. 17–35. O’Neale, Sondra. “Race, Sex and Self: Aspects of Bildung in Select Novels by Black American Women Novelists.” MELUS, vol. 9, no. 4, 1982, pp. 25–37. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/467608. Pearce, Marsha. “Transnational/Transcultural Identities: The Black Atlantic and Pythagoras’s Theorem.” Callaloo, vol. 30 no. 2, 2007, pp. 547–554. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2007.0215.

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Shankman, Steven. “Epic Grandeur: Toward a Comparative Poetics of the Epic (review).” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 38 no. 1, 2001, pp.  72–74. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cls.2001.0007. Singleton, Jermaine. “Renegotiating Racial Discourse: The Blues, Black Feminist Thought, and Post–Civil Rights Literary Renewal in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights, edited by Robert J. Patterson, U of Illinois P, 2019, pp.  165–182. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j. ctvnwc0x7.11. Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. First Anchor Books, 1994. Smith, Norval, and Tonjes Veenstra. Creolization and Contact. Benjamins, 2001. Sutherland, John. “Writing for Nations: Epic.” A Little History of Literature, Yale UP, 2013, pp. 13–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vkwh2.5. Tate, Claudia C. “Corregidora: Ursa’s Blues Medley.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 13, no. 4, 1979, pp.  139–141. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/3041480. Thompson, Della. The Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford UP, 1996. Touré. Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now. Atria Books, 2012. Tucker, Sherrie. “‘Where the Blues and the Truth Lay Hiding’: Rememory of Jazz in Black Women’s Fiction.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 26–44. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3346716. Tyldesley, Joyce. “Isis: Egyptian Goddess.” Britannica, www.britannica.com/ topic/Isis-­Egyptian-­goddess. Walcott, Derek. “The Schooner Flight.” , www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-­ and-­poets/poems/detail/48316. ———. What the Twilight Says. Google Books, 1957. Ward, Jerry W. “Escape From Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones.” Callaloo, no. 16, 1982, pp. 95–104. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3043975.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Imagining a Post-Racist Nation

I hope that this book promotes further dialogue and solution-making regarding racism and the theory of racelessness both in African American literary studies and across many facets of life. I took the task of working my way out of the straitjacket created by race(ism) and helping others to take resisting race(ism) and being actively anti-race(ist) as seriously as one should. It is my sincere hope that this book will act as a bridge between canonized and uncanonized literature and inspire more ways to engage with and teach literature. Scholars can have a sustained, productive, and healing dialogue while in the twilight space, the in-between space created primarily outside of ideologies of racism and raci(al/st) language and thought. In fact, everyone in the US can. Additionally, I hope more people outside of academia will engage with the theory of racelessness to undo racism in the larger society. I anticipate writing a book for the public on eliminativism sooner rather than later. Recently, at the end of a workshop on the theory of racelessness, someone looked at me and told me that I must be concerned for my life when I step out of the house for fear of a police officer shooting me to death. Is that true? Because of how it is upheld within academia, media, public discourse, and primary and secondary schools, raci(al/st) ideology precludes more people from being cleareyed about what racism is, how it manifests, and especially how to solve and resolve the history of racism and

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contemporary issues.  The theory of racelessness,  a methodological and pedagogical framework for analysis, teaching, and discussing race(ism) and a philosophy of ethnicity, culture, nation, and race put forth in this book and my educational firm, helps people do exactly that primarily because it helps people deracialize themselves to see themselves more clearly outside of race(ism). It encourages people to ask questions about everything they hold to be true in ways precluded or obscured by seeing oneself within the category or seeing another person within the category, and in ways that ultimately stop the unintentional upholding of race(ism). It goes a long way to stop the conflation of blackness with poverty, criminality, ignorance, immobility, collectivism, the undermining of individual agency and identity, and so on. The theory of racelessness helps stop the conflation of whiteness with racism, racelessness,  liberty, mobility, individualism, the undermining of collective agency and identity, education, and so on. If people are sincere about solving and resolving racism, they must be for abolishing the concept of race, as I demonstrate in this book. This book is just the beginning in terms of how solutions to racism can look without the sort of zero-sum game many people presume when ideas like these are expressed, which includes: “Well, what she’s saying is just stop talking about race, and racism will go away” or, my favorite, “She said that racism doesn’t exist.” No, I have said and will say the opposite until it is no longer True. I am saying, let’s finally talk about the problem of racism and stop misdirecting the focus toward the symptom (i.e., race). In this way, we can have more meaningful and generative conversations about what racism—race(ism)—is, and we can do so from a deracialized positionality, which benefits everyone and stops the reification of racism and its detrimental impacts. The theory of racelessness creates space for more people to “do the work” against racism that manifests in clarity about the problem, liberation from the nefarious effects of raci(al/st) ideology— race(ism)—and innovation regarding how to solve the problems that matter to many people. These problems may or may not be caused by racism in the ways too many people presume, as illustrated through the example that I must fear for my life when I leave the house because an officer might shoot me. If you remain unaware of those statistics and probabilities and do not see the lie inflicted on racialized black people by skewed ideas of what racism is and isn’t and how it impacts all of us, I encourage you to investigate. Dig down into the core numbers, not the racialized “white versus black” probability but the overall data.

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Racialized black people might be shot more by officers but if more people took the time to study the numbers, they would conclude that it is nothing like the pictures painted of “black” people being hunted in the streets, like Lebron James, the well-known professional basketball player, has said. In fact, the likelihood of getting shot by an officer is so minuscule and has been for decades that it begs the question “Who benefits from ‘black’ people believing such narratives?” And “Who benefits from ‘white’ people believing such narratives about ‘black’ people?” Lastly, “Who benefits from these ideas remaining predominantly unchecked?” It is through similar philosophies of race that go mostly unchecked that some people in American society subscribe to certain ideologies as they pertain to racism. The trauma of racism often gets passed on to future generations, for better or worse. “The talk,” a practice among many Americans who feel it necessary to prepare their children for the experience of racism, whether by law enforcement or elsewhere, is meant to increase both pride and awareness. But what if that awareness no longer reflects reality or inflicts harm, like the subsequent internalization of America’s entire history of racism and beyond? What if the tides have turned, significantly, but raci(al/ st) ideology hides progress and heightens how a person perceives and experiences racism, even when the cause of different happenings is not racism? The theory of racelessness exposes distinctions between recognizing and acknowledging the problem of race(ism) and internalizing it. It does so, in part, by helping people disentangle race, social  class, economic class, culture, ethnicity, and racism. And then the theory enables people to free themselves from race(ism). A very small minority of people in the US, and in the world, benefit from race(ism), as it is designed to divide and conquer people. Historically, many people who are racialized as “white” were encouraged to see themselves in a particular racialized framework so that they were less likely to open their eyes to how they do not actually benefit from the problem and persistence of racism. Consequently, even more racialized white people were mostly prevented from aligning with the interests of people not racialized as white because they were taught to see themselves as distinctly separate and distinct from those people. This political practice of racism works both ways nowadays and across time. Until people can recognize the fallacy and unnecessity of the belief in “race,” even as many people work to undo racism, they will continue to uphold race(ism)—racism— intentionally or unintentionally. Step into your racelessness. Step into the theory of racelessness.

Index1

A African American, 69 African American literary studies, 69 American, 4, 42, 69, 115, 159 Anti-race(ism)/antiracism, 4, 17, 18, 29, 34–36, 41–66, 74, 108, 160, 210 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 21, 133n17 Architecture, 34, 35, 37, 84, 107, 112–114, 119, 120, 123, 125, 136, 141, 146, 147, 160, 163, 164, 170, 173, 175, 177, 179–181, 183, 187–189, 192, 193, 195, 196, 209 B Baldwin, James, 8, 23, 25–27, 33, 61, 62, 91, 163 Black, 6, 42, 69, 114, 161, 219

Blackness, 9, 10, 12–14, 21, 22, 24, 26–28, 30–32, 34, 35, 41–48, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 62–64, 69, 70n1, 71–74, 76, 77n3, 78–82, 85–91, 93, 95–97, 100, 102–105, 116, 127, 131n16, 136, 166, 168, 170, 172–174, 193, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203, 218 C Caribbean, 7, 182, 189, 195–204, 207–209 Carter, Jacoby, 23, 24, 27 Chase-Riboud, Barbara, 35, 36, 74, 76, 79–85, 90, 94, 97–100, 102, 103, 105, 107, 130, 177 Conservationism, 15, 19, 24, 42n1, 210 Consolation, 113, 141, 144–147, 149, 155, 156

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. M. Mason, Theory of Racelessness, African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99944-5

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INDEX

Constructionism, 2, 15, 19–21, 29, 33, 42n1, 210 Constructionist, 2, 3, 20, 21, 25, 26, 28, 33, 36, 41, 43, 75, 76, 111, 112n2 D Derace/deraced, 62, 73, 127, 128, 131, 133, 179 Díaz, Junot, 35, 37, 163, 166, 192–205, 207–209 E Eliminativism, 1, 3, 6, 8, 15, 19–21, 29, 33, 35–37, 112n2, 115n6, 160, 210, 217 Eliminativist, 3, 18, 20–24, 27–29, 33, 36, 37, 75, 76, 111, 115n6, 129, 163 Erace, 16, 16n6, 17, 166, 169, 173, 174, 176, 184 Eracesure, 16, 16n6, 17, 83, 166, 168, 169, 172–179, 181, 196, 203 Eracing, 16, 16n6, 17, 114, 115n6, 166, 198 Erasure, 12, 16, 17, 65, 86, 166–170, 176, 178, 190, 196, 203 Everett, Percival, 16n6, 33, 35, 37, 163, 166–172, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 188, 199 F Fanon, Frantz, 33 Fields, Barbara, 18, 26, 55, 63, 64, 116n7 Fields, Karen, 18, 26, 55, 63, 64, 116, 116n7, 170 Freedom, 9, 10, 12, 13, 37, 42, 44, 46, 86, 96, 98, 103, 112, 114,

118, 119, 121, 124, 126, 127, 133, 134, 139, 141, 143, 146, 147, 153, 155, 156, 189 G Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 30–32, 48, 128n13, 131n16, 141 Glissant, Édouard, 7, 195, 198, 199, 202, 203, 206–209 H Harper, Frances E. W., 35, 36, 65, 74, 76, 81, 84–91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 106, 107 Harris, Leonard, 6, 7, 100 Home, 35–37, 59, 107–108, 111–156, 160, 167, 178, 179, 183, 188, 191, 192, 195 I Invisible ink, 37, 113, 117n8, 120, 126–130, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 155, 160, 167, 173, 177, 208 J Jarrett, Gene, 8, 16, 30, 31, 31n8, 42, 46, 51, 55, 60–66, 70, 73, 127n12, 128n13, 130, 131, 131n16 Jones, Gayl, 35, 37, 107, 163, 166, 181–192, 199 L Larsen, Nella, 33, 35, 36, 58, 62, 74, 76, 81, 84, 90–98, 106, 107 Liberatory, 4, 7, 14, 30, 32n9, 51, 59, 71–74, 146, 147, 160, 209

 INDEX 

Locke, Alain, 6, 8, 23–25, 27, 47, 51, 52, 54, 162, 168n4 M Madness, 35, 37, 113, 113n3, 114, 117–121, 123–125, 140, 141, 148, 155, 159–210 Mallon, Ron, 19, 21, 24, 26, 116 Maternal energy, 113, 114, 121, 123, 124, 141, 143–147, 149, 152, 153, 155, 156 Morrison, Toni, 6, 7, 29, 33, 35–37, 61, 62, 64, 79, 81, 86, 107, 111–156, 161, 166–169, 181, 188 Mulatta, 76–81, 84, 85, 90, 91, 95, 106, 182, 184 N Naturalism, 15, 19, 20, 42n1, 210 P Philosophies of race, 7, 8, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29, 33–35, 37, 38, 41, 48, 55, 56, 59, 71, 75, 77, 94, 159–161, 209, 219 R Race, 1, 19–29, 69–108, 111, 159, 218 Race(ism), 3–9, 11, 13–18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 28–30, 31n8, 32–37, 32n9, 34n10, 41–46, 48–51, 49n6, 56, 57, 59, 61–66, 69–76, 79–86, 88–91, 94, 96, 97, 100–108, 111, 133, 138, 146, 147, 155, 159–210, 217–219 Race(ism)lessness, 12, 155

223

Race(ist), 4, 5, 41, 63, 72, 78, 82, 85–91, 99, 101, 105 Racecraft, 73, 100, 116, 161, 170, 184 Raceless, 2, 3, 16, 17, 35, 42, 50n7, 61, 62, 70, 71, 73–76, 80–83, 85, 88, 94, 97, 99–105, 107, 108, 111n1, 128n13, 129, 131n15, 139, 142, 159n1, 163, 170, 174, 177 Racelessness, 1–38, 41, 42, 58, 66, 69–108, 111–156, 159–210, 217–219 Raci(al/st), 4, 7, 12–15, 17, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32–35, 37, 41, 42, 44, 46–48, 48n4, 49n6, 51, 54, 56–59, 61–63, 66, 69–77, 79, 80, 83–87, 89, 92–94, 96–101, 104–106, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 126, 127, 129–136, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 150, 153, 159–164, 166, 168–174, 176, 177, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 190–193, 199, 209, 210, 217–219 Racialization, 2, 4, 6, 9, 16, 24, 26, 28, 33, 46, 49n6, 71, 83, 92 Racialized, 4–6, 9–14, 12n5, 16, 26–28, 42, 45, 47, 49, 49n6, 51, 59, 60, 74, 77, 77n3, 82, 83, 87, 115, 116, 126, 130, 142, 165, 166, 210, 219 Racism, 1–23, 25–37, 31n8, 32n9, 34n10, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48n4, 49, 49n6, 50n7, 52, 61–65, 70–76, 77n3, 80, 83–85, 88, 91, 97, 104, 107, 108, 111n1, 112, 114, 116, 116n7, 122, 125, 129, 132, 135, 141, 143n21, 146, 147, 149, 155, 159n1, 160, 161, 162n3, 164, 167–170, 173, 177, 178, 182, 183, 210, 217–219

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INDEX

Reconstructionism, 15, 19–22, 24, 42n1, 112n2, 123, 160, 210 Rememory, 113, 113n4, 114, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129, 132–139, 145n23, 154, 155, 165, 166 S Schuyler, George, 23, 24, 33, 48, 48n4, 50–52, 107 Skepticism, 1–3, 8, 15, 19–21, 29, 33, 35, 36, 75, 77n3, 83, 108, 160, 210 Smith, Anna Deveare, 33, 35, 37, 84, 113n3, 163–166, 172, 180, 199 Social construction, 2, 6, 9, 20, 21, 25, 33, 71, 72, 108, 111n1, 159n1 T Tenets, 1, 5, 8, 16, 71, 111, 111n1, 159 Theory of racelessness, 1–38, 41, 58, 66, 69–108, 111, 111n1, 159–210, 217–219 Twilight, 15, 37, 80, 113, 113n3, 113n4, 114, 118–121, 123,

125–127, 129, 133–136, 138–141, 144–147, 145n23, 149–152, 153n27, 154–156, 163–166, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 180, 182–189, 191, 192, 195, 203, 206, 209, 217 W Walking negative, 7, 36, 70, 71, 74–76, 78, 80–85, 96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 167, 169, 173, 182 Warren, Kenneth, 58, 59, 70 White, 4, 5, 9–13, 12n5, 25–28, 31, 33, 42, 43, 48, 48n4, 49, 51–53, 58, 61–64, 70, 72, 75–97, 77n3, 99–107, 117, 118, 127–129, 133, 134, 136, 139n19, 141, 145, 147, 150, 153, 156, 161–163, 168, 169, 191, 199, 205, 206, 219 Whiteness, 9, 10, 12–14, 22, 24, 26, 34, 42, 44, 48n4, 51, 62, 63, 78–82, 84–89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99–105, 127, 162, 163, 196, 218