Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation 047205418X, 978-0472054183

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Introduction: “Ill-Defined Emancipations”......Page 12
1. Chronic Debility and Black Futures: Rehabilitative Politics in Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois......Page 61
2. Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction’s Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction......Page 94
3. Vibrant Naturalism: African American Women, Respectability Ecology, and Reimagined Accommodations......Page 123
4. Unsanitized Domestic Allegories: Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African American Woman’s Risk Narrative......Page 161
5. “Dis-integrating Sanity”: The Harlem Renaissance’s “Transforming Psychology” and Black Mental Distress......Page 191
Epilogue: The Futures of Black Debility......Page 230
Notes......Page 246
Bibliography......Page 278
Index......Page 304

Citation preview

Vitality Politics

Co rporealities: Discourses of Disability Series editors: David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Recent Titles Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation by Stephen Knadler Blindness Through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body by Gili Hammer HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth by Elizabeth A. Wheeler The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect by David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, editors Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability by Elizabeth B. Bearden Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe by Julia Miele Rodas Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability by Shelley L. Tremain Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education by Jay Timothy Dolmage Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones, editors Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement by Suzannah Biernoff Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature by Maren Tova Linett War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence by Anne McGuire The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment by David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder Foucault and the Government of Disability, Enlarged and Revised Edition by Shelley Tremain, editor The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History by Jenell Johnson Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability by George McKay The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing by David Bolt Disabled Veterans in History by David A. Gerber, editor Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life by Margaret Price A complete list of titles in the series can be found at www.press.umich.edu

Vitality Politics Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation

Stephen Knadler

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Knadler All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for. First published August 2019 ISBN: 978-­0-­472-­07418-­1 (Hardcover : alk paper) ISBN: 978-­0-­482-­05418-­3 (Paper : alk paper) ISBN: 978-­0-­472-­12560-­9 (ebook) The cover is divided into panels of black and green and features a photograph from the National Library of Medicine, depicting a crowded waiting room at the Herman G. Morgan Health Center in Indianapolis in the late 1940s. African American babies are sitting on their mother’s laps and a few older children are sitting in their own chairs.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: “Ill-­Defined Emancipations”

vii 1

1  | Chronic Debility and Black Futures: Rehabilitative Politics in Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois

50

2  | Narrating Slow Violence: Post-­Reconstruction’s Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction

83

3  | Vibrant Naturalism: African American Women, Respectability Ecology, and Reimagined Accommodations

112

4  | Unsanitized Domestic Allegories: Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African American Woman’s Risk Narrative

150

5  | “Dis-­integrating Sanity”: The Harlem Renaissance’s “Transforming Psychology” and Black Mental Distress

180



Epilogue: The Futures of Black Debility

Notes Bibliography Index Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10043782

219 235 267 293

Fig. 1. Newspaper photo montage of schoolchildren marching along Atlanta’s main streetcar line during the 1929 National Negro Health Week parade from the Atlanta Constitution, April 13, 1929. (Reprinted by permission from the Associated Press.)

Acknowledgments

This is not the book I intended to write, but it is a better book for that fact. So many people since the time I first conceived this project have shaped, influenced, and sharpened the direction and argument of this project, often in ways that they may not have known. Their enthusiastic support and feedback, and even casual remarks and advice as I have shared and talked about this project, however, have made this manuscript better than I could have ever imagined on my own. I cannot possibly thank everyone as much as I would like. This book is not just the result of collaboration (as it has become the obligatory gesture to say); it is the result of genuine kindness, generosity, and, when needed, tough love. This is also not the book I had intended to write because history got into its way. As readers will soon become aware in the following chapters, this project is informed by the urgencies of our cultural moment: of the #Blacklivesmatter movement, of renewed white supremacism, of racial violence and police surveillance. But these troubled times also made clear to me the need to think this police brutality in terms of a long history of antiblackness and disability. On March 9, 2015, for example, as I was writing this manuscript, Atlanta police fatally shot a 27-­year-old U.S. Air Force veteran, Anthony Hill, who suffered from bipolar disorder. Three days later Freddie Gray died from a severe spinal cord injury while in Baltimore police custody. But the time of his death might have been said to have started over 20 years earlier when he suffered from extreme lead poisoning as a 22-­month-­old-­child growing up in a run-­down rental on North Carey Street between 1992 and 1996. “Lead kids” like Freddie Gray often suffer from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), mood swings, anxiety, and “agitation”—­the behavior that supposedly justified violent police restraint. It is all these Black lives, some of them named in our litany of protest, some of them unknown and “ill-­defined,” who are also collaborators on this project. I need to acknowledge their witness as

viii | Acknowledgments

I struggle to retell an all-­too-­familiar story of slow violence and Black debility, one we can trace back to post-­Reconstruction Black cultural production. This project began a number of years ago through the support of two fellowships: a National Endowment for Humanities Faculty Research Fellowship in 2011 and a United Negro College Fund Henry C. McBay Research Fellowship that allowed me the time and resources to visit a number of archives to start the historical research for this project. Their validation of the importance and potential of this project, even while in its initial stages, provided me the tenacity and motivation to continue with the hard intellectual labor of this work even through tough times. I have benefitted most immediately from the brilliance, openhearted spirit, and support of my colleagues in the Spelman College English Department who have been essential interlocutors behind this project. It was in our reading and writing group that I worked out and honed most of the theoretical and historical lens that frames this project. I want then to thank particularly my colleagues Patricia Ventura, Deanna Koretsky, Christine Sizemore, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Michelle Hite, Pushpa Parekh, and Anne Warner who have given me deeper insight through their own shared visions. I also need to express gratitude to the hundreds of students whom I have taught in the Spelman College English Department and who in my classes on race and biopolitics have enriched my thinking. I have to particularly thank several of my independent thesis students with whom I worked during the writing of this book and whose research in related areas also enhanced my understanding: Ke’Andra Levingston, Tiffany Pennamon, Sydney Tunstall, and Ari Brazier. Although Spelman is only a private liberal arts undergraduate college, I have always felt I worked with highly gifted graduate students. Beyond my Spelman home I have also had the good fortune of learning from a number of generous, innovative, and field-­defining scholars. I want, especially, to thank the amazing researchers I have gotten to know as part of my involvement with the American Studies Association Critical Disability Studies caucus: Katerina Kolarova, Tanja Aho, Jessica Cowling, Leon Hilton, and especially Liat Ben Moshe, who is one of the wisest and most dedicated scholars I know. I cannot fail to mention as well my colleagues with whom I worked during my time on the MLA Race and Ethnicity Studies executive committee, particularly Amritjit Singh, Cheryl Higashida, and Ruby Tapia. I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to have organized an MLA panel around Race and Social Death with Amritjit that enriched my own scholarship.

Acknowledgments | ix

Early versions of two chapters in my book were previously published as articles: “Unsanitized Domestic Allegories: Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African American Woman’s Risk Narrative.” in American Literature 85, no. 1 (March 2013) and “Narrating Slow Violence: Post-­ Reconstruction Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Anti-­Race Fiction,” in J-­19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 5, no. 1 (Spring, 2017). I could not have asked for better reviewers and editors with whom to share my work. I have had the pleasure of working with Priscilla Wald on several projects over the years, and she is, without a doubt, one of the best in the business and a gift to authors. I am also grateful to the guidance and support of J-­19’s former editors, Chris Castiglia and Dana Nelson. Although I doubt they are aware, their belief in my project and their reviewers’ perceptive insights provided the final push I needed to complete this project. Over the years I have also benefitted from the support and insights of a number of colleagues on panels and at conferences: I want to thank Keith Michael Green who organized one of the first MLA panels in 2013 on Disabled Bodies and African American Literature. I am grateful to him and to Jennifer James and Jennifer Sibara who provided me important early feedback on my work. I was also fortunate to get the feedback of Ann Fox, David Mitchell, and Rebecka Rutledge Fisher as I tested out the ideas in this manuscript. My thinking about this project also greatly benefitted from my opportunity to share early versions on a panel organized by Jodi Melamed and Roderick Ferguson on the New Racial Capitalism. Their feedback deepened my understanding of the intersections of Black disability and the (neo)liberal racial capitalist state. I am also grateful to the blind reviewers at the University of Michigan Press and especially the wonderful editorial team of LeAnn Fields and Sarah Dougherty. I could not have asked for a more caring and helpful editor than LeAnn Fields. Finally, this is also not the book I intended to write because my own chronic disabilities had to be acknowledged as well. My anxiety disorder has also played a major part in my own personal story and lies behind my scholarly interest in disability studies. During the period I was working on this book, my anxiety got so debilitating that I became physically ill and had to put this project aside temporarily. This manuscript has certainly progressed according to its own chronic time, as I discuss in the chapters to follow, but the many supportive friends and experts who helped me through that time and their insights into the interrelation between disability and all the matter of our lives also shaped my insights about antiblackness, disability, and racist ecologies. I cannot name or thank them all enough.

Introduction “Ill-­Defined Emancipations” The great trouble is we have never vitalized the matter of health, and made it interesting. . . . Health-­getting means other things; the economic advancement of people, providing them with the vigor to do things. Our people want to know a method of more complete emancipation for themselves. —Algernon Jackson, National Negro Health Week Conference, November 1, 1926

Founder of the Atlanta-­based Neighborhood Union Lugenia Hope liked to repeat the story of the organization’s origin. It all began, she said, with the “ill-­defined death” of the woman on the porch. When the Chicago-­ born Hope moved to Atlanta’s West End neighborhood with the appointment of her husband as professor of classics at Atlanta Baptist College (later Morehouse College), she had intended to imitate the work of her former mentor Jane Addams and start a civilizing settlement house for migrant families crowding into the Black neighborhoods haphazardly springing up around Atlanta University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College. In 1906, as Hope tells the story, a couple along with the wife’s father moved into a house near the Atlanta University campus. Often the neighbors saw the sick woman sitting on her porch, but she did not speak to those who passed by and “no one” (or at least, none of the faculty wives who would later form the Neighborhood Union) troubled to get to know her. Several months later, these neighbors, missing the sight of the woman on the porch, decided to inquire about her welfare. However, on visiting the woman’s home, as Mrs. Hattie Rutherford Watson recounted in her history of the Neighborhood Union for the Spelman Messenger in Novem-

2 | Vitality Politics

ber 1916, they found her “almost dead,” and “[s]he died during the day.”1 As was the common practice when African Americans died without medical attendance, the cause of the woman’s death was listed as “ill-­defined” or unknown, and thus the woman fell into the estimated 25 percent of early twentieth-­century African Americans whose sickness and death would not be counted in the widely disseminated statistics reporting the higher incidents of “Negro mortality” from diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, pellagra, and syphilis.2 Although in “Mathematics Black Life,” Katherine McKittrick raises questions about how to witness and mourn the Black lives reduced to “the mathematics of the unloving”—­on the ledger, in the actuarial table3—­I want to ask in the chapters that follow, how do we tell, and how did early Black cultural production tell, the stories of those Black Americans who suffered, sickened, and died “ill-­defined” outside a post-­Reconstruction United States’ care and counting? How, in other words, did white supremacism turn to sociopolitically structured vulnerabilities and the supposed neutral laws of health to implement, or allow, a racial violence that went unrecognized and “undefined,” or, to borrow the phrasing of contemporary medical science, “ill-­defined,” because it could be said to have no stated causes outside the supposed implacable laws of providence, physiology, or economics. Yet the deaths of African Americans like the woman on the porch remained—­remain—­ill-­defined, indeed undefinable, not only because they were relatively invisible, but because they also lie outside and are unknowable within traditional liberal antirace narratives centered around health disparities that supposedly can be overcome with greater inclusivity. Lugenia Hope and the women of the Neighborhood Union, like the other African Americans leaders and writers whom I discuss in the chapters to follow, however, sought to grieve and to give value to this nameless woman’s precarious life, and to the lives of those Black migrants perceived as disposable and existing outside the nation’s imagined community. Although Hope and the other Spelman and Morehouse faculty wives had planned to teach Black boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 22 uplifting and civilizing skills such as sewing, elocution, domestic management, and literary discussion, the women found themselves forced to alter the course of the organization because they were continually confronted by the community’s “great need of help along health lines” (October 1, 1908 minutes).4 Over the next decade the Neighborhood Union women started a health clinic, demanded that the city install water and sewage lines,

Introduction | 3

organized neighborhood cleanups, petitioned the city to improve the unsanitary and crowded segregated schools, performed outreach to teach families about hygiene to prevent tuberculosis and other contagious diseases, and conducted regular surveys to keep track of migrants’ welfare.5 In response to widely circulated myths that, as L. C. Allen noted in his speech before the general session of the National Public Health Association in 1914, “Negroes” were a dying race due to their greater susceptibility to disease, innate disabilities, and primitive cultural habits,6 the Neighborhood Union women labored to rehabilitate African Americans as vital citizens who would learn and internalize norms and habits of self-­care, cleanliness, and risk management that promised to prevent their suffering and death from treatable causes. Through their community outreach and activism, the Neighborhood Union women sought to identify “methods,” as Algernon Jackson argued, for a more “complete emancipation.” They implemented a rehabilitative politics that did not just save lives, but gave meaning and shape to an ill-­defined racial violence outside the post-­ Reconstruction public health record. This everyday, slow, debilitating, contagious, and toxic attrition spread as a “quasi-­event” little understood at a time when many race leaders focused on more spectacular forms of antiblack violence, from lynching, Jim Crow segregation, to peonage’s neoslavery.7 At the same time, however, as I will demonstrate in the chapters to follow, this rehabilitation of a vital, sanitary Black citizenship licensed its own protectionist control, placing questions of Black health at the center of both community and state-­crafted forms of discipline, correction, and confinement. In Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation I bring together critical disability studies, the medical humanities, Black Studies, and African American literary history to trace out how a long history of postemancipation racial governance has operated through a slow antiblack violence of debilitation and distress that has been critical to the fitting (and disposing) of Black lives within the modern U.S. neo/ liberal racial capitalist state. Taking its cue from the women of Atlanta’s Neighborhood Union, Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation specifically seeks to recover and theorize a twinned history of debility and antiblackness (key terms that I will clarify shortly). My intent is to broaden our understanding of racial violence to include the gradual, toxic, and everyday assaults against African Americans that occurred through unsanitary housing, polluted drinking water, unequal segregated health care, the absence of sewage lines, unsafe food, or trau-

4 | Vitality Politics

matic environmental stress, to take only a few examples, and to argue we need to pay as much attention to a biopolitics of debilitation and medicalization as criminalization, police violence, or surveillance if we are going to better understand how Black lives are made not to matter in our supposedly race-­neutral multicultural democracy. Since post-­Reconstruction, racial politics has often involved creating perpetual cycles of crisis and recovery around Black health and “vitality” that functioned to regulate or exclude African Americans from the modern liberal meritocratic state and racial capitalist economic order. A focus on this physical debilitation and mental distress can tell us a lot about the way power operates—­and is felt, sensed, heard (or not), in short, gets in the bones, gut, blood, and neurons—­amid historic racial hierarchies that continue to naturalize and accept African Americans’ exclusion behind a language of equal opportunity, personal accountability, and character. There is, however, also another side to this early twentieth-­century vitality politics: the role these practices of debilitation and recovery played in what is often referred to in African American cultural histories as “racial uplift” or “respectability politics,” or by both names. In Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation, I trace out in the second half of my study how early twentieth-­century African American community leaders developed a complicated disciplinary and emancipatory rehabilitative method of their own around questions of African American disability, health, and mental pain that turned the so-­called New Negro into a “citizen-­patient” in order to manage gender, class, sexual, and other cultural shifts during the Great Migration.8 The African American community, however, was often divided over the tactics and ends of this rehabilitation. There were also African American leaders and community activists, particularly women involved in the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, like Lugenia Hope, who were trying less to cure, fix, or remake the disabled and distressed as normal assimilated citizens than to create new ecologies for giving people what they needed and to cultivate well-­being. In the chapters that follow I show how early twentieth-­century Black cultural production also gestures toward an alternative futurity beyond a logic of cure and rehabilitation to develop a posthuman (or as I prefer, beyond humanist) ecological understanding of personhood and agency that affords us new paradigms for imagining Black freedom struggles beyond liberal narratives of “color-­blind” opportunity and gradual progress.9 Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation,

Introduction | 5

thus, builds on the work of scholars within an emerging field of Black disability studies. As Sami Schalk and Theri Pickens both contend in mapping out a new methodology for Black disability studies, ableism and antiblackness “operate in parallel and overlapping ways” as the debilitation of Black bodies and the invoking of Black distress has been a key part of antiblack violence. As a result, the common starting distinction between impairment and the extraordinary body/mind within disability studies cannot be so easily maintained within African American history.10 In using the term “vitality,” I am drawing on the critical disability studies work by Jasbir Puar, Robert McRuer, and Nirmala Erevelles, who have sought to complicate identity-­based models of disability to recognize that the “debility” or targeted “maiming” and distress of Black populations has often been a key, yet not fully acknowledged, strategy securing the inequalities and injustices of the racialized state.11 Throughout my book I do not argue simply for an additive intersectional analysis that appends disability to the categories of difference or oppression shaping Black identity and consciousness. To theorize a history of disability and antiblackness, we need new models for talking about how human differences celebrated within disability scholarship intersect with oppression, vulnerability, and risks disproportionately affecting racial minorities, and to do so in such a way that does not undermine affirmative models of disability. I focus in depth on the post-­ Reconstruction period of the early twentieth century precisely because during this era, when the dynamic of this vitality politics was first being crystallized, we see improvisations, innovations, and fragments in Black cultural production that do not just anticipate our current cultural moment, but represent a “future past” that directs us toward imagined alternatives to a liberal language focusing on medical bias and its impact on access to care and treatment.12 As Lucas Crawford notes, a key question for critical disability studies is how to recognize a history of racial violence and the debilitation of minority life, yet also refuse the return of Western medical models of “normal,” “healthy,” “able” bodies that might become part of a revisionary history of disability and racial oppression that “hurts.”13 In the ongoing tension within early twentieth-­century Black cultural production between disability as a sign and outcome of racial violence and as a site for resisting normative and racialized models of physical health and sanity, we can detect new “methods” for a “more complete ill-­defined emancipation”—­ one operating along a different temporality to conceptualize the becoming and unbecoming of Black well-­being. Such a new emancipatory method will recognize that Black disability is more than a fixed, static, and predic-

6 | Vitality Politics

tive category that needs to be accommodated or healed to ensure rights of access and equal opportunity. The term “vitality politics” in the chapters to follow, thus, identifies a post-­Reconstruction politicization of biological health as an instrument for insisting on a racial state of exception in which African Americans’ own unhealthy habits and disease susceptibility justified their legitimate suspension from full rights to social justice, economic opportunity, political equality, and freedom. I use the term “vitality” deliberately because of its layered meanings: first to invoke the language widely cited in early twentieth-­century discussions about racial destiny that debated the private bodily practices and life processes of African Americans to determine (allegedly on an objective scientific basis) the developmental tendencies of freedmen and women and to medicalize economic, social, and political discriminations (see chapter 1). But, second, vitality politics also registers the focus of African American reformers on hygienic behaviors and environments to rehabilitate African Americans into “vital” citizens practicing self-­care and private risk management promoted within modern liberal (and now neoliberal) multicultural racial capitalism.14 Vitality Politics synthesizes multiple strands within the broad field of what is collectively identified as biopolitics, including theories of vulnerability, medicalization, disability studies, slow death, necropolitics, mad studies, and vital materialism to get at the complicated, and not always consistent, ways that both the literal physical and mental health—­the matter of Black lives—­ and the semiotic meanings and larger discursive narratives attached to them functioned as key tactics shaping and controlling African Americans’ place as part of the shift toward modern liberal governmentality. These practices of vitality politics, as a consequence, require an attention to a complex notion of Black personhood, one which necessitates us as literary and cultural critics to avoid privileging representations over physicality or culture over biology, and to acknowledge how post-­Recon­ struction material Black personhood and its representation were being mutually transformed.15 To trace out this story of a post-­Reconstruction U.S. ill-­defined emancipation for freedmen and women, I need also to be particularly clear about one more key term in my study: antiblackness and its critique of racial liberalism. In bringing together questions of postemancipation Blackness, citizenship, and a biopolitics of debility and health, I do not intend simply to add on to the story of medical racism, or the African American community’s countervailing activism: one that has been deftly told by scholars

Introduction | 7

such as Harriet Washington, Vanessa Gamble, Alondra Nelson, Keith Wailoo, Todd Savitt, and Anne Pollock, among others.16 In connecting antiblackness and its role in regulating, on both a material and discursive level, access to U.S. citizenship, I want to complicate and reappraise what Jodi Melamed has identified as official liberal antiracisms that often undercut our capacity to challenge and transform inequalities and injustices because they do not address underlying structural racisms, material and economic inequalities, and institutional systems such as racial capitalism. Although not a singular school of political thought in U.S. history, liberalism has traditionally focused on race as a problem of attitudes or prejudices, which, once removed or altered through greater empathy and understanding, will supposedly give way—­gradually—­to greater tolerance and inclusion around a logic of race-­neutral opportunity and merit.17 Drawing on theories of antiblackness, however, Vitality Politics argues that racism, or more accurately white supremacism in the United States, was not an aberration from the nation’s liberal social contract, but inherent and essential to its original formulations of individual rights, economic self-­ determination, and full political and legal citizenship.18 Vitality Politics contends that there is more to the story of Black debility than the question of “disparities” (a descriptive term) in health status, access to care, and quality of treatment, which are often viewed merely as additional sites of Jim Crow racism. As Black Studies scholars Jared Sexton, Alexander Weheliye, and Frank Wilderson assert, antiblackness encompasses more than racial bias, discrimination, white privilege, and even violence. Antiblackness refers to a foundational structuring differentiation and devaluation of Black lives embodied in slavery, but that continues in its afterlife. Drawing on ideas of social death, for example, Sexton argues that slavery was—­despite popular conceptions—­not only about forced and bounded labor, but about a distinctive disposability toward Black life that involved specific vulnerabilities and a stateless rightlessness.19 To speak of antiblackness, therefore, is not only to note how “whiteness” or a white identity politics invoked Black otherness as a self-­ identifying racial difference, and never more so than in our own historical moment,20 but also how U.S. notions of personhood, citizenship, agency, and even basic human value in the early twentieth-­century racial capitalist order were grounded on structured vulnerabilities and a resulting oppositional Black disposability, debilitation, and worthlessness. The chapters that follow, therefore, expand on ideas of antiblackness by synthesizing them with recent theories of vulnerability and risk.21

8 | Vitality Politics

Although vulnerabilities have often been associated with private personal bodily suffering, weakness, or infirmities, critics such as Judith Butler and Martha Fineman have recentered vulnerabilities within political and legal theory as not an inevitable part of the human condition, but as often sociopolitically created outcomes that are unjust, unequally distributed, and preventable, despite notions of a universal shared human fate.22 This imbrication between antiblackness and calculated African American vulnerabilities was clearly expressed in 1933 by early African American health care advocate Midian Othello Bousfield in his speech before the American Public Health Association. After enumerating all the challenges facing the public health worker addressing African American health risks, from crowded unsanitary housing, segregated hospitals, to unsafe water and rotten food supplies, Bousfield summarized by insisting, in short, “There is nearly always a prevalence of influences which tend to destroy.”23 For Bousfield the question of Black health had to be placed back within a network of unrecognized everyday racist “influences” “destroying” or debilitating Black life, and enabled by municipal, state, and—­until 1932 when the U.S. Public Health Service established the Office of Negro Health Work—­federal indifference.24 As the current Black Lives Matter movement has emphasized, antiblackness is about an utter indifference to Black suffering and denial of Black people’s right to exist, and not just racial prejudices, discriminations, and surveillance. Just as the slave was always a commodity under the risk of sickness, disablement, and death, historical forms of postemancipation antiblackness similarly ensured that being Black in an antiblack world meant, to modify Christina Sharpe’s telling metaphor, living in the “wake,” or in close proximity to death, debilitation, and distress.25 In what follows I return to the “demonic grounds” where Blackness begins in a mundane violence,26 but also highlight how Black cultural production in the early twentieth century sought to intervene in the rise of a modernity created with, as, and through an antiblackness materially and figuratively embodied in Black debility. Post-­Reconstruction Black “social death,” to borrow Orlando Patterson’s influential phrase, was and is not only some static state of alienated life or structural relationality that has no social claims or rights. As Patterson himself noted, there was always a secondary “exclusive” justification of social death operating along a different temporality and whereby the “insider” was marked as having fallen, or lost his status, and thus deserving to be “excluded out of ” or expelled from civic and political participation.27 Among those included in this group,

Introduction | 9

Patterson lists people accused of capital offenses and the destitute, but Vitality Politics contends that we need to add the biopolitical delinquent, the unsanitary (non)citizen, the incorrigible and contagious sick and defective, who through a calculated health vulnerability was first left to sicken, if not die, and then excluded for lacking—­and ultimately being incapable of—­a modern scientific understanding of proper health and hygiene.28 Just as Black criminality—­and actuarial projections and social science studies of Black crime—­ emerged in the post-­ Reconstruction United States as part of a national debate over freedmen and women’s fitness for modern life,29 similarly the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human and from full citizenship in post-­Reconstruction America operated through a quotidian, attritional violence that sought to dis-­able (and not simply discriminate against) Black people and render unsustainable the material environments that they lived in. Since Black people served as the surplus life within this modern industrialization, Black health alternately became a matter of disciplined uplift and calculated neglect (and often both at once).30 Vitality politics was, therefore, particularly instrumental to the rise of modern racial capitalism (chapters 1 and 2) and the modern multicultural meritocracy (chapters 4 and 5). In speaking of “racial capitalism,” I am drawing on the ideas of Cedric Robinson who has argued that the unequal distributions of capitalist accumulation were allowed through the ascribing of race to Black persons who were marked as being of only relative value, or valuelessness.31 Although liberal antiracism promises to release individuals and groups from racial restrictions by extending opportunity, possessive individualism, and an assimilationist cultural citizenship, it did not, Vitality Politics will show, challenge the structuring conditions of its foundational antiblackness: an antiblackness that did not just assign differentiated meanings to African American workers (undisciplined, unskilled, or lazy) within the hierarchical racial order of new economic men. But it also literally debilitated African Americans to make them allegedly unfit to compete in a modern meritocratic industrial and entrepreneurial order or to be capable of complete citizenship rights. A sociopolitically conditioned Black debility was central in defining, shaping, and marking the limits of the liberal state’s claims about race transcendent merit and individual opportunity for all. As Stacy Simplican and Douglass Baynton have illuminated, U.S. citizenship has historically revolved around a “capacity contract,” in which those who were granted the right to work, to vote, or to access public spaces had to demonstrate prerequisite

10 | Vitality Politics

physical abilities or the cognitive sufficiency to reason.32 However, the rise of modern industrial capitalism and the liberal meritocratic state depended on ensuring that Black life would lack this capacity through their conditioned debilitation and exposure to differential vulnerabilities and risks. At the same time this decapacitation or maiming worked gradually and indirectly so that this violence was not always recognized as an event that should be protested and so that the claims of the victims could be doubted and dismissed.33 In chapter 1, in particular, I reexamine the careers of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to recover how these supposedly politically opposite early twentieth-­century leaders both raised questions about the intrinsic profitability and structuring necessity of Black debility to the meritocratic logic of the modern liberal state in which freedom and opportunity were supposedly open to all responsible, hardworking, and healthy subjects. To map out these tensions among the necropolitical, disciplinary, and emancipatory trajectories of vitality politics, I will in the remainder of this introduction provide several key preliminary overviews to clarify the themes of the book. First, in the next section, I will briefly rehistoricize African American racial uplift as a rehabilitative politics that functioned to impose its own forms of governance, particularly on a contagious African American poor and on Black women. Even though these African American leaders identified a post-­Reconstruction management of Black freedom around a slow quotidian violence that debilitated Black health, their own invocation of this logic of crisis and recovery functioned to implement a complicated discursive, material, and affective control over African Americans at a time when the Great Migration to the North and to urban centers in the South was destabilizing inherited gender, class, and sexual distinctions. Second, I will then turn to the writing of Fannie Barrier Williams and Jane Edna Hunter to elucidate how some African American women community activists developed an emergent respectability ecology that broke down traditional distinctions within liberal individualism between humans and objects, interiority and the environment, to rethink the meaning of agency, freedom, and the accommodations necessary as part of an alternative Black future. Finally, in the last section, I conclude with a reading of Dorothy West’s retrospective novel of the Great Migration (the 1948 The Living Is Easy) to make a case for the value of recouping an “(un)becoming” literary archive that witnesses and troubles this complicated racial politics enacted on the level of life—­and living—­ itself. In West’s work, we see the emergence of a Black radical tradition

Introduction | 11

that was not just a variant of Western forms of protest, but that represented a specific Black response to the constitution of modern liberal states around antiblack debility. In the contradictions and ambiguities of the ironically titled The Living Is Easy, West’s work reveals how many early twentieth-­century African American writers were imagining a different cripistemology of Black progress that disrupted an early twentieth-­century insistence on African Americans’ rehabilitation as normative healthy and sane “New Negro citizen-­patients.” Uplift’s Rehabilitation Narrative and the “New Negro Citizen-­Patient”

On April 12, 1929 the African American community of Atlanta staged its annual “Clean-­Up Week” Parade as part of National Negro Health Week, a campaign begun by Booker T. Washington in 1915 with the support of the National Negro Business League to increase public health education and end the health problems within the African American community.34 During the parade, organized and sponsored by race entrepreneur A. F. Herndon’s Atlanta Life Insurance Company, schoolchildren marched through the streets in their stiffly pressed white shirts with placards strung across the front proclaiming in bold black letters “PERFECT TEETH,” while above them floated signs that delivered the message, “Make the world pleasanter to live in by keeping your MOUTH and TEETH CLEAN.”35 Amid a cavalcade of decorated automobiles, wheelchairs, and bicycles blazoned with the theme for 1929’s National Negro Health Week, “Good Health is Good Citizenship,” school children swore their patriotic fealty to a gospel of health by singing to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers”: “Happy young Crusaders, / On the quest of Health / For we know that bodies strong, /Are our greatest wealth. /We are united / ‘Gainst a common foe, / From our home and schoolrooms / Dread disease must go.”36 The Atlanta community’s staging of its “Clean Up” parade as part of its 1929 National Negro Health Week program reveals, as Susan Smith and Darlene Clark Hine have noted, an early twentieth-­century community-­ based activism around issues of health, but its church-­based songs, pageantry, and street stylin’ were also deeply embedded in the values, assumptions, and myths of what I am calling vitality politics. In the early twentieth-­century United States, for many race leaders, the African American was no longer a “problem,” but a “patient,” and economic and political progress was rediagnosed as the enhancement of the individual’s and the

12 | Vitality Politics

race’s vital development. As Michele Mitchell points out, during the first part of the twentieth century, in the context of Darwinian debates over the survival of the fittest, African American leaders concentrated on the race’s destiny and the building of the “vitality of future generations,” and this promotion of racial destiny caused them to politicized many private behaviors as part of temperance movements, birth control advocacy, sexual purity campaigns, and public health demonstrations.37 Concentrating on more than Jim Crow legal segregations and discriminations, early twentieth-­century race leaders sought to change African American habits, health, and lives in the face of disproportionate Black mortality and disability, which many white Americans identified as signs of the race’s degeneration. Thus, in the conclusion of his medico-­political treatise America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro (1915) physician and ethnographer Robert W. Shufeldt mobilizes a panic about contagious black bodies to secure Jim Crow color lines: “It is senseless to trifle with this matter; and it is a thoroughly proven fact that the negro in the United States is, among other things, a constant menace to the health of the white race by reason of his being a pronounced disseminator of some five or six of the most dreaded diseases known to man.”38 In contrast, as a consequence, Dr. Algernon B. Jackson, Howard University professor of medicine and director of the National Negro Health Week, emphasized in 1924 the need to rescript racial progress around the optimizing of Black health: “I have a habit of saying that I should much prefer seeing my boy or girl the possessor of the C.B. H. degree—­clean bill of health—­than an A. B. degree without the C.B. H. One is essential in order to get the most out of and put the most into life. The other is not.”39 As Atlanta’s schoolchildren paraded down Walnut Street they proudly proclaimed their “perfect teeth” that merited Jackson’s “clean bill of health” and, in doing so, announced their sanitary merits for full legal and political rights. If the early twentieth-­century witnessed the rise of what Booker T. Washington called in the title of his 1900 collection of essays, “A New Negro for a New Century,” this new Black citizen, as Algernon Jackson asserted, ought also to be a modern “vital” and “sanitary” subject who was constantly working at getting the “most out of,” or optimizing, his health, vitality, and economic efficiency. This biomedicalization of politics, or a shift in racial thinking from biology as the foundation of racial inferiority in the nineteenth century to life processes themselves becoming the focus of racialized political strategies, debates and actions,40 can be seen most clearly in the writings of Charles Victor Roman, editor of the African

Introduction | 13

American Journal of the National Medical Association. Throughout his career as an advisor to Booker T. Washington, Roman pushed to redefine, manage, and regulate aspects of the race question that were previously debated and understood as part of separate social, political, and ethical spheres as questions about medicine and health. In a 1915 article on “A Preventable Death Rate” that he wrote in response to public health reports about an alarming higher disease and mortality rate among African Americans in relation to key illnesses, Roman prognosticated that a significant turn had been made in regard to the future of African American health. “The health movement . . . has been transformed during the past decade from a merely negative movement, having as an object the avoidance of disease, to a splendidly positive movement having as its aim the development of vitality” (my italics).41 Although a professor of eye, ear, nose and throat at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Roman had a master’s degree in history and philosophy from Fisk and also wrote an assimilationist patriotic history of the role of African Americans in the U.S. march of civilization, American Civilization and the Negro (1916), that included medical evidence of Blacks and whites being physiologically one race.42 Thus, in much of his writing, Roman addressed a national debate that often invoked an African American health crisis to regulate the inclusion/exclusion of African Americans as productive workers and worthy citizens in national progress. In an article on “The Negro Psychology and His Health” for the National Urban League’s Opportunity (August 1924), for example, Roman noted that social scientists “sneered” at the African American’s “vitality” and insisted that he was an inferior “physiological machine,” but higher incidences of African American disease and disability were merely “situational” and thus, Roman insisted, the race’s “final possession” of “liberty and citizenship” was inevitable with his progress toward sanitary habits and healthy living.43 In post-­Reconstruction America, statistics on higher African American mortality, disease, and disability were ubiquitous—­from insurance company actuarial accounts that justified higher premiums for African Americans, to public health reports addressing the menace of the “infectious Negro,” to sociological studies of African American unsanitary cultural practices, to local legislators calling for the medical surveillance of contagious domestic workers, laundresses, and maids. But these numbers raise questions not just about health disparities; instead, they must be situated back within larger doubts about what Roman repeatedly calls African American “vitality.” In 1908 the economist Irving Fisher was commis-

14 | Vitality Politics

sioned by President Theodore Roosevelt to write a widely circulated report on “National Vitality” in response to growing concern that the United States needed not only to conserve nature but also to conserve and improve its human resources and capital as well.44 As part of his study advocating an active social and health campaign, Fisher emphasized the efficient and productive use of human life in the interests of the nation’s commercial development and national security and denounced unhealthy practices as “wasteful” and dangerous. Thus, for Fisher, the nation’s health politics was to be linked to increasing productivity and efficiency in the service of strengthening the state, the race, and the economy. In 1907 Fisher chaired the Roosevelt-­commissioned Committee of One Hundred on National Health that included Booker T. Washington among its members and that campaigned for the federal regulation of public health. As Fisher, like Roman, pronounced, “With our superior scientific knowledge, our health ideals ought, as a matter of fact, to excel those of any other age. They should not stop with the mere negation of disease, degeneracy, delinquency, and dependency. They should be positive and progressive. They should include the love of a perfect muscular development, of integrity, of mental and moral fiber.”45 Invoking incipient ideas of eugenics, but also foreshadowing what Nikolas Rose has identified as the optimization of health and questions of human enhancement as part of (neo)liberalism’s biological citizenship, Fisher argued that the race that practiced the most preventive health and thereby improved its racial stock would be the most successful in advancing its civilization and industrial progress.46 At a time when medicine was organizing itself around prevention (instead of cure),47 Fisher urged the enhancing of a racialized human vitality. But this “human” vitality also depended, as Roman’s comments point out, on a not always acknowledged Black debilitated life. The recapacitation of a vital national (white) citizen relied on an antiblack relationality, one that complicates our understanding of the post-­Reconstruction era as simply a time when medical biases framed diseases or impeded African American access to health care. In highlighting the importance for race leaders to fashion an activist vitality politics, Charles Roman, in contrast, does not just dispute racial stereotypes; he identifies the tactical role of a healthy or unhealthy material (and secondarily, discursive) Black personhood as the site for maintaining and generating racial hierarchies, political discriminations, and their corresponding meanings. Roman’s politics of Black vitality, thus, links labor productivity and citizenship rights with vigorous health, since racial differentiations—­and particularly

Introduction | 15

an antiblackness—­sought to govern on both a literal physiological level and in public discourse African Americans’ ability to be the nation’s laboring force, its intellectual and entrepreneurial leaders, and fully assimilated citizens. Fundamental to the rise of the modern industrial U.S. liberal racial capitalist state was an evaluation of all persons in terms of their health, efficiency, and thus potential for productivity and upward mobility, but at the same time maintaining U.S. myths of a responsible, productive, and efficient white labor also meant a corresponding devaluation of other Black workers as lacking, as debilitated, or disabled. In Booker T. Washington’s famous 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exhibition Address, he identifies that a post-­Reconstruction backlash depended on the biopolitical production of a lived experience of Black health precarity and tactical debilitation. In this “compromise” speech, Washington repeatedly asserts, as most commentators note, the important role that African Americans ought to play as the laboring race in the industrial development of a New South.48 But Washington’s selling of African Americans as the “most patient, faithful, law-­abiding, and unresentful” workforce that mill owners and manufacturers might hire is accompanied by an appeal as well to postemancipation myths about a disabled African American race and, in turn, to the region’s fears about biosecurity.49 As part of his “pragmatism,” it is frequently noted, Washington targets—­and appeases—­white self-­interest, but Washington also taps into white (as well as Black) fears and anxieties about African American productive vitality. After assuring white southerners that African Americans do not seek social equality—­willing to remain separate as fingers, but work as one hand in “all things essential to mutual progress”—­ Washington adds a thinly veiled threat that most in the audience would have hardly failed to detect: the “nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling your load upward,” Washington warns, or, switching suddenly from the synecdoche of “hands” to the first person, as if to call attention to his own embodied presence, “we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic” (222). In his language that African Americans excluded from participation in the New Southern economy will “retard” and not advance the “body politic,” and indeed they will putrefy as a “veritable body of death,” Washington invokes a highly contentious and statistically driven public debate prompted by African America post–­Civil War health inequalities: since emancipation, it was widely publicized, African Americans were a diseased, debilitated, and even, as Washington notes

16 | Vitality Politics

here, dying race in the absence of their masters’ care and protection (see chapters 1 and 2).50 But what does it mean, we need to ask, that Washington frames African American progress—­the question of African American citizenship—­ around an opposition between Black capacity and debility? What does it mean that commentators have erased this line in their remembering of Washington’s speech and in the repeated criticism of his failure to demand immediate civil or political rights, or both? Washington’s compromise speech talks back, as we will see in chapter 1, to postemancipation debates over the contagious, disabled, and dying African American by reframing and placing these health disparities in the larger context of a post-­ Reconstruction vitality politics. In his promotion of Black labor in the New Southern economy Washington pinpoints that postemancipation antiblackness revolved around not just the denial of rights—­to work, to public access, to opportunity—­but that antiblackness in the afterlife of slavery functions through the creating of cycles of debilitation and recovery that keep African Americans always on the edge of health and, thus, as the surplus laborers in racial capitalism. As Washington implies in his address, conserving the “wages of whiteness” (to borrow David Roediger’s famous phrase) means neglecting and debilitating black bodies and minds to naturalize their comparative inadequacy.51 In tracing out the diverse techniques grouped under the idea of biopower, or the way politics intervenes into the vital characteristics of biological and mental life, Michel Foucault distinguished between two general technologies: although much of Foucault’s early work focused on the production of individual discipline or the individual’s internalizing of the surveillance, control, and norms implemented in the factory, the schoolhouse, the asylum, and the prison, Foucault’s later work focused on a biopolitics that operated on the level of populations.52 As part of this biopolitics in mass, social scientists, public health officials, reformers, politicians, and race activists sought to track, survey, and regulate various demographics’ births, life expectancy, mortality, and general level of health. As Washington’s often redacted appeal to the debilitated Black body reveals, as part of the post-­Reconstruction racial reordering, biopolitics broadened and shifted from tactics of direct exclusion to a dialectical regime of imposed Black debility followed by surveillance, recovery, and assistance toward optimized capacity, or what post-­Reconstruction commentators called vitality, according to the demands of an industrial labor market.53 As part of U.S. national fantasies of liberal meritocracy, all citizens had to

Introduction | 17

learn to monitor, assess, and “conserve” their vital resources for their personal success as well as the conservation of the race. However, a post-­ Reconstruction politics of Black debility worked through an environmentally produced corporeal and mental enervation to render freedmen and women as a contrasting disposable population of decapacitated life incapable of achieving the aspirational promises of self-­perfectibility, opportunity, economic productivity, material success, and mobility. As a result, “New Negroes” in racial uplift’s politics of respectability were not simply “policed” according to the norms of middle-­class propriety.54 They were debilitated, and, as a result, the post-­Reconstruction period saw a shift toward data gathering and actuarial assessments by insurance companies and public health officials that broke down the African American “citizen-­patient” into an assemblage of risks, statistics, and biomedical predictions that created new networked forms of surveillance and control. Race leaders’ rehabilitative program and their invocation of a language of recovery and cure, however, sought to regulate particularly the behavior of Black women and the poor. I want to end this initial brief historical contextualization of early twentieth-­century vitality politics by looking at National Negro Health Week, and, especially, one health week bulletin from 1927. Begun in 1915 by Booker T. Washington and officially operating out of Tuskegee until 1930, when it came under the direction of the U.S. Public Health Service, National Negro Health Week followed a fairly fixed weeklong schedule: first, Sunday was Mobilization Day with health sermons in the local churches along with other mass meetings, musical events, and parades. Monday was Home Hygiene Day with home cleanup (including often a survey of houses and yards in neighborhoods for cleanliness) as well as parents’ meetings and sex talks. Tuesday expanded the work from the home to the neighborhood with cleanups and waste removal, including contests for boys to build the largest tin can pile. Tuesday’s “clean-­up” campaigns, thus, reveal the origins of the movement in early public health outreach focused on sanitary social work rather than an epidemiologically based preventive medicine. On Wednesdays, communities could focus on their own special needs or activities related to the annual theme, while on Thursdays the focus was on adult health education with mobile clinics and meetings to encourage individuals to have annual checkups. Friday was school health day and featured songs, plays, poster contests, as well as physical examinations and health lectures in the school to detect “defects,” thus revealing how National Negro Health Week could slip into a lan-

18 | Vitality Politics

guage that inculcated a compulsory able-­bodiedness.55 The following Saturday was general cleanup, and the final Sunday was a reporting and fellowship day. In its neighborhood cleanups, lessons in home sanitation, school inspections, and self-­examinations, National Negro Health Week ushered in the modern imagining of the racialized citizen-­patient who would gain greater freedom and opportunity not through political action, but by exercising individual self-­care, risk management, and personal optimization to fit him or herself into the U.S.’s ostensible liberal meritocracy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening day health sermons. In the suggested sermon “Sin in Relation to Health” sent out to local committees in 1927, for example, the organizing board suggested using Mark 2:3 (“He said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven to thee”) to equate sin and unsanitary habits. As the sermon riffs: “Every man with his strength and weakness, stunted in body and dwarfed in heart, palsied in nerve or deadened in sensibility, is the exact result and aggregation of all the past, all that has been done by himself and all that has been done by his ancestors.”56 Such a link among illness, sin, and generational progress or degeneration was common within southern discourse on Black health, and it demonstrates how the National Negro Health Week organizers, even though resisting the myth of the disabled “dying Negro” after the end of slavery and the master’s care, also reappropriated its particular affective appeal to fear, shame, and a morally charged science to turn health outreach into disciplinary socialization. This life politics, however, sought particularly to regulate the behavior of Black women and a perceived contagious poor at risk—­and a risk to the community’s uplift—­at a time when social and gender norms were shifting. In the National Negro Health Week bulletin from 1927 (April 3 to 10), “Negro Health—­Our 1927 Challenge,” for example, we particularly see this targeting of Black women.57 As Monday’s and Tuesday’s scheduled activities reveal, one of the key intentions of the Health Week was to turn the home into a battlefield in the “crusade” against or the “conquest” of disease; and overwhelmingly, despite the lectures toward fathers, the scapegoated risk agent in National Negro Health Week was the modern mother or the Black woman who might exchange domesticity for unsanitary freedoms. Reproducing an article by Johnstown, Pennsylvania public health official Emlyn Jones, the 1927 National Negro Health Week bulletin declared, for example, that the “finest type of human being” was “the home-­keeping wife and mother.” As part of the weekly activities, home

Fig. 2. Photograph on the cover of the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin showing a light-­skinned Black child in a washing tub.

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demonstration agents went into residences to teach “the Negro housewife” how to make “home life more attractive for the family.”58 Although such an emphasis on domesticity reflects the conservative gender codes familiar within racial uplift ideology, in its repeated shame-­filled and anxiety-­ producing fungible replacement of the Black mother and the corporal Black female body for the aesthetic and material details of the clean living room and yard, National Negro Health Week implied that the irrefutable laws of health meant the necessary immolation of Black women’s independent control over their bodies. The visual artifacts of the National Negro Health Week bulletins particularly underscore this particular ideological and cultural framing of health, illness, and preventive medicine around the figure of the “sanitary mother”—­a figure whom I will discuss more fully in chapter 4. The cover of the 1927 bulletin, reminiscent of the most beautiful baby photo contest winners in Du Bois’s The Crisis magazine, shows a light-­skinned baby in a small tin washtub with the caption “Negro Health—­Our 1927 Challenge.” As was common throughout public health campaigns, the figure of the child stands in for the future of the race, since after the turn of the century, there emerged a heightened public health concern for infant mortality that gradually shifted agencies’ focus from ensuring hygienic environments or safe milk to teaching the behavior of a sanitary mother. As the subsequent images reinforce, the future health of the child depends on the hygienic mother/homemaker. In a key image as part of the bulletin, we see a mother sitting in a parlor doing needlework while supervising her two daughters reading together in a facing chair. Even though such a photograph intertextually invokes the sentimentalized landscape of a Mary Cassatt impressionist painting, it is the room that is as important in this photo as the people (minimal in size). If the mother seems swallowed up in this sanitized landscape, it is because her body should be seamlessly one with it, equally ordered, clean, and hygienic, pure in morals but also free of any contagious modern behavior. Although modern medical imagery, as Adele Clark notes, tends to focus on the transparency of the hidden inner body to invite the viewer to tour through technology the subdermal and molecular functionings of the body, the imagery of the African American citizen-­patient, by contrast, involved an externalization of the individual’s vital and sanitary habits (rather than an internalization).59 Early public health discourse focused on a spatialization of disease, as various alleyways, hovels, juke joints, and tenements were seen as the breeding ground of bacteria and germs within

Introduction | 21

Fig. 3. Black-­and-­white photograph of a mother and her two daughters reading beside the fireplace in a family parlor that appeared in the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin.

public health officials’ mapping of contagious urban space.60 Similarly, the spatialization of African American vital citizenship in National Negro Health Week visual imagery becomes privatized and almost exclusively focused on images of domestic space that reveal the link between economic self-­realization, bourgeois respectability, hygienic homemaking, and optimized health under a male physician-­directed guidance. National Negro Health Week bulletins, thus, introduce a new medicalized aspirational model for the citizen-­patient that fused uplift ideology and “healthy well-­being” and invoked a porous boundary between the maternal body and the home, middle-­class commodification and health. In the 1927 bulletin, in particular, the mother’s dress seems more Victorian than modern, as she is swaddled in long-­sleeved and high-­collared sexlessness to the point that her body disappears. The photograph semiotically encodes an erasure of Black female desire, experience, and independence as necessary

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Fig. 4. Photograph that appeared in the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin picturing a Black nurse or mother with a freshly bathed child in her lap above a caption that reads, “The baby is entitled to constant intelligent care.”

to the achievement of a hygienic home life. Likewise, her racial identity is attenuated into an ambiguous near whiteness that distinguishes her from a darker-­skinned contagious indigent class. The other photograph included within the 1927 bulletin also focuses on motherhood, invoking the religious sentimentality of a Madonna icon, and carries the caption “the baby is entitled to constant intelligent care.” But it is unclear finally whether the photograph depicts a mother with her child or a trained nurse. The darker image of the woman and her dress indicate that she may be more private nurse than mother, and implies, as John Kenney insisted in his 1912 The Negro in Medicine, a need to replace “ant Ca’line” with the trained health care nurse who knows how to properly bathe a child.61 Similarly, when Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee’s nursing school, as he attests in his essay “Training Colored Nurses at Tuskegee,” he sought to provide not only technical training, but tools for all women of the race to “arrange the whole life that goes on within these homes in an orderly manner.”62 Such an ambivalence in the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin about the woman’s identity—­mother or

Introduction | 23

nurse, domestic caregiver or sanitary engineer—­captures in a clear visual way the medicalization of bourgeois respectability within racial uplift’s rehabilitative politics and its ambivalent empowerment of, and discipline over, the “sanitary mother.” At the same time, however, as the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin also shows, this biomedical logic amplified the dismissal of a feminized unscientific and superstitious diasporic cultural knowledge promoted by “conjure women” or “ant Ca’lines” who practiced alternative medicines. These “ant Ca’lines” were now abjected as part of a permanent underclass of “poor naturals,” seen as unworthy and incapable of advancement or even visual or legal representation, due to their inherent self-­generated debilitation.63 Vitality politics was, thus, not just a new emancipatory political program to address a necropolitics of slow violence; it also acted as a heteronormative, class-­based governance over Black life. As the National Negro Health Week bulletins display, a post-­Reconstruction Black vitality politics would be about the production of “New Negro” citizen-­patients whose possibilities of freedom and progress depended on their self-­regulation under the “neutral” laws of health. This immunized African American, moreover, would not just internalize social norms, but should regulate and monitor their own moods, potentialities, risks, and vitality according to an emergent actuarial, sociological, and scientific advice and data. The widespread arguments about African American disease susceptibility—­ and the vital statistics proving disparities in morbidity and mortality—­ induced highly charged feelings and anxieties around African American health.64 At the same time, in their counterinsistence on a vital citizenship, National Negro Health Week officials and reformers offered what Lauren Berlant has termed a “cruel optimism”: that is to say, Health Week’s tactical affects of hope, happiness, and future promise through “sanitary habits” functioned to condition people to a normative, consumeristic, and privatized life and turned their aspirations away from radical structural reform toward gradual and integrationist social and cultural programs.65 Moreover, this health optimism within early twentieth-­century vitality politics with its overlapping emancipatory and disciplinary trajectories involved the designating of a new targeted infectious risk group: the modern Black woman. In response, as we will see in the next section, early twentieth-­ century Black women fashioned a radical tradition of political ecology that reimagined a different care and accommodation to achieve a more complete emancipation centered around Black well-­being.

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Black Women and an Ecology of Racial Response-­ability

In the essay “The Relation of the Trained Nurse to the Negro Home,” published in the Southern Workman in September 1901, Fannie Barrier Williams proposes the formation of a Visiting Nurses’ Association to teach Black women the proper care of the sick and to “promote cleanliness in congested districts.”66 A Chicago community activist interested in settlement house work and women’s rights, Williams is best known today as one of the leaders who helped create the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, but five years earlier she had also worked with the Black physician Daniel Hale Williams (no relation) to establish Provident Hospital, the first Black hospital in Chicago, in response to the community’s health crisis as a result of increased migration. Like Jackson, Roman, and Washington, as we saw in the previous section, Williams found disturbing the slow violence being implemented through the particular vulnerability and disposability of Black lives as a part of a post-­Reconstruction necropolitics. In 1900, according to the report of the annual Conference for the Study of the Negro Problem at Atlanta University, Blacks crowded in the unsanitary Southside tenements died annually at three times the rate of whites from tuberculosis (485 to 174 deaths per 100,000 people), and because of inadequate sewage and water lines, died at twice the rate from typhoid (68 to 32 per 100,000 people). In addition, unequal access to meat, dairy, and fresh vegetables in Chicago’s food deserts also lead to alarmingly high rates of debilitation and death from pellagra (a protein deficiency disease).67 As a result of this environmental racism, and equally toxic municipal indifference, Barrier Williams notes, the “loss of young lives” within the African American districts of Chicago is “startling.” In response to this “startling” debilitation of Black life, in her essay on the “Trained Nurse in the Negro Home,” Barrier Williams introduces a parable to insist on the urgent need for new methods of remediation and care, and more complete emancipation. I want to cite Barrier Williams’s parable in full because its speculative realism and affective pedagogy disclose the key language, tropes, and narrative strategies that African American writers used to testify to the differential vulnerabilities, risks, and devaluations of African American life as part of a protracted twinned history of debility and antiblackness amid the Great Migration: And it came to pass that a mother grown helpless through poverty fell among microbes, and the microbes increased and multiplied and behold they attacked the baby, and the child was stripped of its

Introduction | 25

nutrition, and was left half dead. And a certain physician passed that way and wrote a prescription. And in like manner a benevolent countess was good to the child, but behold, not good with it and left money and soon passed to the other side of the city. But a certain visiting nurse as she journeyed came to where the child was, and behold, was not only good to the child, but was good with it, and she washed the child with soap and water and put it on a bed, and the bed was clean and warm and dry, and the primary nutrition of the child waxed and grew; the secondary nutrition did likewise and there was no wasting of tissue. As the visiting nurse departed the mother of the child opened her mouth, and said, “Heaven bless you a thousand times.” (481, emphasis in original) In its opening scene of terror in which multiplying anthropomorphized microbes attack the exposed Black child, Barrier Williams indicates that, as Susan Craddock has emphasized, at the turn of the twentieth century politics often became an “exercise in the epidemiological imagination.”68 Starting in the 1890s, germ theory changed society’s understanding of the origin, distribution, and control of diseases. Not only did public health officials and doctors now reconfigure the racialized body around its capacity to infect and leak across carefully segregated borders, but sanitarians of public health and African Americans activists drew on this new language of germs and contagion to preventively manage populations said to be at risk.69 But Barrier Williams turns this epidemiological awareness into a “speculative realist” text fusing scientific fact with a gothic-­infused “lynching” narrative in which African Americans are besieged by invading dirt, germs, and deleterious diets. Through this speculative realism Williams makes the racialized, though seemingly mundane, deferred accumulative violence of toxic environments, unhygienic housing, infectious food, and municipal neglect of sewage and waste management in Black neighborhoods visible. In this urban monster story, “nutrition” takes on all the virulence and lethal injury of a Ku Klux Klan mob or a sexually rapacious plantation master, so that the quotidian, ordinary, and chronic form of Black suffering can no longer be dismissed or doubted in relation to “more real” or “headline grabbing” spectacular forms of racism: by animating the microbes and their attack on the child, Barrier Williams gives shape and meaning to a racism that is unremarkable in its singularity, but which over time turns catastrophic: a white supremacism centered around Black debility. In highlighting Barrier Williams’s “speculative realism” amid her polit-

26 | Vitality Politics

ical essay on the need for visiting nurses in urban Black communities, I want to argue that this speculative realism emerged as an important narrative tactic by which African American writers and race leaders in the early twentieth-­century sought to disrupt and expose the incongruity between predominant liberal antiracist narratives premised on a gradual inclusion through individual uplift and racial capitalism’s deliberate practices of precarity, debility, and distress. In using the multireferential term “speculative,” I bring together, as I discuss more fully in chapter 2, the recent genre criticism about “speculative fiction” with the new materialism of object-­oriented theories and “speculative philosophy” to identity the tactics by which post-­ Reconstruction African American writers sought to create a new imaginary for thinking about the time and place of violence and injustice. Speculative fiction, as a broad term including Afro-­ futurism, fantasy, and science fiction writing, has as its common characteristic the imagining of alternative worlds where the “rules of reality do not apply,” and thereby where readers can think, feel, and see differently.70 By blending history and fantasy to center on the impossible, speculative fictions disturb mutually agreed upon fictions of race.71 As Carla Peterson notes, identifying the methodology of nineteenth-­century African American feminists, “speculations” beyond an often white and male-­dominated scientific empiricism were a key way African Americans challenged “established institutions, conventions and constraints.”72 But this speculation in queer time-­altered places of fantasy and transformative experiences hints at another understanding of the speculative, one that connects with the turn to objects within the work of ecocritics and new materialists who have recognized the actant power or agency that material realities have on subject formation.73 Although a recent development in canonical Western philosophy, speculative realism has a long history among African diasporic peoples, who thought beyond Western reason and logic with its rigid subject-­object, self and nonhuman environment dichotomies to identify a more complex and distributed agency.74 By animating and personifying the tenement environments of African American migrants in Chicago as white racist mobs in her parable, Barrier Williams highlights the dispersed and incremental causality of a slow material violence whose virulent logic could be, and was, doubted and denied in liberal “accommodationist” narratives promoting self-­help, equal opportunity, and gradual progress. After beginning her testimony to a white supremacist health politics with a gothicized tale of the unsanitary ghetto, Barrier Williams then

Introduction | 27

updates in the remainder of her story the parable of the Good Samaritan. In contrast to the first half of her story that indicts post-­Reconstruction U.S. northern cities for permitting, or actively producing, Black environments of disease, debility, and death, the latter half excoriates white and Black liberals’ own participation in this vitality politics. Both the “benevolent countess” (Barrier Williams’ metonymy for white philanthropists) and the “physician” who merely “prescribes” pills (or behavioral changes, as Roman urged) fail to care for the mother and her children. As Barrier Williams indicates in her italicized prepositions, they are only “good to” a working-­class poor, and especially, poor working-­class mothers, assuming a hierarchical distance from these contagious at-­risk groups. Particularly in limiting the physician’s intervention to “prescribing,” Barrier Williams talks back to a privileged patriarchal medical establishment that, as we saw as part of National Negro Health Week, used the language of health to dictate respectable middle-­class heteronormative habits and behavior at a time when urbanization and migration put a late nineteenth-­century racial, gender, and sexual order in flux. In contrast to this patriarchal and white power, Barrier Williams asserts a Black matriarchal influence, one that she characterizes as being “good with.” By contrasting a Black vitality politics that is “good with” as opposed to “good to” a Black working class, Barrier Williams captures in succinct phrasing the ambivalent politics of what I call in chapter 3 Black women’s “respectability ecology.” In being “with” the working-­class mother and her sick child, the Black nurse (this stand-­in as well for the scientific sanitary Black mother) assumes her equality with the incorrigible sick and dying Black patient. However, being “good with” for Barrier Williams in her parable signals more than egalitarian relations. As she indicates in the cleaning, feeding, and brightening of the home, being “good with” means changing the everyday mundane environment shaping and constituting Black life. Through a fantasy parable within a “realist” public health essay on “The Relation of the Trained Nurse to the Negro Home,” Barrier Williams develops along with other Progressive Era African American women activists a loosely defined, but influential, alternative political theory that challenged official liberal antirace discourse. Although many African American club women borrowed heavily from sociology as it struggled to define new theories of causality, these club women also adapted this new sociology in light of their own ideas about home influence, contagion, and aesthetic impressions to create a respectability ecology that recognized that everyday “things” also shape, indeed became inhabited in, Black per-

28 | Vitality Politics

sonhood. Their vitality politics with its emphasis on a respectability ecology, thus, figured a different relation between subjects and their environments, one that tied a healthy racial progress “with” nonhuman bodies, or the capacity of things, from yard trash to light to kitchen sinks to impede or block the will and desires of free men and women and to act as forces with propensities and tendencies to shape transcorporeal racial performances.75 In Ariel’s Ecology, Monique Allewaert asserts that African diasporic subjects, who were seen as only “parahuman” within a colonial plantation system, drew upon their own indigenous belief systems to fashion a distinct minoritarian and anticolonial model of personhood that undermined and exposed the limitations of a Lockean individualism and ideas of bodily integrity. This “parahumanism” reconceptualized Western understandings of personhood and agency within liberal theory.76 Similarly, as part of their vitality politics, early African American women synthesized inherited ideas of maternal influence and environmental activism to evolve a Black radical tradition of “respectability ecology” that identified an expanded material ecology in order to better address the contribution of nonhuman actants in the realizing of African American agency and freedom.77 To speak only of the deterministic power of structural constraints, many early twentieth-­century African American women community activists implied, fails to recognize the entanglement of bodies and minds “with” or as part of “human and non-­human assemblages,” a co-­constitution of human and things, in which housing (hygienic or not), microbes (contagious or not), food (fortifying or not), odors (pernicious or not), yards (beautiful or not), and other materialities all challenge the meaning of freedom, agency, and personal accountability enshrined within traditional liberal theory.78 In her insistence on a vitality politics “with” and not “to” urban migrants, Barrier Williams recognized that achieving a more complete emancipation is finally about the struggle of Black people to manage their life worlds and the everyday encounters of their body with, in, and through urban spaces that had often been designed to discipline, debilitate, and kill them. Barrier Williams’s respectability ecology, as a result, implies that we need new theories of “accommodation” that take into account how the fluid dynamics of ability/disability, capacity/debility, mental ease/distress become and un-­become over time and across unstable identities and environments. In referring to new theories of “accommodation,” I am making a deliberate pun as a way to bring critical disability studies and Black studies scholarship together. In African American literary histories, Booker T.

Introduction | 29

Washington’s gradualist politics has often been referred to as “accommo­ dationism”—­that is to say, his pragmatism accommodates itself to existing social and political conditions rather than challenges larger structural inequalities or demands full civil or political rights. At the same time disability rights theory has also focused on questions of “accommodations.” Starting with the assumption that it is environments that are disabling, and disabilities arise in opposition to assumptions about normal capabilities, disability activists have insisted on accommodations that allow people who are differently abled equal access to public space. But beginning with a recognition of an antiblack debilitation and tactical decapacitation of Black bodies and minds, Barrier Williams implies that a disability logic of “accommodation”—­or the removing of physical barriers to a fixed and preexisting disability—­can serve as just another form of “accommodationism,” only allowing African Americans so-­called opportunities to prove themselves alongside other white, able-­bodied citizens. Such an accommodation is premised on the belief that “disabilities” are somehow stable and predictable and do not, as they did for many African American migrants, originate in racist environments and fluctuate over time and in response to the objects and atmospheres within these environments. Such an accommodationism reduces environmental factors to disabling barriers rather than accounting for how they are implicated in the etiology of physical and mental capacities, particularly through the slow and chronic attritional and accumulative effects and debilitations of Black life within racialized environments that cannot be changed simply with curb cuts or the removal of lead paint. In contrast, as I will discuss more fully in chapter 3, many African American women like Barrier Williams called for a reimagined racial “response-­ability,” one that sought to reinvent and transform what it means to create accommodating environments where everyone can flourish and all needs are met. This revised Black activist response-­ability demands a new kind of political and ethical thinking that attends to the potentiality of all things—­nonhuman, material, inanimate, as well as human and systematic and legal—­to shape, organize, and inhabit Black personhood.79 Thus, the flourishing of Black life can only be realized through an understanding that the starting point and end point are constantly shifting: it is not enough simply to bring African Americans into the room and offer them a place at the table. As Barrier Williams implies, one must be mindful of how the everyday, quotidian things of the room—­from the table itself, to the lighting, the odors, the germs, the noise, the food and water—­have all been working to make and unmake Black well-­being.

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Few figures probably so clearly represent the contradictions and inconsistencies of an early twentieth-­century Black women’s respectability ecology as the founder of the Phillis Wheatley Association and of the settlement house movement for Black migrant women, Jane Edna Hunter. In the “Policing of the Black Women’s Body in an Urban Context,” Hazel Carby uses Hunter’s 1940 memoir, A Nickel and a Prayer, to trace out middle-­class African American club women’s governing of the behavior, self-­expression, and sexuality of working-­class Black women migrants.80 Although Hunter in her autobiography depicts the migrant Black woman at times as a helpless and powerless victim in need of maternal oversight, protection, and regulation—­and that despite Hunter’s own example of independence—­ Hunter invokes a crisis language to portray migrant women as not just menaced by immorality and prostitution but also by unwholesome and insalubrious living conditions. As Hunter notes, as if echoing the precise language of Irving Fisher and African American leaders such as C. V. Roman, modern societies have turned from the conservation of nature in the face of the “destruction of forests, the impoverishment of the soil” to a conservation preventing the “waste of human potentialities.”81 The ecological destruction to the “great force in the bodies, minds, and hearts of the Negro citizens of this country,” in particular, Hunter argues, comes from the “force of evil” in “large cities” that “breed disease and crime” (122). As part of Hunter’s settlement house work, the preservation of Black women’s lives meant combatting those forces that promote toxic unsanitary environments that debilitate Black health and mental well-­being. Prior to migrating to Cleveland, Hunter trained as a nurse at the Charleston Hospital and Nurse Training School founded in 1897 under Dr. Alonzo McClennan. From 1898 to 1900, McClennan edited the Hospital Herald, one of the first African American medical journals to disseminate information not just to physicians, but to general readers about domestic and public hygiene.82 Troubled by the polluted water, germ-­ infested unsanitary housing, lack of sewers, and unhealthy food in the African American neighborhoods springing up around Charleston, McClennan was one of the first race leaders who identified a post-­ Reconstruction necropolitics of slow racial violence as debilitating and killing African Americans. Even though Hunter changes McClennan’s name in her autobiography to McClellan, her account of her work on behalf of an African American poor in the “slums of historic Charleston” reveal her awareness, like McClennan and like Barrier Williams, of the

Introduction | 31

assault on Black lives by insidious and terrifying “microbes”—­germs that particularly attack the Black child and imperil the future of the African American community. In one extended episode that Hunter recounts in her chapter on her nursing work among the Black poor in Charleston, she particularly blends myth, fantasy, and fact—­as Barrier Williams did—­into a speculative realism to create an allegory about racial progress. One night, Hunter relates, she was called by a white “doctor” to attend to a “wretched Negro woman” who was in labor, but who was housebound with her five small children ranging in age from one to six years old. When the doctor fails to make the house call because he decides he cannot be bothered from his Sunday rest, Hunter must make the delivery on her own, thus proving her “efficiency in nursing” but also setting up Black women’s agency against an indifferent patriarchal medical profession all too willing to let Black people suffer and die. The challenge for Hunter is, however, not the difficulty of the labor but, as she states upfront, how to “effect the necessary sterilization?” (65). Looking at the “filthy ash-­strewn floor” on which the mother sat curled—­ for, as she explains, the family “libbers on de floor”—­Hunter fears that the baby’s birth and healthy future is imperiled by the unsanitary and germ-­ filled living conditions of their rented tenement. As Hunter muses, in such an environment “only a miracle could prevent infection” (65). It is this overriding question of how to “effect the necessary sterilization” that shapes Hunter’s account of her service among an African American poor in the slums of Charleston and Cleveland. However, it is not a “miracle,” but the trained nurse’s sanitary intervention that saves the child, “a twelve-­pound baby boy, black as ebony” (66). Although Hunter successfully delivers the child, she also “clean[s] the floor and put[s] the wretched room into a semblance of order.” In turn, she also bath[es] and appl[ies] antiseptic precaution and sterilized dressing to the mother” (66). Most importantly, in order to find a sanitary cloth in which to swaddle the child, she wraps him in one of her own clean “underskirts” that she is wearing. In this speculative allegorical parable injected amid a largely factual recitation of her training as a nurse, Hunter invokes the narrative strategies that many early twentieth-­century African American writers used to conjure the slow attritional and contagious time of black debility—­a debility dismissed as an outcome of the immoral and unhygienic cultural habits of African Americans. Hunter underscores the allegorical mythic resonances of her story when she ends by saying that she kept in touch with the mother and child for “several weeks” after the birth because

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she was “curious to discover whether the baby’s extraordinary inkiness would diminish,” for if “ever a full-­blooded African was born in America, that child seemed to be the one” (66). As if signifying on Pears’ soap ads that pictured the cleanser’s power to scrub a black child “white,” Hunter asserts her pleasure in discovering that the baby boy remained weeks after his birth “inky,” “ebony” Black.83 In its blend of realism and fantasy, Hunter’s account of how sterilization saved the ebony child for an alternative healthy, strong, and proud Black futurity traces out many of the narrative strategies and motifs that we will see are part of the (un)becoming archive of early twentieth-­century Black cultural production. Like Barrier Williams, Hunter gestures toward post-­Reconstruction African American women’s respectability ecology by blending class-­inflected probity with a posthuman understanding of Black lives and the need for an object-­oriented micropolitics of Black freedom struggles. In Hunter’s allegorical re-­remembering, it is symbolically the Black woman’s morality that safeguards the reproduction of a Black future health (the Black child) as it is Hunter’s starched and whitened undergarments that serve as the child’s hygienic coverlet, or “layette.” At the same time, however, if it is the Black woman’s linked sexual and hygienic purity that prevents all kinds of “infections” that injure a child, Hunter demonstrates that the community cannot sterilize the child without also attending to the cleanliness and order of the everyday objects in his environment: the scrubbed floor, the laundered mattress, the beautified apartment, light and fresh air all not only contribute to, but “in-­habit,” the child’s well-­ being as part of an implied transcorporeal understanding of Black life that blurs traditional boundaries between the human, the home, and the object world. Hunter’s insistence that the health of the “Black” child depends on Black women organizing, cleaning, and elevating the aesthetic and sensory impressions of the child’s environment suggests a different understanding of “racial response-­ability.” To address a long history of Black debility, Hunter pictures a political ecology attentive to how the everyday objects of Black Americans’ lifeworlds foster or hinder their vitality. Although Hunter’s “respectability ecology” insists on Black women’s sexual morality, it also gestures toward a contradictory “queer” futurity, one in which the reproduction of the Black child requires an interruption of the normative flow of time and political protest among early twentieth-­ century race leaders. By identifying the slow violence in Charleston’s failed regulation of unsanitary tenements and an unsafe water supply that gradually wear away and debilitate Black health—­but which persists under the

Introduction | 33

white doctor’s apathy—­Hunter interrupts contemporary political debates about racial progress that often defaulted to opposing arguments about personal responsibility or an immediate end to political and legal discriminations. There is another everyday attritional and delayed violence that Hunter’s narrative implies can be overshadowed by concerns over voting rights and Jim Crow segregation and that requires a fuller ecological transformation, anesthetization, and sterilization—­one that can be charted only along a slow, chronic time of racial progress and development. Albeit Hunter’s conservative memoir does not offer any direct acts of political protest against municipal governments that fail to enforce sanitary codes or to install roads and sewage lines to the ramshackle flat in which the mother and her ebony child live, Hunter witnesses, as did other early twentieth-­century African American women, a new chronic temporality, or a different time and place of racial violence. She points toward a future potentiality that can only be realized when Black women begin to transform the quotidian material world so that unapologetic Black life—­inky and proudly distinct—­can thrive. In her autobiography Hunter imagines a different “cripistemology,” or disabled perspective on racial progress: that is to say, she understands, first of all, that racial progress must account for the mundane violence that happens alongside the legal, economic, and political realms, though it is inseparable from and created through them. Racial progress must address the complex way in which post-­Reconstruction African Americans were denied access to vitality, living in persistent and seemingly implacable spaces of precariousness, which fostered disease, disability, and a concomitant dread that foreclosed a vigorous Black future. At the same time, Hunter’s narrative disrupts the marshalling of crisis and recovery to ensure the rehabilitation of Black lives according to ideas of normative self-­care and ideologies of whiteness. In place of these patriarchal stories of rehabilitation, Hunter’s narrative calls attention to the experiential reality of those who “libbers on the floor” and who have their own inky and proudly Black time and path to a differently imagined well-­being. Their well-­being cannot be achieved through some decontextualized self-­ help, but only through a communal and materialist logic of being “good with” all Black lives and the objects in their world. Early Black cultural production, especially by women, thus intervened in the everyday violence of Black debility, and the way that an expendable population of Black Americans functioned to sustain liberal state fantasies of a modern “postrace” meritocracy. At a time when a perpetual state of crisis around Black health enhanced the empowerment and self-­

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determination of “white citizens,” many race leaders invested in a vitality politics that used health as a tool for remaking and rehabilitating African Americans as proper citizens. But such a language of crisis and recovery often left the African American poor and Black women vulnerable to authoritarian forms of surveillance and control. In contrast, Barrier Williams and Hunter challenge the accommodationist aspirations within racial uplift and self-­help premised on the independence of Black lives from the objects in their lifeworld that come to inhabit them. In her study of African Americans’ reworking of medical and legal discourse about white normalcy and rehabilitation, Andrea Stone raises the question of how African Americans have identified creative modes of resistance around disability. In their respectability ecology, both Barrier Williams and Hunter asserted just such alternative stories and liberatory states of well-­being,84 and in the next section, we will see how an (un)becoming archive of Black cultural production similarly sought to unsettle assumptions about recovery within vitality politics. Instead of further stigmatizing those who fail to achieve the compulsory standards of health, hygiene, productivity, and happiness, some early twentieth-­century Black cultural production, such as Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy, demonstrate a different cripistemology in which the disabled are not rehabilitated or banished, but, instead, placed at the center of an alternatively imagined racial progress, and their crip experiences are seen as offering valuable ways of knowing, feeling, and experiencing emancipation. Uneasy Living: A Cripistemology of Early Twentieth-­Century Black Cultural Production

Dorothy West’s 1948 retrospective novel The Living Is Easy about the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to Boston shortly before and after World War I is built around a troubling contradiction: although in the novel Cleo Judson seeks to reunite her family (and elevate their status) by bringing her sisters to Boston, she in the end fails to ensure her siblings’ well-­being. Not only does Cleo ruin her sister’s happiness and isolate them from the Black community, but she seemingly depletes and damages their health. As Meredith Goldsmith has noted, at the heart of West’s novel lies questions of normative Black female embodiment,85 but we need to pay more attention to how obsessively the novel chronicles the women’s decline into “disability” and not just their deviance from gender

Introduction | 35

ideals. Despite the significant gains in material comfort and security that all the sisters initially acquire in the affluent 10-­room family home in Boston’s largely white (and we are repeatedly told “clean”) Brookline neighborhood, all the sisters lose what is described as the “aliveness” that they had in the South: Charity becomes so large that the “vast” “weight of her body” caused her “small feet” steadily to “ache” and gave her a “ponderous walk.” As West’s narrator notes, “Her bloated face was beet-­red and a little moist from the effort expended on her slightest movement.”86 In contrast, the middle sister, Serena, declines into a “stubborn frailty” that shocks Cleo when her hand easily circles the “scant flesh on the delicate bones” (224). Similarly, whereas Cleo had tried to create a house that “hummed with well-­being” (252), the third sister, Lily, suffers from a hysterical nervousness that turns her into a housebound agoraphobic fearful of all men, including her husband, and makes her too timid to hold a steady job. Although West calls attention to these diverse embodiments among the four sisters, she uses the sisters’ precarious embodiments as an ambivalent, and at times not always fully realized, intervention into modern vitality politics. West’s characterization of the women’s transformation upon migration in The Living Is Easy directly taps into the anxieties, as we have seen, about diffuse, quotidian, and ill-­defined disabling threats, the susceptible Black body at risk, and a countervailing proper scientific optimizing of health among race leaders in the first decades of the twentieth century. Yet, by pointing out the failure, and at times harm, that Cleo’s obsessive sanitary discipline imposes on the sisters, West’s The Living Is Easy opens up an improvisational and not always coherent space for a different cripistemology, or a different framing and perspective on modern subjectivity in which diverse embodiments and mental states are not rehabilitated, indeed cannot and ought not to be so sterilized and normalized. In the both/and logic of West’s novel of decline without the sisters’ redemption and recovery, The Living Is Easy witnesses the persistent antiblackness that functions through the enervating of Black vitality and yet, at the same time, the harm inflicted on poor Black women by a middle-­class protectionist vitality politics. In the sisters’ failure to be rehabilitated West’s The Living Is Easy gestures toward an alternative epistemology that values so-­ called dis-­abled and discrepant ways of being, relating to, and experiencing the world. In the chapters to follow I will examine what I call, with intended double entendre, the “(un) becoming archive” of early twentieth-­century African American literary production, such as West’s novel: unbecoming in

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the sense that its “ugliness” challenges normative ideas about beauty, representativeness, and health, but also (un)becoming in the sense that its resistance lies in the undoing of traditional normative ideologies. For some readers, the question no doubt will arise as to why I give so much attention to a “fictionalized” past throughout this book, but it is precisely literature’s tendency to focus on the ordinary, embodied, and sensorial experiences of “living”—­experiences that were not always harnessed into full narrative coherence or ideological protest—­that allows us to see how everyday embodiment became inseparable from institutional practices of white supremacism. Vitality Politics focuses on how racial politics shifted in the first part of the twentieth century as part of the rise of modern medicine and public health to focus on life processes. Literature’s emphasis on the singular, historically specific, and embodied life, in this context, offers us an incisive lens into these quotidian racist practices and the manifestation of them in the sphere of everyday feeling, well-­(and ill) being, and “living.” In recent years there has been a growing debate about “what was” African American literature and more generally about just what African American literature can do—­did do—­particularly as a resistant or counterdiscursive practice to shape political, economic, or cultural climates.87 West’s The Living Is Easy, however, offers us a model of an “(un)becoming archival text,” one that offers less some ideological resistance or closure, or anticipation of oppositional identities, than witnesses to the messy living amid the unsettled transitions and speculative historical cultural moments when ideas were still in flux, and the work itself, as in the case of West’s novel, sought to improvise new improper forms of thinking, seeing, and living. The “(un)becoming” archive of Black post-­Recon­ struction cultural production is comprised not of a set of texts with fixed and settled meanings, but of texts that are a part of an open-­ended “lively past,” evoking and participating and actively trying to make sense of a network of senses—­affects, discourses, and the material actants—­that lie outside the bounded discourses within the traditional terrain of historicist studies.88 In giving us the perspective of the chronic debilitated Black life, West’s novel suggests that racialized knowledge may be more about unlearning than “resistance,” or, to put it another way, about “unbecoming” in order to reach toward unthought ways to know that defy ideas of the sanitary and redeemed life. Although early African American literature is often read for how it laid the groundwork for particular present-­ day racial selfhoods, communities, and political/diasporic “protest” con-

Introduction | 37

sciousnesses,89 it is the improvisational and incomplete becomings—­and unbecomings—­of proper narrative coherence and corporeal well-­being in West’s ironically titled The Living Is Easy that most clearly takes us back to a potential future past that can help us imagine a different and complete Black emancipation. Whereas much of the power of West’s narrative lies in its contradictions, its plot, in many ways, does clearly identify a post-­Reconstruction antiblackness that functioned through the debilitation of disposable Black lives. Nowhere does West’s novel bring together the twinned history of antiblackness and debility as clearly as in the story of Serena’s husband, Robert. As part of Robert’s backstory, we learn that he had been a “homeless man” abandoned by his nomad mother and that he had a “shame in him from as far back as he could remember” (161). Because he was the orphaned son of a fallen woman, the town subjects him to a life of slow violence since they see him as little better than the “droppings left on anybody’s doorstep”; as a result, he found shelter only among the “whores,” the “drunks,” and “the diseased” (161). Robert, thus, represents the debilitated and infectious Black life against which respectable, rights-­worthy citizens (both Black and white) define themselves and subsequently shun. Robert’s positioning as the debilitated and unsanitary Black other unworthy of inclusion—­one he recognizes—­is underscored in the transcription of his thoughts upon first meeting Serena: “To him Serena was a walking angel. She was clean. Her hair was combed. She lived with her own folks. She had shoes to wear. She went to school” (161). Before he begins to court her, he agrees to any chore as long as it “gave him money for a bar of soap” (161). The class lines separating Robert and Serena are reinforce by a panic about the infectious Black pariah. In contrast to Serena’s learning to love the cleaned-­up Robert, seeing his “contagion” as only a temporary effect of his poverty, Cleo dismisses him as inherently criminal, dirty, and disposable—­an infectious body that must be removed from the racial family. When Robert is jailed after killing a white cop during a protest, it is telling that he catches tuberculosis, thus affirming the knotted criminalization and debilitation of Black lives that worked to ensure a social, as well as literal, exclusion and death. As a consequence of this criminalized illness, Cleo, like many middle-­class aspirants, then forbids the children, including Robert’s own son Tim, to have contact with him: Tim, we are told, had never been taken to see his father at the hospital because “Cleo was afraid that Tim would bring home a germ from the visit, and one by one the children would die of a galloping consumption” (301).

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Robert’s debility, however, represents more than the vulnerability of Black personhood as part of West’s sociopolitical commentary against a long history of a racist biopolitics that operated through assaults on Black bodies and minds. His subplot serves as the shadow narrative that haunts the story of U.S. modernity. Although Robert is acquitted of the charges of killing a white cop, he is still confined to a sanatorium because of his tuberculosis and because he is seen as no longer being in his right mind since he refuses to speak and blames his sister-­in-­law Cleo as the “enemy who ravaged him” (305). In the substitution of Robert’s chronic disability for his suspected criminality as the motive behind the containment and surveillance of an angry Black underclass, West’s novel reveals the role of an antiblack necropolitics in the fitting (and exclusion) of African Americans into modern life. At Robert’s trial, it is significant that he is freed of criminal charges largely because the judge, prosecuting attorney, and jury all fear his contagiousness: Robert was called to the stand only once, and nobody could hear his mumbled answers for his coughing. The cross-­examination was very brief, for the district attorney felt very uneasy being sprayed by Robert’s germs. The burning spot in Robert’s checks, his bleary eyes plainly showed that he was hearing and seeing through the thick folds of fever. (303) In Robert’s trial West’s novel links Robert’s criminalization with medical neglect (as neither his jailors nor the court attorneys bother to attend to his health, though they fear his diseased state) and, in turn, ties the dismissal of his testimony with his stigmatization as diseased and disabled. Robert’s accounts of racial injustice (what he is “hearing and seeing”) are not accepted as legally permissible because they are viewed as only the madness of fever. Robert’s trial, thus, shows the role Black debility played in creating and then justifying the “removal” of the “unassimilated” angry Black man from the modern U.S. economy. Earlier we had learned that Robert was unable to find work amid the New South’s industrial success, but his disposability as surplus life in this modern racial capitalism depends on the gradual wearing down of his mental and physical health. And Robert’s downfall has ripple effects that perpetuate racial inequalities for all the characters as if to expose the absurdity of a liberal race-­neutral meritocracy. Serena’s frailty and wasting away results from her long hours labor-

Introduction | 39

ing for a “despotic woman” in order to pay for Robert’s hospitalization. In spite of the fact that Cleo’s husband Bart’s loss of his business is explained as the inevitable fallout of modernization—­he is underbid on contacts and cannot compete with the lower prices of large corporations and grocery chains—­this laissez-­faire narrative of capitalist evolution is contradicted by Bart’s “loss of credit” when he exhausts his savings for Robert’s legal defense. As a result of a calculated imbrication of Robert’s criminalization and debilitation, Bart also loses his “vital power” (272) that had spurred and sustained his entrepreneurial success. Thus, despite the fact that the novel’s narrator invokes the melancholic passing of black-­owned businesses like Bart’s in the face of modernization, such a “natural” (white) capitalist development depends on an antiblack relationality: It is because of the calculated maiming of Black life that many Black businessmen like Bart fail to “merit” sustained success. West’s The Living Is Easy testifies to the function of antiblack debility in the fitting of African Americans into (or out of) modern racial capitalism. Behind a liberal rhetoric of personal responsibility, betterment, and productivity lay, West shows, a debility that foreclosed Black access, ownership, and employment. But rather than offering an overcoming narrative of Black recovery, West’s novel, in its contradictions, ambiguities, and failure, hints at a differently abled Black cripistemology. Throughout the novel, West continually underscores the harm of Cleo’s vitality politics, which seems to borrow from the most authoritarian guidelines that we have seen were at times embedded in racial uplift’s class-­inflected rehabilitation of the “New Negro” citizen-­patient. If ideas about neatness, cleanliness, and hygiene arose to differentiate the urban from the rural, the newly arrived from the old moneyed, the middle class from the Black poor natural, this medicalization of difference worked through, West’s novel reveals, a biopolitics of affect and sensorial immediacy, a careful management of shame, disgust, and anxiety that came to govern middle-­ class Black women’s lives. In Cleo’s training of both her sisters and her daughter and nieces, West’s novel particularly invokes for readers the pedagogy of disgust (and its concomitant feelings of fear and shame) that a middle-­class vitality politics cultivated to control Black migrants’ behavior. When Cleo takes her daughter with her to visit her husband at his import office along the Boston wharfs, for example, she instills in Judy not arrogance, or condescension, toward this working-­class world, but a sensual disgust and anxiety about this dirty infectious environment and its inhabitants. As the nar-

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ration shifts into an indirect discourse about Cleo’s experiential response to the contagious warehouses, we are told, “she [Cleo] gathered up her skirts to show her disdain of the dirty steps and guided Judy down them with exaggerated care” (71, my emphasis). Cleo then thinks that “the fruit piled everywhere you looked made you sick of the sight of it” (71). In guiding Judy in what the narrator confirms is an exaggerated or unnecessary caution about the unsanitariness of the warehouses, Cleo tries to instill in her daughter an automatic affective and sensorial reaction: a sickening sensation at the chaos and dirt toward what are actually health-­inducing bananas and other fruit. Cleo, moreover, does not just direct Judy’s disgust and fear toward this contagiously imported diasporic environment (the bananas come from Jamaica) but towards her father, Bart Judson. When Judy flings herself in her father’s arms to rub her cheek against his mustache, Cleo immediately insists that her husband release their daughter and avoid intimate contact. As Bart tries to explain to his daughter, “Let go papa’s hand. Papa’s not clean enough to touch you. If I’d known my best girl was coming, I’d have washed up.” Earlier, as part of the daily family rituals, Cleo had taught her daughter to fear the “germs” in her father’s moustache, and had only permitted Judy to lay her checks against her father’s lips (when kissing) “in her effort to wipe out all the world’s germs” (229). In Judy’s childlike response to these sanitary restrictions, West’s novel criticizes race leaders such as Roman and Jackson who recruited a language of health and hygiene to regulate intimate contact and particularly codes of behavior by linking them to a corporeal revulsion and a sense of disgust: “‘You’re my papa,’ she [Judy] said loyally. ‘I don’t care if you’re dirty. I like the way you smell.’” In rebuking her daughter, however, Cleo reinforces that the performance of bourgeois feminine respectability involves learning the proper sensorial affects and tastes organized around the sanitary laws of health: “A little Boston lady doesn’t discuss the way people smell,” Cleo responses, although the narrator implies that her actions indicate that she thinks Bart “stank like a ram” (72). Although segregationists often invoked the contagious Black body and its infectious germs to reinforce the color line, in West’s The Living Is Easy such a deterrence narrative also serves to regulate intraracial intimate attitudes and behaviors. West’s The Living Is Easy, however, not only represents the harm that comes when moralism and ideology become framed in a language of health and hygiene. The novel also challenges a fantasy of liberal able-­ bodied personhood presumed within vitality’s racial politics. As I men-

Introduction | 41

tioned earlier, none of the sisters, including Cleo, achieve what Washingtonian acolyte H. T. Kealing in his widely popular 1908 self-­help book (How to Live Longer) identified as a new “gospel” of health.90 Although Cleo believes that a modern postslavery “emancipation” comes when Black folk are liberated from the “raucous” backward life of their southern past and reformed as proper, sanitary Boston citizens, this supposed “manumission” only robs the sisters of any agency or independence. Starting with this reformatory ableist language of vitality, Cleo continually badgers Charity that she is too obese to leave the house and get a job, Cleo stokes Lily’s fears that she is too mentally unstable to interact with others, particularly men outside Cleo’s supervision, and Cleo tries to convince Serena to abandon her contagious lower-­class husband. However, when the “living proves not too easy” after the collapse of Bart’s business, these dis-­abled sisters identify a cripistemology that arises out of their own interactions with and negotiations with the world that counter Cleo’s liberal meritocratic fantasy of health, wholeness, and assimilation. We can see how West’s novel depicts an “(un) becoming” narrative of disability that undoes a vitality politics’s normalizing recovery narrative in Charity’s obesity that refuses to fit itself in any narrative either of “healthy” progress or a traumatic past. Even though Cleo reads Charity’s fatness as a symptom of her “emptiness” after the traumatic experience of her husband Ben’s leaving her for another woman, such an interpretation reflects Cleo’s reading of her sister as lacking self-­discipline such that she could not overcome an addiction to bread. As West’s novel demonstrates, a contemporary vitality politics, one identified through the indirect and unreliable narration of Cleo’s consciousness, reads Charity’s fat as a failure of will or agency, as a deformity marking the dependent woman. Yet, in the ending of the novel, such an interpretation of Charity’s disability is exposed as part of the able-­ist surveillance that has kept Charity in captivity. Once Charity refuses her sister’s regulatory oversight, Charity asserts the value of her own fat presence and her differently embodied experience of time, place, and survival. Indeed, West positions Charity’s fat presence as what interrupts and challenges the sterile authoritarian “decency” of the house. When the elderly couple Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy visit the house to decide whether the house is “decent’ and “quiet” enough for them to rent an upstairs room, they are scared off because they mistake the noises of Charity’s shuffling as the stumbling of a drunkard. But Charity’s “outrageous clamor”—­her “wheezing and gasping” and “mad” and “erratic scurrying”—­ are indeed a life-­affirming charity (as her name implies) for they save the

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children from the heavily controlled life of quiet decency that the Kennedys’ renting of the room would have imposed. By asserting her own way of being, by operating and moving in her own loud and troubling way at this critical moment of sanitary inspection, and, thereby, refusing to act according to her sister’s guidelines of respectability, Charity disturbs the regulatory logic of Cleo’s sterile living. Throughout the novel Cleo tries to keep the sisters housebound, repeating that they will be an “embarrassment” because of their disabilities. But in the end, all the sisters refuse to remain domestic, and it is particularly Charity’s “extraordinary body” that saves the sisters from losing their home. Seeing Charity sitting in the window, Mr. Doran, who is opening a restaurant across the street, offers her a job as a cook. Although Mr. Doran’s offer reveals his own racial assumptions about large Black women as mammies with natural subservience and culinary giftedness, Charity refuses this semiotic reading of her fat presence. Instead, when her sister Cleo tries to insist on the association of fatness with disqualifying impairments, Charity asserts the value of her discrepant experience: “Your breathing’s bad,” said Cleo, her own breath rasping in her throat. “But the white man wants his pound of flesh. You think he’ll let you sit down when you’re tired? Sure I want to see my closest sister kill herself.” “I ain’t much with words, Cleo, but I feel newborn. I don’t feel so shamed of being nothing.” (312) Although Cleo once again tries to pathologize her sister’s size, arousing fears that her working will cause her death, Charity asserts a sense of personhood that refuses such an able-­ist individualism. She is newborn, and she is no longer ashamed of “being nothing” despite the disciplinary affects that we have seen have functioned to shame the African American poor into becoming respectable/healthy sanitary citizens. The words “being nothing” here fracture into a multivalent contradictory logic that disrupts the binary normal/abnormal, healthy/disabled, debility/vitality logics. At first such phrasing suggests that Charity, having found a job, no longer feels useless (worth nothing): she can contribute to the household expenses at a time when the family is facing eviction. But in renaming her obesity as “being nothing,” in redefining her mass as weightless, as not capable of pressing her down, as Cleo believes, Charity unsettles the normalized embodiments enforced within a vitality politics that overlapped black emancipation with a “gospel” of normative healthy individualism.

Introduction | 43

In her groundbreaking work on the disciplinary power within public health discourse, Deborah Lupton has argued that what is often missing in critical studies of health is the encounter of patients, everyday citizens, and particularly designated risk groups with these new technologies of surveillance and risk management.91 West’s The Living Is Easy, however, provides us a troubling narrative about just such an encounter and, thus, raises significant questions about what it would mean to theorize freedom and agency amid the post-­Reconstruction subjugation and debilitation of Black life in the afterlife of slavery. Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy is about new systems of force and how they operate on the Black body and mind, not just to bring about a direct internalizing of norms, but a constant self-­examination: Cleo constantly fears she and her family are potentially diseased and debilitated, and, thus, Cleo acts out the dialectal logic around vitality/debility that sought to regulate post-­Reconstruction Black life. In contrast, Charity interrupts this narrative with her own alternative cripistemology that overturns the language of worthy/unworthy, normal/ abnormal, and most importantly, vital and productive bodies and “nothingness.” Rather than following the narrative arc of racial uplift’s rehabilitative politics in which “disabilities” are cured as part of the sanitized respectability that Cleo seeks to enforce, The Living Is Easy recenters the disabled extraordinary body as Charity comes to wear her fat as a badge of distinction, and not shame, and as West’s messy and contradictory novel dismantles the bodily norms of liberal personhood. As part of its alternative cripistemology West’s novel calls attention to the potential harm of obsessive normativizing practices of health and sanitized living and asserts the value of supposedly dis-­orderly ways of experiencing and knowing the world. In Charity’s slamming the door on rehabilitative uplift’s imprisoning “dollhouse,” she offers readers the ingenious agency of an improper dis-­abled subject. A Lively (Un)Becoming Archive: An Overview of the Chapters to Follow

In Unsettled States Dana Luciano proposes a new model for doing the recovery work of literary history. Calling for more lively readings of the literary archive that no longer focus on those texts offering a clear ideological resistance, closure, or anticipation of our own contemporary figurations of oppositional identity, Luciano asserts the need to place texts back into the “unsettled” transitions and speculative historical cultural moments

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when ideas were still in flux, and the work itself, as in the case of West’s novel, sought to improvise new proper and improper forms of thinking, seeing, and living. In the chapters to follow, therefore, I will be tracing out just such an “(un)becoming archive” that, like West’s The Living Is Easy, offers us experientially alive glimpses into how the incomplete and often contradictory transitions occurring as part of an early twentieth-­century U.S. modernity around antiblackness and debility took narrative form.92 The following chapters will particularly argue for the need to pay attention to the text’s ambiguities, temporal lags, and confusing translations of experience into memory, narrative, and art. The improper archive of early twentieth-­century Black vitality politics that I trace out struggled, first, to narrate the unspectacular time of Black debilitation and ill-­defined emancipation; and then, second, worked to imagine other ways of being amid the historical shift toward the politicization and management of Black life through structured debility and rehabilitated vitality. The first two chapters, thus, focus on the slow violence and necropolitics of Black debility that arose as part of the postemancipation governance of Black life and that were central to racial capitalism and the liberal state. Chapter 1, “Chronic Debility and Black Futures: Rehabilitative Politics in Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois,” reframes and recontextualizes early twentieth-­century African American racial uplift around the question of chronic debility. Although the division between the race politics of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B Du Bois revolves around questions of temporality—­gradualism vs more immediate political action—­both race leaders were shaped by a post-­Reconstruction racial biopolitics that operated through the calculated maiming and debilitation of the physical bodies and mental health of freed Black populations. Both Washington’s Up from Slavery and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk are rehabilitative narratives troubled by figures of a feminized chronic disability that cannot be normalized and rehabilitated, and thus disrupts  racial progress’s binary temporalities of cure and recovery, or crisis and overcoming. Although Washington narrates his life as a chronobiopolitics tracing out the stages of healthy self-­care and risk management for individual “natural growth and progress,” Du Bois gestures toward a chronic Black futurity, an “ugly progress” that ruptures a Washingtonian prosthetic narrative of cure, rehabilitation, and overcoming. In reading Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk we also see the way the “crooked,” “creeping” characters that Du Bois describes in his survey of

Introduction | 45

the Black Belt South “speak.” These subaltern disabled characters speak, I underscore—­if we go beyond a reduction of speaking to oral or written communication—­by asserting their material presence in ways that cause Du Bois to contradict his ideologically intended arguments. The material presence of disabled characters disrupt the narrative trajectory of Du Bois’s text so that finally in his chapter on “The Passing of the First Born” Du Bois questions the crisis/recovery narrative within his rehabilitative politics of manly self-­culture. Chapter 2, “Narrating Slow Violence: Post-­Reconstruction Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction,” continues this investigation into the vitality politics outlined in chapter 1 by exploring through the works of W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt a post-­ Reconstruction racial order’s more dispersed, yet more virulent, attritional biopolitics of “slow violence” and argues that turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­ century African American writers turned to a speculative realism as a narrative strategy to give shape to the differential vulnerabilities, risks, and devaluations of Black life within early modern racial capitalism. To trace out this unstoried history of slow violence, the chapter first looks at W. E. B. Du Bois’s study of “Negro Health” in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), and then turns to a more detailed narrative analysis of his ignored first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), to argue that Du Bois in his fictionalized account of his earlier economic study of the tenant farmers in Lowndes County, Alabama, reimagines a repressed story of African American health by showing how a necropolitics of contamination cooperated with a neoslavery of debt and foreclosure. After recovering Du Bois’s speculative realism, the chapter then examines how the fiction of Charles Chesnutt worked both to circulate and overturn liberal antirace fiction’s representational strategies. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a text haunted by a never quite fully named slow violence that is finally closed off in the novel’s healing image of racial sympathy through a shared vulnerability to disease and death. In contrast, Chesnutt in his earlier Conjure Woman tales (1899) speculates beyond this liberal protest narrative by turning to the time of conjuring, which in its accelerated injury, overlap of temporalities, and object-­oriented reversal of normal causal logic exposes the repressed story of the New South’s slow violence. Picking up on my opening case studies of Lugenia Hope, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Jane Hunter, chapter 3, “Vibrant Naturalism: African American Women, Respectability Ecology, and Reimagined Accommodations,” reexamines the community outreach work of the National Asso-

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ciation of Colored Women’s Clubs to argue that these Progressive Era African American women activists developed a loosely defined, but influential, alternative political theory that challenged official liberal antirace discourse. In their emphasis (as the slogan often went) on “better homes, prettier yards, cleaner premises, quieter streets,” these NACWC women reconceptualized the lived relations of African Americans to the objects of their environment and worked out a new “respectability ecology” that complicated notions of human agency, freedom, and sociopolitical change. Talking back to masculinist conceptualizations of racial progress, NACWC members often pictured the necessity of a new feminist materialist practice of sustainable becoming and response-­able agency, care, and survival attuned to the transcorporeality of human and nonhuman objects to realize a long deferred African American freedom and equality. After examining the educational reform and outreach work of African American club women, I then turn to a close reading of two African American women writers, the proletarian author Marita Bonner, who published most of her short stories in the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazine in the 1930s, and the “naturalist” writer Ann Petry, whose 1946 novel The Street was the first bestselling novel by an African American woman. Both of these women create new understandings of the political—­and the connection between African Americans’ freedom and the housing and urban environments that arose amid the Great Migration. Bonner’s stories are biomappings of the city that challenge both a bourgeois politics of respectability and a leftist melodrama of oppression by showing how a racialized poor are always becoming with (and being cultivated by) the sensuous, scripting matter of their urban ecologies. By showing this entanglement of humans and things, Bonner challenges liberal antiracism’s melodramatic logic of worthy, or innocent, victimized lives. Similar to Bonner, Ann Petry also draws upon and disrupts the respectability ecology being worked out in practice among African American club woman. Although Lutie seeks to attain ownership over herself to resist the dehumanization of Black lives, Petry depicts Lutie’s failure as a necessary rupture of rights-­based thinking to begin imaging new ethical and political practices of liberation that recognize that Black lives are always already a part of, and constrained by, racially managed material and aesthetic ecologies. It is only through an innovative micropolitics of accommodation, Petry witnesses, that African Americans will achieve the will for, and be in the mood for, a revolution. In contrast to the first three chapters, which focus on African Ameri-

Introduction | 47

can disturbances of the slow violence and calculated debilitation of African American vitality as part of Jim Crow racial governance, the last two chapters take as their point of departure the disciplinary value African American race leaders found in their own redeployment of anxieties about Black vulnerability and an ableist language of health to rehabilitate the “New Negro” citizen-­patient. The great migration of African Americans to Harlem (and other northern and southern cities) aggravated an already ongoing African American health crisis as African Americans crowded into toxic, unsanitary tenement housing. Yet a protectionist African American health advocacy served not only to prevent and cure disease but also to shape, manage, and regulate the class divisions, social transformations, political aspirations, and collective self-­imaginings of these Black migrants. Chapter 4, “Unsanitized Domestic Allegories: Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African-­American Woman’s Risk Narrative,” therefore, recovers the complex interrelation among Progressive Era biomedicalization, gender, and ideologies of racial uplift during the Harlem Renaissance. Through a close reading of early twentieth-­century African American health care activists, including C. V. Roman, editor of the Journal of the National Medical Association, E. Elliott Rawlins, health columnist for the Amsterdam News, and Mary Fitzbutler Waring, the chair of the Committee for Health and Hygiene of the NACWC, “Unsanitized Domestic Allegories” argues that race leaders recruited a particular biomediated image of the “unsanitary mother” as part of a politics of risk and affect to preempt women’s freedom: the “unsanitized” mother was said to endanger the health of her family and the community at a time when many African American neighborhoods were experiencing epidemics of diseases as a result of health care disparities and environmental racism. After examining the affective work of this biomediated image of the unsanitized mother as part of the risk narrative in an African American counterdiscourse of public health, I then turn to a close reading of Angelina Grimke’s play Rachel (1916) and Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928) to show how their unruly, unsanitized domestic allegories expose and destabilize this interworking of medical language, affect, and gendered risk within racial uplift. Larsen’s Quicksand and Grimke’s Rachel testify to the difficult meaning of agency in a world in which political, economic, and moral crises have been recast as the medical condition of specific risky bodies and their competence at maintaining proper and sanitary self-­care. Turning from questions of physical disability to mental distress, the

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fifth chapter, “Dis-­integrating Sanity: The Harlem Renaissance’s ‘Transforming Psychology’ and Black Mental Distress,” argues that African American community leaders in the first decades of the twentieth century invoked an emergent social psychology’s turn toward preventive mental health to cultivate and shape hygienic racial attitudinal affects as part of their integrationist citizen-­making project. In this chapter I first recover how during the 1920s the manner in which psychology sought to understand the race problem shifted dramatically from a race psychology that defined inherent biological differences to a social psychology that investigated the source of irrational prejudices within the intrapsychic conflicts of a supposed “dis-­integrated” or fragmented racial personality. In the post–­World War I United States, key Harlem Renaissance writers such as Alain Locke and Jessie Fauset, however, also drew on a language of social psychology to describe and name how an inescapable “atmosphere” of societal and systematic racism creates ongoing “nerve-­wrecking” psychological stresses that physiologically, and not just metaphorically, wear on the “nerves” to deteriorate and diminish Black health and well-­being. “Dis-­integrating Sanity,” therefore, reexamines Locke and Fauset as Harlem Renaissance writers whose works both embed and enable, but also trouble and unsettle, a postrace multiculturalism organized around the “integrated” personality. In his promoting of a “new race psychology,” Locke figured a new proud, but at-­risk, subjectivity for African Americans to pursue, internalize, and monitor as hybrid Americans within a post–­ World War I cultural pluralism. In her medicalized sentimental novels, There Is Confusion (1924) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931), Jessie Fauset, similarly, discloses her conflicted and “dis-­ integrating” feelings about the dual role of social psychology as both allowing her to give voice to Black mental distress and trauma, which heretofore has been sanitized in earlier uplift fiction, but also as serving to demonize and marginalize the angry Black woman and her maladjusted anger, depression, and restlessness, which served as the outside to the “social sanity” of liberal pluralism. Although critical assessments have often faulted Fauset for apolitical sentimental novels of manners, her neurodiverse fiction often foregrounds risky behaviors and improper psychologies that undermine the very language of social sanity that it relies on to give visibility to Black women’s “saving” madness. In summation, then, the following chapters seek to trace out the responses of early twentieth-­century Black cultural production to the unequal distribution of life and death, hope and harm, endurance and

Introduction | 49

exhaustion. As Elizabeth Povinelli has argued, violence is often enacted through a series of “quasi-­events” that “become ordinary, cruddy and chronic, not catastrophic,”93 and early African American cultural production often reveals the attempt of African Americans to translate this everyday sensed experience into “sense,” or into some narrative form. These stories raise questions about how one creates an ethics and a politics of racial “response-­ability” in the face of such dispersed suffering. These works offer an immanent critique—­rather than necessarily a moral or a political one—­since what we discover in regathering an improper archive of early twentieth-­century Black cultural production is the unruly, messy, and often failed ways these writers tried to make sense of what it meant to live as a racialized subject in the face of new forms of slow contagious violence and a corresponding emancipatory but also disciplinary vitality politics.

1  |  Chronic Debility and Black Futures Rehabilitative Politics in Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois

Among his duties as Tuskegee’s Institute’s medical director, John Kenney provided college President Booker T. Washington with periodic reports on the health of all incoming and returning students. Kenney, one of the founding members of the National Medical Association, the professional organization of Black physicians started at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton Exposition, introduced a screening of all admitted students’ eyes, teeth, noses, and skin for eruptions, and Tuskegee students had to fill out an application for a “health certificate” in which they reported not only their medical history but also certified that they “digested their food well,” and “were healthy and strong enough for ordinary work or a trade.”1 As Kenney noted in a 1914 letter to Washington, as “per your [Washington’s] instructions,” he had examined the list of students, most of whom were women, and had found the majority had only a “fair” condition of health, and others such as Lottie Sargent and Miguelena Panteleon were in conditions of “health questionable,” or as he detailed in relation to Panteleon, “[she] is rather weak and debilitated, and it is questionable whether she should remain, but we have her.”2 I start with what at first may seem an unremarkable moment in the correspondence between Tuskegee’s medical director and Booker T. Washington about the “questionable” health of students at Tuskegee College because it captures a politics of debility that I want to argue in what follows shaped African American social, economic, and political thought at the turn of the twentieth century: the chronic debilitated Black body, particularly the chronically fatigued Black female body, is at the heart of key texts such as Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) and W. E.

50

Chronic Debility and Black Futures  |  51

B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and is the material and semiotic specter that haunts as the buried presence or shadow these early democratic imaginings of a rehabilitated Black citizenship. Kenny’s letter, as I traced out in the introduction, discloses that post-­Reconstruction politics involved a complex intertwined assault on health and civil and political rights that linked social, biological, and economic racial progress and equality not only to legal decisions and public policies but to the unequal distributions of risk, debility, and death. But it also testifies to a deeper anxiety about a “health questionable,” about a chronic debilitation, disease, and pain that will not go away and that cannot be normalized or rehabilitated. As Kenney laments, it remains. Such a chronic health questionable—­one which Kenny genders female, “yet we have her”—­ persists outside the era’s binary racial debate over post-­Reconstruction disabled black personhood or, in contrast, an optimistic African American counterdiscourse of sanitary citizens in charge of their own self-­care and rehabilitation.3 As I will show in what follows, Booker T. Washington’s and W. E. B. Du Bois’s racial visions, though often seen as representing opposing ends of a political spectrum, both evolved at an historical moment that debated freedmen’s and women’s health chances, that sought to reduce African Americans to the surplus life of New South racial capitalism, and that identified a developmental crisis among African Americans as a threat to national vitality. At the same time, a chronic debilitated Black personhood, as Kenney notes, complicates racial uplift’s recovery narrative and its underlying assumptions about racial embodiment and the temporality of a “natural” gradual progress. In my contention that we need to reframe and recontextualize early twentieth-­century African American racial uplift’s rehabilitation practices around the question of chronic debility, I will be drawing on the queer crip critique of Alison Kafer, Alyson Patsavas, Jasbir Puar, and Robert McRuer who raise questions about the able-­ist temporal frames of becoming used to normalize individualist narratives of a productive, fulfilled, and well-­ developed life, but also about a nation’s progress and achievement. In her work on chronic pain, Alyson Patsavas, in particular, points out the need in disability studies to attend to the experience of people with chronic pain and disabilities, which disrupt cultural imperatives of cure and recovery, as well as the binary temporalities of crisis and rehabilitation that structure medical, personal, and state fantasies of health, wholeness, and mastery.4 The questionable chronic disability of students such as Panteleon exposes the able-­ist and exclusionary aspirations toward an idealized

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horizon of overcoming, resilience, and recovery that inspirational autobiographies such as Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery intended to disseminate. Chronic disability, in contrast, represents a persistent presence that refuses to be explained away or fit neatly into overarching narratives of progress structured around stories of a traumatic past and an optimistic reparative future integration. In the end, the “questionable” time of chronic disability prompts a reimagining of alternative theories of an agency without mastery that exists within a complex and interdependent network of care.5 To situate Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery back within post-­ Reconstruction anxiety over chronic disability is to recognize its functioning as not just a story of “uplift” or “self-­made” overcoming, but as a narrative that at its very core offers a calculated chronobiopolitics: in an insistence on the lessons of the toothbrush, bathtub, and broom, Washington’s Up from Slavery does more than instill a civilizing respectability that will supposedly merit African Americans equal citizenship. Washington’s autobiography aims to groom, scrub, monitor, and control the functions of the Black body and mind so as to raise freedmen and women to an optimized vitality at a time when necropolitical racial violence regulates their inclusion in the modern state. In defining chronobiopolitics Dana Luciano traces out how naturalized life stages and strategies for living (from marriage to mourning, from health habits to childbearing) often serve to naturalize a heteronormative middle-­class life chronology that is desirable within the meritocratic liberal state.6 Yet despite an emphasis on sanitary habits in Up from Slavery that would make freedmen and women worthy and well-­behaved citizens for turn-­of-­the-­ twentieth-­ century New South racialized industrialism, Washington’s narrative of overcoming and mastery is constantly interrupted by the persistent presence of a feminine, and feminizing, chronic disability, like Panteleon’s—­like Washington’s first two wives’—­that insists on its own alternative story and time of becoming. In the chapter that follows I will recontextualize Washington’s accommodationism, particularly in his key autobiographical work, Up from Slavery, as a vitality politics in which respectability, self-­care, and hygiene were meant to manage, stabilize, and preempt the degeneration of a disabled Black personhood. Washington’s key works from the turn of the century circulate rehabilitation narratives that were reactionary (in terms of response and as ideology) life-­saving interventions into the material and discursive practices of fostering African American debility and risk,

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and his autobiography discloses how a post-­Reconstruction modern consensus around an allegedly universal U.S. liberal meritocracy was shadowed by the biopolitical managing of Black citizens’ capacity. Washingcare and risk management, ton’s prosthetic narrative of healthy self-­ however, is fractured and disrupted by the persistent chronic time of a disability that cannot be triumphantly healed and that cannot be recuperated in what Washington repeatedly calls that “natural growth and progress” that should govern how African Americans ought to live.7 Similarly, chronic Black debility is central to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. The divisions between these race men often revolve around questions of temporality: gradualism versus more immediate political action, accommodation versus legal and political resistance. But the persistent disturbing presence of chronic disability in both texts reveals a commonality in how both race leaders were shaped by a post-­Reconstruction Black debility. Both are “disabled” narratives in which the persistence of chronic disability as a result of a post-­Reconstruction racial violence disturbs the desired temporality of gradualist or evolutionary progress. In contrast to Washington’s Up from Slavery, however, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is also itself a “disabled” narrative because the chronically debilitated demand to speak. The chronically disabled “speak,” I contend, in those moments of narrative crisis, those moments of textual contradiction, ambiguity, and never fully resolved compromises that undermine the story Du Bois struggles to tell about a racial development toward, on a personal level, manly culture, and on a national level, of civilizing progress.8 The messiness of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk witnesses the implosion of a turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century racial recovery project around Black beauty and culture that disavows the experience of those whose mental and physical disabilities were/are chronic. In his failure to find meaning in the avoidable death of his son Burghardt in his chapter “The Passing of the First-­Born,” however, Du Bois finally gestures toward a chronic Black futurity, an “ugly progress” that ruptures a Washingtonian optimism of cure, rehabilitation, and overcoming in order to open a space for alternative political imaginings of radical redemocraticization. Specters of Chronic Time in Up from Slavery

At the end of his ghostwritten 1900 autobiography The Story of My Life and Work, Booker T. Washington spells out the threefold objectives be-

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hind his life’s work at Tuskegee. In this auto/biography published by J. L Nichols and geared toward a black audience who would buy the book on subscription from door-­to-­door salesman,9 Washington notes that his educational mission had always differed from the curriculum implemented in both northern and southern colleges: “In addition to the ordinary task involved in education and disciplining over a thousand students, is added the responsibility of training them in parental directions, involving systematic regulations for bathing, eating, sleeping, the use of the tooth brush and care of health.”10 Although Washington’s Up from Slavery, published a year later (1901), dropped direct appeals to a self-­ help gospel of health, questions of African American health—­of optimizing black vitality and avoiding debility—­recur as the buried referent shaping, directing, and medicalizing what is routinely interpreted as Washington’s accommodationist obsession with propriety, appeasement, and gradual Black progress.11 Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century Washington tied economic and educational uplift to a health politics ensuring an optimized Black laborer for an industrializing southern economy. In his last essay, written in 1915, the same year he started the National Negro Health Week campaign, but published posthumously as “Fifty Years of Negro Progress” (1916), for example, Washington highlighted that his respectability politics could not be separated from inequalities in risk, susceptibility, and vitality. Traveling about the rural South conducting educational outreach, Washington notes, he saw how the push to increase home ownership and private sanitation had brought progress in one of the most important areas of racial uplift: the “conservation of Negro life and health.”12 African American debility at the turn of the twentieth century was anything but natural, or even the unintended fallout of poverty and discrimination. The post-­Reconstruction crisis around African American health disparities was the effect of specific policies to regulate African American social, economic, and political progress.13 In their survey of African American medical history until the First World War, W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton note that, because of the lack of adequate food, shelter, and clothing after the emancipation of enslaved people in the South, disease and disability plagued many African American communities. The Freedmen’s Bureau, as a consequence, during Reconstruction had established over 100 hospitals throughout the South staffed by civilian bureau physicians working together with local doctors when possible. Although these hospitals were always inadequately funded and staffed to

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meet the health needs of the African American communities, the federal government terminated all but one of these hospitals (in Washington, DC) in 1872, leaving a “racially segregated and inferior Negro medical ghetto.”14 The health disparities in the post-­Reconstruction United States reflected a turn from public policy to more conservative private sector solutions as part of the larger retraction of concern about African American health in the South.15 Even as they were losing the right to vote in post-­Reconstruction America, African Americans were also being relegated within a “virtual health system apartheid.”16 Debility was thus both a metaphor, as Douglass Baynton explains, for differentiations of citizenship, defining those who are unfit for full enfranchisement as disabled,17 but it was also for freedmen and women a material reality resulting from large-­scale social forces tactically working to manage the sickness, suffering, and vulnerability of African Americans who would, according to economic cycles, be needed or excluded from New South industrialization. African Americans in post-­Reconstruction America, however, were not just disproportionately at risk of disease and death. The debilitated Black body also became incorporated into emergent racial assemblages constituted out of medical, affective, ecological, but also statistical, economic, and other data charts, graphs, and networks.18 As a part of early twentieth-­century vitality politics, the Black body was not only debilitated and sickened within toxic environments, but also abstracted and reassembled as part of an emerging predictive racism within insurance reports and sociological studies of hygiene that became new sites of comparison and discrimination. As older forms of direct discrimination became reframed according to a new logic of risk assessment,19 these studies justified new laws and politics implementing racial surveillance, unequal treatment, and monitoring based on the premise that the “Negro” was a dying race. Almost all the writers who would cite African Americans as part of a statistically evidenced dying race in the late nineteenth century referred to the work of Frederick L. Hoffman who published his findings about African American debility in his 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,20 a market-­driven 330-­page statistical report written at the behest of insurance companies. A German immigrant actuary in the emerging life insurance business, Hoffman was hired by Prudential Life to assemble statistical support that would justify his employer’s refusal to write life insurance on African Americans. In 1881, Prudential, which had led the industry in writing cheap ($100) policies for immigrants and minorities often disqualified by the industry leaders such as Metropolitan

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Life, Mutual Life, and Equitable, had decided to reduce payments by one-­ third because they had failed to calculate the volume of African American demand. As Anna Julia Cooper noted in her ironically titled essay, “What Are We Worth,” rather than improving health care, insurance companies assigned a “mathematical value” to disposable and “wasted” African American lives.21 In response to this discrimination, civil rights leaders throughout the Northeast filed suits contesting these reduced payments for comparable premiums, and a number of states such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Ohio outlawed the practice (1884, 1887, and 1889). At the end of the nineteenth century civil rights leaders were arguing not just for an end to Jim Crow segregation laws, or even lynching, but also health security for African Americans to gain equal access to medical treatment as well as life insurance.22 Confronted with this racial protest, Prudential Life hired Hoffman to give scientific validity to their policy by arguing that African Americans had excessive mortality and a hereditary predisposition to a number of diseases and chronic illnesses. Stating his conclusions succinctly near the end of his statistical study commissioned by the Prudential Life Insurance company, Hoffman predicted that African Americans would gradually disappear like the Native Americans due to hereditary tendencies to disease and death: “If the race is destined to disappear, it will be a gradual process of extinction, perhaps increasing in rapidity in the course of time.”23 Although for many post-­Reconstruction politicians, reformers, and insurance leaders African Americans faced extinction due to their greater disease susceptibility and unhygienic cultural practices, this medicalization of freedmen and women’s progress also involved redefining inherited notions of deficiencies in moral character into the intractability of chronic debilities.24 We can see this reframing of moral character within a statistically supported chronic Black debility in William Hannibal Thomas’s 1901 The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What he May Become. African American literary historians have often seen Washington’s promotion of an obsessive respectability in Up from Slavery as an intended rebuttal of Thomas’s vilification of African Americans in his 1901 The American Negro;25 however, at the center of Thomas’s The American Negro were also questions of African American vitality, and not just moral character: that is to say, whether, given African Americans’ postemancipation debility, they could participate on a level playing field in the economic life of a meritocratic liberal state. A disabled, light-­skinned African American

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Civil War veteran whose right arm was amputated above the elbow due to injuries incurred during the siege of Wilmington, Thomas, who was born to a freed family in Ohio, made a case for “Negro inferiority” by repeating familiar racist claims about freedmen and women’s lack of moral character, personal responsibility, and sexual restraint. But Thomas also connected his accumulative evidence of the race’s innate unfitness for equal citizenship to their unhygienic cultural primitivism and defective health and physique that created an intransigent state of chronic debilitation. Although Todd Carmody argues that Thomas, in his insistence on pensions for disabled veterans, defied the era’s cultural logic, insisting on rehabilitation and an implied intolerance of disability’s difference,26 Thomas’s The American Negro tapped into and helped to circulate a post-­ Reconstruction debility discourse in which African American sickness and death served as a fluid, but chronic, sign of their incapacity to be rehabilitated as a vital laboring force in the emergent industrial economy and as equal self-­determining rational citizens. In a style that anticipates Du Bois’s own dense poetics in The Souls of Black Folk, Thomas in The American Negro draws upon a metaphorical as well as material experience of African American disability. In his introduction, for example, Thomas asserts the credibility of his treatise by invoking the moral, social, and medical meanings behind African American disability: “I think I have fairly diagnosed the racial situation, and have pointed out rational and efficient remedies for the elimination of race disabilities.”27 Even though various forms of racial violence from contagious tenement housing, segregated hospitals, to workplace safety were instrumental in the creation of the race’s “disabilities,” Thomas refused to implicate the state’s or industrialism’s responsibility, instead attributing the race’s disabilities to individual and group pathologies. In Thomas’s The American Negro, however, debility was not just the opposite of the normal body functioning to define a contrasting white citizenship: it was also a pliant notion of persistent and untreatable inadequacy that could be invoked, when needed, to measure the African American’s distance from some necessary competence for freedmen and women to become efficient modern workers and equal citizens. Black debility represented a material and semiotic chronic condition that tapped into a post-­Reconstruction reworking of a biology of racial inferiority based on blood and heredity to one in which states of health served as a supposedly neutral and scientific criterion for determining access to employment, housing, voting rights, and democratic participation.

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In William Hannibal Thomas’s The American Negro, we can see how he reframed post-­Reconstruction health inequalities into evidence of African Americans’ chronic debilitation, which menaced national vitality and impeded racial progress. In addressing what he called the “question of national preservation,” Thomas repeats familiar tropes about freedmen’s and women’s greater health and (stress-­free) happiness under slavery. As a result, if freedmen and women are currently wreaking “sad havoc” in a New South, Thomas asserts, it is due to the irreparably impaired state of their “health and physique.” But rather than arguing for improved health care in the face of this crisis, Thomas pictures African American disability as chronic. Citing scientific and statistical authority, Thomas asserts, “Physical disability is an unquestioned fact. There is such a thing also as mental and moral debility among the feeble races of men. Human life may be grouped into three classes . . . the physical basis of life in the freedman is defective; .  .  .  his intellect is feeble, his will unstable, and judgment untrustworthy.”28 In The American Negro, Thomas invokes African American’s chronic disability as a sign figuring a dystopic and antiprogressive future, if not the actual degeneration and extinction of the race.29 Faced with such a widespread African American debility, it is not surprising then, as we will see, that Washington in Up from Slavery reframes these historical, material, and structural dynamics as biologically mediated risks that self-­disciplined and personally responsible African Americans can manage to optimize their physical vitality and mental health and thus can become a dynamic labor force to participate in the U.S.’s economic industrialization and expansion.30 I want to turn now to a scene in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery that reveals the haunting of his personal narrative of entrepreneurial self-­help, industrial education, and gradualism by the return of a disavowed image of chronic African American debility, yet at the same time discloses Washington’s awareness of the pathologies of power within turn-­of-­the-­twentieth century racial governance.31 In recent years critics have sought to reevaluate the reputation of the head of the so-­called Tuskegee Machine by emphasizing his pragmatism. Given the circumstances that he and the former slaves encountered in the South after the Civil War—­from vigorous white opposition to poverty, illiteracy, and landlessness—­he had little choice but to work quietly behind the scenes while emphasizing the benefits of character and economic self-­achievement.32 However, Washington’s tactical circumspection in his autobiography and obsession with repudiating the pathologization of free men and women by insisting on respectability also indicate a more

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material and immediate concern to rehabilitate African Americans as a vital laboring race for regional and national economic progress. The specter of Thomas’s deformed, diseased, or feebleminded freedman or woman spurs yet also haunts Washington’s discussion of the race question, as a “shadow presence,” to borrow the words of Toni Morrison, that appears—­ and then is repressed—­in his autobiographical Up from Slavery (1901).33 This shadow presence of disability can be seen in the germ that Washington identifies behind his political epiphany about America’s colorblind meritocracy. After the Civil War, Washington’s stepfather moved the family to West Virginia where a young Washington worked briefly in the salt processing facilities and the coal mines until going to work as a domestic servant for the fastidious Mrs. Ruffner. Most interpretations of this chapter in Washington’s life have focused on Washington’s schooling in the gospel of the broom under the tutelage of Mrs. Ruffner.34 Washington’s repeated concerns with cleanliness and order in Up from Slavery, it is believed, reflect his “valorizing” of a Black middle class and domestic life that feminized black men, discounted political activism, and accepted current racial hierarchies.35 But what prompts Washington’s profession of faith in the broom, and, as we will see, the meritorious life of the toothbrush and bathtub, is not simply Mrs. Ruffner’s cultural imposition of Victorian spotlessness and rectitude, but a biocultural reality about the persistent chronic debility that freedmen and women experienced due to toxic environmental racism. Prior to going to work at Mrs. Ruffner’s, Washington describes the town that had arisen around the Kanawha Salt Mines where his father “Wash” worked. Even though in the 1901 version of My Life and the Work, which Washington dictated to Edgar Webber, Washington’s boyhood home is merely identified as a shantytown, in Up from Slavery—­which he wrote with the debate over Thomas’s The American Negro in mind—­ Washington expands upon and lingers over the scene of his childhood home in one of the few extended descriptions of setting in Up from Slavery. And what Washington underscores is the infectious and debilitating traits of the laborer’s tenement housing: Our new home was in the midst of a cluster of cabins crowded closely together, and as there were no sanitary regulations, the filth about the cabins was often intolerable. Some of our neighbours were coloured people, and some were the poorest and most ignorant and degraded white people. It was a motley mixture. Drinking,

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gambling, quarrels, fights, and shockingly immoral practices were frequent.36 Despite the fact that Washington provides little commentary beyond adding that the West Virginia families did not even have the benefit of “pure [mountain] air” (26), his forced optimism soon takes a darker turn. When Washington goes to work in the coal mines at the insistence of his father, who says the family cannot afford to send him to school, Washington encounters firsthand the disabling outcomes of this industrial life. After working for a short time in the coal mines, Washington notes that his experienced peers often suffered from mental and physical debilities. Suddenly Washington’s Up from Slavery is interrupted by an image of chronic debilitation that would thwart the education and development of the freedman and woman so that they could not pull themselves up by their bootstraps: “What is worse, I have often noted that, as a rule, young boys who begin life in a coal mine are often physically and mentally dwarfed. They soon lose ambition to do anything else than to continue as a coal-­ miner” (39). By focusing on the “loss of ambition,” Washington indicates that the slow violence of debilitating and maiming post-­Reconstruction Black life functioned not just to unfit African Americans for work or public life; it also sought to induce an affective state of dread, dependency, and despair. In his description of West Virginia mining towns and their white and Black workers, Washington falters in his bright-­sided liberal faith, acknowledging, if only briefly, that a post-­Reconstruction racial politics of debility functioned by both fostering physical and mental health problems, but also simultaneously instilling dread and despair so as to evacuate targeted and supposedly disposable racialized citizens of the will, energy, and the motivating anger of political dissent, or even hope for betterment.37 They would simply endure. At the moment when Washington might have denounced the environmental conditions behind the debilitated freedman’s and woman’s health questionable, and to rebut Thomas’s calumny about the African Americans’ lack of vitality, Washington instead takes a leap of faith into the “gospel of the broom” proffered by Mrs. Ruffner. Although Washington praises his mother’s domestic cleanliness and her careful “money management,” which spared the family from getting into debt, he fails to note the contradictions in his own story that such “clean living” failed to prevent her own premature illness and death that tellingly coincided with his departure for Hampton. In Washington’s odd juxtaposition of the metonymic figure of

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dwarfism as a stand-­in for chronic mental and physical debility and then the upright—­and uptight—­superwoman of respectability Mrs. Ruffner, Washington contrasts middle class respectability not just with dirt and immorality but also with unsanitary tenement housing (for there was no “regulation”), air pollution, and hazardous working conditions that deteriorate African American health and well-­being. Although Washington denies economic, legal, and social barriers as part of his faith in America’s liberal meritocracy, he cannot—­and in revealing textual contradictions, does not—­so easily ignore the environmental risks and bodily vulnerabilities that were a part of New South racial capitalism. For Washington, the “physically and mentally dwarfed” disturbed and unsettled the natural slow growth of racial progress because these debilitated, as Washington concludes, are “continuing” forever, trapped in the chronic reoccurrence of a postemancipation health crisis, unable to, and as importantly, no longer desiring to, advance. Significantly Washington himself moves forward only through clutching at the ready-­made consolation of hope and transcendence promised within public health discourses of middle class cleanliness and personal self-­care. It is this obsession with negating chronic debility and its nonlinear and ambiguous time of racial progress that leads to similar self-­contradicting leaps of faith throughout Up from Slavery as Washington denies a feared pain, sickness, and even fatigue that he perceived as inimical to racial and national vitality. The urgency of hope for Washington outweighed—­and, he implies, precedes—­the need for political action. Such a seemingly incongruous shift from muted, yet still acknowledged, environmental racism, to “excessive negro mortality and debility,” to finally the cruel optimism of cleanliness and hygienic self-­care occurs not only in Washington’s Up from Slavery. This asserted affective, psychological, and immunizing hope shaped other community leader’s response to turn-­of-­the-­twentieth century African American health inequalities. Thus, in his talk on the “Physical Conditions of the Race, Whether Dependent upon Social Conditions or Environment,” later reprinted in the proceedings of the second 1897 Conference at Atlanta University on the “Mortality among Negroes in Cities,” Fisk University sociologist Eugene Harris, like Washington in Up from Slavery, insisted on a similar reactionary optimism. Despite the title of Harris’s essay, and his meticulous acknowledgment, like Washington, of the unsanitary conditions of urban African American neighborhoods, Harris insists that the “social conditions which white people make for Negroes” have no “bearing on

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his health, vitality, or longevity.”38 When elaborating upon his seemingly inconsistent position that African Americans can transcend documented toxic and contagious environments, Harris explains that if mortality were “due to causes outside our control, I could see nothing before us but the blackness of darkness forever.”39 For Harris, like Washington, the gospel of the broom, with its fusion of cleanliness and cure, of respectability and hygiene, and of self-­sufficiency and self-­healing, served as the only soul-­ sustaining reaction amid an emerging necropolitics of racial debility, a necropolitics in which African Americans were kept always on the edge of injury, sickness, death, and, for some actuarial futurists like Hoffman, extinction. Post-­Reconstruction African American necropolitics was not just a matter of maiming, but also of creating environments that would produce a particular affective state of dread, so that assaults on African American health cooperated with instilling a learned helplessness and resignation. Washington’s Up from Slavery is, thus I would argue, a prosthetic narrative that seeks to hide, normalize, and assimilate a feared chronic debility into a paradigmatic story of African American rehabilitative potentiality. In speaking of “prosthetic narratives,” David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder identify the artificiality within realist narratives that operates out of a desire to compensate for, or resolve a perceived deviance from, the designated normal world. But just as at times a phantom limb can still be felt, Mitchell and Snyder argue, such denaturalized narratives of idealized bodies often evidence moments of failure, incompleteness, or discomfort as they are haunted by a disability that cannot fully be displaced.40 Written shortly after Washington returned from a tour of Europe paid for by concerned friends and patrons who expressed fears about his health and need for a “solid rest” (264), Up from Slavery is ultimately less a retrospective account of the past, and what Washington has been and what he has done, than a promise and blueprint of what he—­and the race—­can and should become through a combined gospel of personal responsibility and health care management, even to the point of denying one’s own fatigue. Not surprisingly, then, amid the autobiography’s mixture of genres, Washington in his penultimate chapter shifts from historiography to confessional self-­help advice, sharing the details of his daily habits of sleeping and resting and his regime for “keep[ing] his body in good condition” (262). As Washington directs his readers, racial self-­help cannot be separated from a careful self-­monitoring and due diligence about one’s health: “if I find any part of my system the least weak, and not performing its duty, I con-

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sult a good physician” (263). As Washington’s language of “least weak” implies, what he fears is not just illness or some debility, but the chronic, or a persistent, physical or mental effeminizing weakness that would impair those of manly character from making themselves and their work indispensable. In response to a question from one of his readers about how he finds time for rest and recreation, Washington elaborates on his preventive measures against feared limitations that would mark him (and the race) as “weaker” than some idealized vital laborer: “I have a strong feeling that every individual owes it to himself, and to the cause which he is serving, to keep a vigorous, healthy body. . . . My experience teaches me that, if one learns to follow this plan, he gets a freshness of body and vigour of mind out of work that goes a long way toward keeping him strong and healthy. I believe that when one can grow to the point where he loves his work, this gives him a kind of strength that is most valuable” (261–­62, my italics). Once again Washington’s counsel talks back to a post-­ Reconstruction order that twinned health and medicalized racial hierarchies, but it is important to note that Washington does not just make able-­ bodiedness the prerequisite for self-­help; he makes health the outcome of and sign of industry: “a freshness of body and vigour of mind out of work.” Washington’s Up from Slavery is a liberal meritocratic fantasy of individualism somatized as biopolitical vigor, one that can only be fully understood within a larger political and national debate about a chronic racial debility that functioned to unfit African Americans as the new economic man within U.S. racial capitalism and the liberal meritocratic state. Throughout Up from Slavery, Washington, as a consequence, insists on a contradictory biopolitics of economic citizenship, urging his readers both to transcend the racialized body (for character, not color, in the end is determinative), yet recorporealizing the strong healthy body as necessary to and, as importantly, proof of—­in a secularization of inherited Calvinist faith—­the race’s self-­disciplined vitality to be the laboring race within the New South.41 In Up from Slavery, Washington boasts of the manly self-­discipline, hard work, and personal responsibility that will make freedmen and women of “indispensable value” to an emerging New South industrial economy (281). He brags about the race’s “vitality”—­its bodily strength and health that pushes through fatigue and finds strength “out of ” labor. At the same time, though, Washington’s story contradicts this inspirational sermon, as if the resistant corporeal reality of Panteleon’s chronic fatigue and even that of his two wives demands a different accounting.

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Although Washington in Up from Slavery speaks only briefly of his first wife, Fannie Smith, who died “ill-­defined” from unknown causes in 1884, he dwells fondly on his second wife, Olivia Davidson, who labored selflessly for the college and whose expert fundraising kept the college financially stable amid early debt crises. Yet Olivia suffered continually from chronic respiratory problems and a fatigue caused by the tuberculosis that would later kill her in 1889, several months before the couple’s fourth anniversary.42 In describing one of Olivia’s successful fundraising campaigns up North that saved the college from foreclosure, Washington, as he had earlier when relating his family’s life in West Virginia, acknowledges the chronic debility of many post-­Reconstruction African Americans: diagnosing Miss Davidson (as Washington refers to his second wife) as “never very strong,” he elaborates that she “would be so exhausted that she could not undress herself ” and “had fallen asleep” while waiting in one of the college’s patron’s parlors (142). Faced once again with “health questionable,” with the chronic conditions of tuberculosis that ravaged the African American community and created the largest health disparity between blacks and whites at the turn of the twentieth century, Washington refuses to rage against or mourn—­and name—­his wife’s “debility.” Instead, he portrays his wife as a selfless martyr for the community, a saintly true and pious superwoman whose delicacy indicates her higher spirituality: “In 1899 she died after four years of happy married life and eight years of hard and happy work for the school. She literally wore herself out in her never ceasing efforts in behalf of the work that she so dearly loved” (my emphasis, 199). Although Washington genders labor as granting manly strength, he cannot quite reconcile himself to a feminized chronic fatigue, one that here threatens to rewrite Washington’s narrative of black agency that can achieve mastery over disease, pain, and fatigue, as well as other social and legal obstacles. In the chronic weariness of his wife and her premature death, Washington confronts a feared corporeality that compromises an autonomous Black self that can pull itself up by its bootstraps, or, that is to say, a Black body that cannot escape its conditions, cannot elude, as Washington writes, the “least weaknesses” from the racist environments that interpenetrate and alter it. Olivia’s death amid the self-­made man’s bright-­ side resilience exposes the deception of self-­sufficiency and calls for a different Black agency, one that is interdependent and, though it may have force, does not profess an obfuscatory transcendent mastery. Olivia’s story, the story of the chronically debilitated and fatigued black woman, “yet

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remains,” as Kenney warned Washington, to alter and reshape the portraits of manly men and superwomen that Washington wants to relate as part of a narrative of self-­willed upward progress. As a result, Washington retreats into another prosthetic narrative that permits him to recoup a faith in a liberal meritocracy: Olivia suffered only from an excess of womanly virtue, of self-­abnegation and service, a commitment that earned her only happiness, and certainly no chronic pains that would cry out to be heard as part of the race’s “natural” progress.43 In many ways, then, Washington’s Up from Slavery outlines a course of prosthetic rehabilitation and not simply a political pragmatism: it does not just advise the African American citizen-­patient toward self-­help and personal responsibility; rather, it educates African Americans in a self-­ surveillance, care, and personal enhancement seen as necessary to land a job or merit citizenship. In arguing that manly men and pious superwomen can take control of their lives and optimize their health and vitality, Washington fashions a mixed genre memoir that serves to inculcate in its readers a “chronobiology” about the proper and natural development of the individual biological life. Throughout Up from Slavery Washington repeats that following his educational and self-­care regime will ensure “a natural process of growth” that will in turn effect the race’s and the nation’s slow natural development. For Washington, political ideology overlapped with life processes or the question of what is the “natural” and “healthy” stages of individual psychological and physical development. Against what he repeatedly calls the “artificial forcing” (223, 234) of immediate political rights and social equality, Washington hails a “natural growth” that requires that both the individual and the group undergo necessary stages of evolution. As Washington elaborates, quoting the epiphany that he says his students come to after first begrudging the hard, muddy labor required of all students at Tuskegee, “I am glad that our first boarding-­ place was in the dismal, ill-­lighted, and damp basement. Had we started in a fine, attractive, convenient room, I fear we would have ‘lost our heads’ and become ‘stuck up.’ It means a great deal, I think, to start off on a foundation which one had made for one’s self . . . [we]are glad that we started as we did, and built ourselves up year by year, by a slow and natural process of growth” (162). Washington’s recurring paean to “slow natural growth,” however, fractures out in complex multiple meanings, suggesting at once a renunciation of immediate transformative political change and, at the same time, a normalizing of supposedly medically verifiable healthy life stages. In Up

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from Slavery Washington repurposes the same constitutive discourse around vitality and debility that had been used to exclude African Americans from southern economic and political life to foster in his audience a constant self-­monitoring, one given scientific authority through a language of health. Hard manual labor is not just a vocational choice, or a lesson in character-­building self-­discipline, but a part of the development stages the child must pass through in his rite of passage to become a man. The healthy self, in Washington’s architectural metaphor, must start at the “foundation,” must start with bone-­wearing labor, from digging out the dirt for a dining room to stomping on mud and straw to forge the bricks to lay the building’s cornerstone. To not pass through this “primitive” manual labor stage is somehow, in Washington’s transcription of the good “healthy” life, to lose one’s head, to not be whole, healthy, and of right (sane) mind. At the same time, this analogy of the architectural foundation that Washington uses to tie manual labor to the natural and healthy biochronology of the Tuskegee student—­from primitive youth to rational adult, from freedman and digger of ditches to businessman—­ threatens to restore the reality that Washington can never fully deny, yet can never fully incorporate into his overcoming narrative: an effeminizing chronic fatigue. Although Washington puts into the mouth of his imagined student spokesman an appreciation of the “dismal, ill-­lighted, and damp basement,” these details, as if taking on a linguistic meaning exceeding their intended purpose, remind readers of the very insalubrious environments—­ the result of racial and economic inequalities—­ that caused a post-­ Reconstruction Black debility. Such environments frequently breed tuberculosis more than character. This “foundational” metaphor has a particular irony given that the sacrifice and labor that Washington identifies as the bedrock behind a socially transformative Black vitality brought about only the chronic fatigue and tubercular demise of his angelic second wife who was never allowed time for her own self-­care. Washington’s inconsistencies between message and reality in Up from Slavery, however, are precisely the point of his memoir, or at least, its pedagogical purpose. Washington uses his story to instill in his readers habits that they should come to see as stages and practices of their “natural” development. And one of the habits readers should carry over from the Principal’s story is a prosthetic faith that they can manage their own health risks, a faith foundational to the post-­Reconstruction liberal state and the New South’s economic miracle.

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Set back into the context of post-­Reconstruction debility politics, Washington’s insistence that the “use of the tooth brush” had the effect of “bringing about a higher degree of civilization among the students” (175) expresses a complicated, and sometimes inconsistent, attempt to bring together self-­help, health advocacy, and social justice around a vision of optimized Black life. In response to his upbringing in a West Virginia mining town, to a post-­Reconstruction debate over the possible evolutionary extinction of the “dying Negro,” and to the specter of African American debility (embodied in the chronic fatigue of his own wife and students), Washington sought to boost confidence in an enhanced African American health. He inculcated hygiene both to ensure the race’s survival and to promote African Americans as the comparatively desirable laboring race. Such a rehabilitation narrative of uplift required for Washington the teaching of a self-­care that would ensure a “natural growth of individual and collective development.” In describing his educational program at Tuskegee thus, Washington begins by noting he taught the students “how to bathe; how to care for their teeth and clothing. We wanted to teach them what to eat, and how to eat it properly” (126). It is only after this (or as he says as if announcing priorities, “aside from this”) that he mentions that he wanted to provide them “practical knowledge of some one industry” (126). Intertwined with Washington’s assertion of vocational education was a foundational insistence on a right to health, to the need to first counteract a slow violence that was killing, excluding, and disenfranchising African Americans. Such a prioritizing of health had an even more immediate urgency at a time when, as Paul Lawrie notes, there arose a new discourse of “vitalism” that understood the laboring body as a dynamic and energetic dynamo that could be trained to transcend its human elements of fatigue, pain, and debility.44 Not surprisingly, then, in his Atlanta Cotton States Address, Washington did not just promise 16 million laboring hands for New South industrialists; he promised “vigorous life,” and urged upon his African American readers that they had a duty to perform that self-­care and risk management that ensured what he called a “vigorous healthy life” (237). Even as he enumerates, however, the habits that will teach the race “vigorous life” to prevent disease and debility, Washington only feels he has succeeded when he has instilled a constant anxiety and self-­surveillance that in the end imposes, as Saidiya Hartman has noted, new scenes and forms of subjection on freedmen’s and women’s freedom:45 “This lesson, I am pleased to be able to say, has been so thoroughly learned and so faith-

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fully handed down from year to year . . . [that] when the students march out of the chapel in the evening and their dress is inspected, as it is every night, not one button is found to be missing” (176). Just as Washington inculcates rational and self-­interested conduct to remake free men and women into a vital laboring race for New South industry, it is important to note, he disciplines them in new habits of self-­monitoring to optimize their vitality. The disciples of Washington’s prosthetic faith would not simply internalize norms; they would constantly diagnose a sense of failure, fearing over their shoulder the shadow of potential black debility that hovered as the ghostly matter behind Washington’s own autobiography. To triumph over the chronic time of African American progress, Washington rechanneled his fears of debility to urge the ever-­greater progress, self-­ perfection, vitality, and consumption that he saw as central prerequisites for a meritocratic citizenship. To William Hannibal Thomas, chronic Black debility created an impossible time of race progress. In contrast, Washington repurposed this fear to reinvigorate African American economic and cultural aspirations around a new normative life chronology, which would put African Americans in control of all stages of their development regardless of what foundation they started from—­whether salt mine or damp and germ-­filled basement. Ugly Progress’s (Un)becoming of Rehabilitative Citizenship

Throughout his career, as he notes in his “Forethought” to The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted to lift the veil to reveal what had been left out or distorted within historical images of African Americans and what impeded African Americans’ progress to full self-­determination and culture. But Du Bois’s tracing of the “soul’s striving” for political, economic, and social equality depends on a not always fully acknowledged opposition between the postemancipation diseased and debilitated Black body and the beautiful manhood of his ideal (fully developed) men of culture. In lifting the veil from Black lives under Reconstruction and in a New South, Du Bois at the same time, like Washington, wrestled with his own never quite resolved “debility troubles.”46 In his study of W.E.B Du Bois and American Political Thought, Adolph Reed contends that Du Bois drew upon Lamarckian theories of the stages of racial development to concede to the backwardness of many poor Blacks that made them unfit for immediate full citizenship.47 This contrast, however, between primitive

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and civilized cultures in Du Bois’s thought overlaps with an anxiety and shame about freedmen and women as the chronically debilitated race—­a myth that Du Bois worked tirelessly to disprove in his own statistically driven sociological studies, but one he also reinscribes within The Souls of Black Folk as part of his timid faith in an “ugly progress.” In his 1903 essay on the “The Talented Tenth,” which has prompted critics to accuse Du Bois of being patriarchal, elitist, and civilizationist, Du Bois tellingly frames his distrust of an uneducated working class in language reminiscent of post-­Reconstruction myths of Black debility: as Du Bois assesses the health disparities within the African American community at the opening of “The Talented Tenth,” “It is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”48 For Du Bois, as we saw for Washington, debility was not merely metaphorical, but the “contamination and death” of a supposedly permanent Black underclass claimed to be in the post-­Reconstruction United States, too unhealthy and unfit to be part of the nation’s vitality.49 The language of disability is ubiquitous in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and his understanding of racial discrimination as a “handicap” that has prevented African Americans from competing on a level playing field in a U.S. liberal meritocracy has often been cited in key civil rights legislation.50 But such an invocation of disability is both metaphorical and material. In what follows I want to argue that eruptions in The Souls of Black Folk of chronic disability—­those extraordinary bodies and minds that cannot be, do not want to be, fixed and recovered as part of the man of culture’s development—­elucidate Du Bois’s struggle both to recognize the function of a material debility in structuring the racial hierarchies within New South racial capitalism and, at the same time, to imagine an alternative chronic time of racial progress. In the end, I am interested, however, in those places where Du Bois’s text “malfunctions” as part of a contradictory “lyrical sociology” that both records the poetic beauty and simultaneously the gritty economic hardships of African Americans in the Black Belt.51 Although Du Bois tries to assume the position of the detached spectator operating as a native informant, the South’s chronic disabled constantly interfere and interrupt his attempts to tell a story of the evolutionary progress of Black manhood and culture.52 In these textual malfunctions we hear the disabled Black southerner’s resisting presence to the grand political and economic narratives that Du Bois desires to impose on their experience. Although Jennifer James and Christopher Bell have

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pointed out that disabled black characters are rarely visible in racial uplift literature for fear they would affirm the pathologization of Black life, these veiled disabled “voices,” I would argue, insist on breaking through and disturbing Du Bois’s mediation so that he finally has to renegotiate his representation of “Black folk.”53 In many ways, The Souls of Black Folk renders visible what Booker T. Washington in Up from Slavery could only hint at in brief confessional moments about his West Virginia origins or his wife’s health: an antiblack violence that operated through the long-­term debilitation of Black mental and physical health. Throughout The Souls of Black Folk, in chapters such as “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois clearly calls attention to the fact that the economic position of Black labor cannot be removed from a southern “debility politics”: in describing the post-­ Reconstruction “crystalliz[ing]” of “racial prejudice” in “harsh laws and harsher custom,” for example, Du Bois notes that this “marvelous pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen.”54 Here Du Bois’s metaphoric invocation of “handicaps” plays on the gap between Black agency and a democratic discourse of race-­neutral individualism that claimed that all could prove themselves in the capitalist marketplace. But Du Bois’s “disability metaphor” here, as Sami Schalk contends, demonstrates how Du Bois could both invoke disability as a figure of something else and yet, at the same time, still insist on its materiality, one resulting from antiblack violence.55 Ironically calling the progress of a southern white working class“marvelous,”Du Bois undercuts the New South’s so-­called economic miracle by highlighting how poor blacks have been both metaphorically and also literally—­physically—­handicapped or debilitated by this economic progress. But this mocking of the boosterism of a southern economic “miracle” also suggests that white working-­class advancement depended on a not always acknowledged Black debilitated life. The racialization of a vital white Southern working-­class citizen, Du Bois indicates, only has its meaning through what Alexander Weheliye has called an antiblack relationality.56 The post-­Reconstruction era, Du Bois implies, was not simply a time when medical biases framed diseases or denied African Americans access to health care. Fundamental to the rise of the New South (white) economic miracle was an evaluation of Black and white bodies in terms of their health, productivity, and potential capacity and the corresponding rendering and evaluating of black bodies as “handicapped,” or as, by comparison, lacking, debilitated, and unrecoverable.

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In his appeals throughout Souls to a language of disability, or a “handicap,” Du Bois invoked a figure of disabled African Americans that was at once meant to be lyrical, sociologically factual, and affective. Du Bois understood that post-­Reconstruction labor relations operated within a biopolitics in which the material everyday lived experience of African Americans was systematically regulated and deregulated to keep them always at risk, vulnerable, and in a precarious state of vitality. As the surplus life of racial capitalism, African Americans were disposable within the vacillations of the marketplace’s inevitable crises, as well as commodified bodies for cheap manual labor. Thus, tellingly in his chapter on “Of the Sons of Master and Man” in Souls, Du Bois ties black debility to African American laborers’ reduction to a surplus labor population: “The unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all advance in the black South, .  .  .  but it does mean that this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system might easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to” (171). In saying that black laborers are handicapped to accomplish less than they potentially could within a “fairer economic system,” Du Bois contends that interracial labor competition in the New South involved a preemptive logic of slow violence through an increased exposure to disease, disability, and other vulnerabilities. As Du Bois would elaborate, calling attention to the debility that Washington reified in his prosthetic faith in immunizing self-­care, “If now the economic development of the south is to be pushed to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the modern self-­reliant democratic laborer” (168). In the overlap of protest between the worker’s lack of education (or training) with the material invocation of a postemancipation African American debility, Du Bois thus unveils an imbrication of debility and predetermined opportunities that are supposedly open to all regardless of color. Questions of the “Conservation of the Race” were, of course, always a part of Du Bois’s scholarly inquiry and political writing even before The Souls of Black Folk, as the title of his 1897 essay by the same name indicates. Although in his earlier 1897 essay Du Bois invoked directly a Darwinian language of racial competition and national vitality, in The Souls of Black Folk he aligns this evolutionary thinking with the problem of African Americans’ postemancipation disabilities. In The Souls of Black Folk,

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Du Bois narrates the race’s chronic disabilities as a sign of its prehistory and as a gauge of a persisting primitivism that will delay the time of the man of culture’s full realization. This desire for a particularly masculine evolutionary vitality is seen throughout The Souls of Black Folk in repeated visual imagery about “upright” men set against a contrasting “crooked,” “creeping,” “bent,” and debilitated Black underclass. Racial progress in Du Bois is always set against a chronic time of debility—­ halting, slow, erratic—­that reveals Du Bois’s perception that racial capitalism and its laissez-­faire market-­place driven government policies have maimed Black bodies and mental health, but also his fear—­like Washington—­that a chronic black debility would render education and advancement disabling and “ugly.” As Susan Schweik notes, in the late nineteenth century, many cities passed municipal laws or “ugly laws” aimed to limit the access of disabled persons to public space. This legal construction of the “unsightly beggar,” defined as “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object,” was, however, often inseparable from racial discrimination. Such a fear of the “unsightliness” of racial poverty that recurs in Du Bois’s Souls, therefore, reflects and registers a specific post-­Reconstruction era linking of legal rights, race, beauty, and disability.57 I want to turn now to one of Du Bois’s most famous chapters in The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” which was first published in the Atlantic Monthly and which analyzes New South industrialism in light of the region’s economic history.58 In his essay “Of the Meaning of Progress,” W. E. B. Du Bois expresses his doubts about Black progress in the New South, which at best seems reduced to a crude materialist betterment, but worse produces a fallout of chronic disability. Structuring his essay around a before and after autobiographical return to paradise lost, Du Bois recalls how during his undergraduate studies at Fisk, he took a summer teaching job in Alexandria, Tennessee, in the central Tennessee mountains. Although Du Bois soon left the community to pursue his PhD work at Harvard, he revisited the town ten years later only to find that the region’s industrialization had blighted as much as advanced aspirations. As Du Bois expresses his ambivalence in telling language, “My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly” (70). Yet, what exactly, I think we need to ask, is the nature of this “ugly progress” that haunts the soul’s strivings in Du Bois’ classic depiction of modern Black consciousness? And why is the progress named as “ugly,” rather than in more precise language as partial or uneven,

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terms more commonly employed to indicate a nonlinear and incomplete development. In using a language applicable to physical appearance, a language meaningful only in contrast to some idealized and normalized standard of beauty, whether of the individual person or the landscape, Du Bois takes as his point of reference to determine African American progress, Black “health and physique,” the title of a conference that Du Bois would convene at Atlanta University in 1906 to address health inequalities. In “The Meaning of Progress,” chronic disability persists as a shadow presence against which a Du Boisian Black subjectivity or the full manhood of the “man of culture” takes shape: a shadow that persists as a feared subtext that resurfaces to disrupt the chapter’s expressed intentions about racial advancement. Although Du Bois in Souls’ sociological survey cites everywhere continued signs of “black penury,” he finds himself always having to accommodate in his descriptions of Black life in the New South debilitated and disabled African Americans who refuse to remain invisible (or veiled) and demand that their experience be taken into account. These chronic disabled cause Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to malfunction, and in doing so, raise questions about problems within our critical approaches about how to do a Black disability history. Even though Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk never relinquishes its detached authorial consciousness to allow debilitated black characters to express the details of their lives, they do “speak,” if we recognize the limitations of this able-­ist metaphor of voice that limits speaking to oral or written communication. The disabled express their presence in their demand that Du Bois take into account their thriving and enact often complex, and ambiguous, textual negotiations, so as to accommodate their physical movement and embodied lives in ways that cannot be subsumed in abstracting metaphors about a “handicapped” race. Poor disabled African Americans make themselves heard, felt, seen, and touched within Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk through their refusal to be “veiled” and in their insistence on de-­forming or re-­forming the prosthetic narrative of evolutionary progress that Du Bois (and a New South) wanted to tell about the “natural” evolutionary and economic development of the race. To understand Du Bois’s “Of the Meaning of Progress”—­and Du Bois’s accommodation to a different chronic understanding of racial progress—­we need to restore the materiality of his poetic representations as part of his lyrical sociology. Throughout his account of his return to Alexandria, Tennessee, Du Bois lingers repeatedly (and almost obsessively) on the alleged “ugliness” and unsightliness of the maimed and the diseased

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as if to provide his own anecdotal weight to prevailing public health statistics about the degeneration of Black life as a result of postemancipation life. But the constant and accumulating repetition of these differently abled bodies—­a crookedness that Du Bois cannot make straight or fit into some developmental time and “meaning of progress”—­starts to take on an expressive force of its own, disrupting the forward march of Du Bois’s bifurcation of southern Black life into a before and after of crisis and recovery. Thus, upon coming back to Tennessee after his years at Harvard, Du Bois is shocked, he says, upon seeing the “broken blighted family” whose son Ben was “homely and crooked” (71), at seeing the Hickmans, whose Albert has “stooping shoulders” (72), and the Burkes, whose father’s “massive frame is showing decline” (72). In part, Du Bois’s “Of the Meaning of Progress” signals its retrenchment of hope about racial progress through a fear (as we saw in Washington’s Up from Slavery) of the chronic time of “unmanly” and “ugly” Black disabilities, which despite the “marvelous” story of southern economic progress, persists unredeemed or arises from the collateral damage of labor exploitation. But, at the same time, although race leaders such as Booker T. Washington were working to make African Americans a vital labor force for the New Southern industrial economy, the men and women of Alexandria, Tennessee enact their own becoming—­and unbecoming—­that forces Du Bois to feel and to know debility’s function within a complex antiblack necropolitics that left many like Mrs. Burke, once of “lion-­like physique,” “broken.” Alexandria’s disabled will not let Du Bois extrapolate their bodies into metaphor, or to quantify their lives in some utilitarian calculus of greater good as part of a New Southern economy whose benefits will trickle down to them. In the end, the narrative trajectory in “Of the Meaning of Progress,” or to borrow the language of Du Bois’s original title for his essay, of the “Negro Schoolmaster” in the “New South,” goes nowhere, only “stumbling” and “hobbling” back to the same questions with which it began: “How shall man measure Progress?” Although Du Bois returns to his Jim Crow railway car, detached once again, but “sadly musing,” the chronic disabled haunt “Of the Meaning of Progress”; they get in Du Bois’s face, get into his narrative so racial progress has to account for a different chronic time that does not fit into the neat binaries of degeneration or advancement, of agential control or victimization. Just as in Washington’s Up from Slavery, it is, moreover, a feared feminized chronic disability that most troubles and overturns the before and after rehabilitation narrative

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that Du Bois wants to tell, and indeed searches the empirical evidence for, in “Of the Meaning of Progress.” Although Du Bois wants to discover an inspirational progressive history, the only story Du Bois finds is the “ill-­ defined” and mysterious death of the broken and enfeebled true woman Josie: “How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-­faced Josie lies?” Although Hazel Carby has faulted the gendered ideology in Du Bois’s “Of the Meaning of Progress,” which pictures black women as invisible, silent domestic objects hidden away from public space,59 the disabled black woman Josie is, I would argue, not fully silenced; she insists on being heard and on derailing the progressive narrative time of Du Bois’s history. It is Josie’s counternarrative that causes Du Bois’s essay to conclude fractured and open-­ended, conveying only doubt and melancholy and other “bad” feelings that catalyze Du Bois’s reevaluation of a post-­Reconstruction rehabilitative politics. Upon his return visit to Alexandria, Du Bois learns that “Josie was dead.” To help her brother Jim escape incarceration for allegedly “stealing wheat,” Josie “emptied her purse,” but such a loss of money and continued brotherly support relegate Josie to a life of “toil,” causing her to grow “thin and silent.” When her little sister Lizzie brings home a “nameless child,” Josie, Du Bois writes, conjuring up her ghost in his poetic imagination, “shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired” until she “crept” one day to her mother like a “hurt child” and “slept,” slept permanently in death, as Du Bois euphemistically implies (70). Once again, as we saw in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, the chronically fatigued woman haunts Du Bois’s imaging of a black futurity in a post-­Reconstruction South. Like Washington, Du Bois too, as part of his “lyrical sociology,” tries to frame Josie’s story as Olivia Davidson’s story, as the life of a saintly superwoman and martyr on behalf of the race whose chronic fatigue calibrates a sacrificing virtue. Yet, in Du Bois’s meditation on the time of racial progress, unlike Washington’s, the ghost of the disabled black woman Josie resists these remunerative literary and political objectives: her fatigued body refuses to restore a feeble liberal faith that “it only gets better” with time and hard work. Instead, her “creeping” chronic fatigue disrupts Du Bois’s “striving” for an optimistic Black future built around visions of respectable middle-­class Black families proving themselves—­and lifting others as they climb to a state of vital citizenship. Josie’s death upends the prosthetic fantasy of a respectability politics by unveiling a post-­Reconstruction necropolitics that linked mass incarceration, debilitation, the destruction of Black families, and death.

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Josie’s chronic debility and the negative states of being that it engenders in the “schoolmaster,” however, offer Du Bois the productive possibility of a chronic agency without mastery. Josie’s ability to survive, to neither regress backward nor transcend into some transformative inspirational rehabilitated future, represents a different model for being affecting and effective. Her everyday acts of ingenuity and persistence that keep the family together, that remain generative in shaping the bodies and lives of those closest to her, assert a fugitive agency that is neither finally about assimilation nor resistance, but in caring for the lives of others. In the “Book of the Dead Revisited,” Saidiya Hartman identifies the need to recover what she calls the “practices of the hold” within African American cultural history. In the face of anticipated death, brutal violence, and enduring dispossession, Hartman asks, what were the “daily practices of refusal and waywardness and care in the space of captivity”? 60 This “feminized” agency of care—­one that does not fit into the manly time of racial progress—­Du Bois finally acknowledges in his ambiguous ending of “Of the Meaning of Progress.” In ways the sociologist Du Bois did not anticipate or want to see, Josie’s chronic debility is moving and compelling in its ability to initiate survival and change. Josie pictures and opens up the possibility of a chronic time of progress, “creeping” forward, yet also at times “stumbling” back, inching the family forward so that her brother remains unjailed, if not completely free, and her sister’s child takes its first steps. Even though Booker T. Washington lamented the chronic fatigue of disabled black woman like Miguelena Panteleon, like Olivia Davidson, whom “yet the community has” as its racial burden, the chronic disabled Josie teaches the Harvard-­educated sociologist another nonlinear time of racial progress—­or, as Du Bois says at the end of the chapter, “all this life and love and strife and failure” (74). Such an agency cannot be enumerated on an actuarial chart, or graphed in the teleological forecast of uplift, or etched within case studies of meritocratic manly self-­sufficient vitality and citizenship.61 Just as we see in Du Bois’s chapter “Of the Meaning of Progress,” this attempt to imagine a black futurity of manly culture continually malfunctions and encounters discomforting, but finally generative, failures. No chapter in The Souls of Black Folk probably more clearly demonstrates Du Bois’s ambivalent attempt to imagine an alternative time of chronic racial progress than “Of the Passing of the First-­Born.” In Du Bois’s personal account of the death of his oldest son, Burghardt, in the chapter “Of the Passing of the First-­Born,” DuBois provides his strongest meditation on a

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post-­Reconstruction debility politics. In many ways, this added chapter to the collection of essays, one of the few in The Souls of Black Folk not previously published, repeats the mystifying contradictions and disjunctures between the actual lived experience of the chronically disabled and the collection’s lyrical sociology, here one crystallized around the idealized and sentimental domestic middle-­class family. But even such “Love” that “[sits] beside [the] cradle” is vulnerable in this elegy detailing the threats and insecurities of Black life amid a post-­Reconstruction antiblack necropolitics (214). Although Du Bois struggles to find some consolation of philosophy or redemptive tale of overcoming to frame his son’s death, it is finally in the essay’s narrative failure and the resultant negative feelings that Du Bois gestures toward an alternative chronic time of racial progress. As the title of Du Bois’s essay suggests, “Of the Passing of the (and not my) First-­Born,” the death of his son caused not only a personal crisis, but a crisis of faith about the race’s progress. Like “Of the Meaning of Progress,” “Of the Passing of the First-­Born” is organized around a before and after, crisis and recovery structure, or more precisely once again a failed recovery structure. At the start of the essay Du Bois pictures his son as the longed-­for idealized black futurity, one bound up in the reproduction of the respectable manly character and culture of the present: I “saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world” (209). But such a masculinized futurity, one embodied once again in a pointedly symbolic health and vitality (arms of strength), is disrupted by Atlanta’s necropolitics: although Du Bois’s account of the circumstances surrounding his son’s death remains largely abstracted and sanitized of anger, his son’s demise could likely have been avoided. When Burghardt fell ill from diphtheria, a newly treatable disease at the end of the nineteenth century, Du Bois and his wife Nina searched frantically for one of the three black doctors in Atlanta, but finding them all unavailable, the couple turned to the city’s white doctors, who refused to care for a black child.62 During the “three days” described in the “Of the Passing of the First-­Born,” Du Bois and his wife waited, watching helplessly as their child was “wasting, wasting away,” not as a result of the ravages of some untreatable disease, or accident of fortune, or “the Shadow of Death” (210), but as the direct result of medical racism. Du Bois, however, never names this prejudicial and systematic lack of quality health care that Georgia law dictated as part of its mandatory rules about health care segregation; instead, he elaborates in the mode of sentimental

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fiction on the death bed scene, the mother’s agony, and the child’s dying breaths. If the personal is always political—­and here the family’s personal tragedy witnessed a Jim Crow health care apartheid—­Du Bois can seem, somewhat incongruously, to turn his essay into an Emersonian-­style sorrow song on the tragedy of a transcendental human fate. This seemingly odd failure of Du Bois to find a mobilizing and conscious-­raising anger in his son’s possibly avoidable death exists in tension with his earlier muted critique of a post-­Reconstruction racial capitalism’s normalizing of a chronic black debility to ensure the (white) economic “miracle.” But in “Of the Passing of the First-­Born,” Du Bois turns to the tradition of slave suicide, as Teri Snyder and Bill Bennett have chronicled,63 to give this violence a post-­Reconstruction afterlife. After his son’s demise, Du Bois muses that, it might be said, that he is “not dead” but “escaped”—­having eluded a lifetime of racial inequality, injustice, disappointments, and bitterness (213). Given Du Bois’s own deliberate emphasis on his son’s mixed-­race heritage (his golden hair, his blue eyes), Burghardt reenacts and recalls the tragic mulatto’s preemptive drowning leap to elude a life without freedom, dignity, or hope. But if slave suicide was itself a kind of necropolitics, one less a matter of personal despair or choice than a social outcome of deliberate policies shaping Black lives without options, Du Bois adds onto this residual discourse a post-­Reconstruction afterlife, an afterlife that persists in the deliberate medical neglect and toxic environments that leave African Americans diseased, debilitated, and dead. Such an afterlife is underscored once again in Du Bois’s invocation of chronic black debility. At the moment of Burghardt’s death and “escape,” Du Bois foregrounds, as he had done in his previously surveys of the post-­ Reconstruction South, the familiar haunting shadow of Black debility: “Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil!” (213). If Clotelle’s leap from the Washington bridge signaled the slave’s attempt to deny the master’s power over the Black body, in Du Bois’s “Of the Passing of the First-­Born,” African American infant mortality points toward another kind of preventive “escape”—­ one that seeks to avoid the “choking” and deforming,” or the slow violent maiming and killing of Black life. In “Of the Passing of the First-­Born,” therefore, Du bois signifies on a long tradition of slave suicide to witness a post-­Reconstruction antiblack social death enacted through health politics rather than slavery. But Du Bois’s elegy for his dead son opens up transformative possibilities of Black liberation, most notably in its despair, or in his “crip negativity”

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that refuses the rehabilitative promise of a Washingtonian faith in self-­ care and the “natural growth” of resilience and recovery. Set back in post-­ Reconstruction debates about the race’s progress and development through healthy habits and risk management (Washington’s sanitary citizenship), Du Bois asserts the productive possibilities of living in the persistent present time of chronic debility that cannot simply be denied, redeemed, or marginalized for a better tomorrow. Even though Du Bois’s lack of clear protest has troubled twenty-­first-­century readers, we should not be so quick to overlook the potency of his concluding unresolved ambivalence in “Of the Passing of the First-­Born.” Bidding his child “well sped” as part of an almost rhapsodic apostrophe, DuBois notes, “better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you” (213). Du Bois’s essay ends with a testimonial to what at first might seem an odd resignation, but this “melancholy” instead invokes a tentative alternative chronic time of racial progress. To resist the prosthetic logic of rehabilitation that we saw in Washington’s Up from Slavery, Du Bois pushes the limits of what is considered natural or possible and embraces uncertainty and radical change instead of the self-­sustaining and risk-­ avoiding reproductive logic of a Washingtonian faith in unfatigued supermen and women.64 In moments of narrative failure, of racial uplift’s ideological malfunctioning, Du Bois’s “The Passing of the First-­Born,” ruptures and “creeps” beyond the individualized ideologies of cure, rehabilitation, and overcoming that we saw in Washington’s Up from Slavery. The ending of Du Bois’s “Of the Passing of the First-­Born” expresses an obstructionist melancholia in the face of a chronic Black debility that cannot be translated or co-­opted within the racialized narratives of liberal progress, gradual development, and modern efficient racial capitalism. Even as Du Bois attempts the sentimentalized leap into the promise of a future kingdom of heaven (and its radical democratic spiritual equality), he quickly dismisses this cruel hope, renouncing it because it strikes him in the end as not defiant, and all too redolent of the very necropolitical logic of post-­ Reconstruction debility politics: a debility politics that insisted that a “dying negro” race could not advance beyond its own “choked and deformed” present. It was too doomed by its own inner deficiency to “waste away,” like his son, unsusceptible to any medical intervention (that never came). In the end, Du Bois’s personal despair about the death of his son finally awakens him to the ambivalence of his earlier reflections on the “ugly progress” of New South industrialism: he chastises

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himself for his attempts at mystifying consolations of philosophy, which were, after all, not so much a comforting truth about a child’s preventable death than a socially conditioned resignation to a New South antiblack vitality politics. Thus, it is not surprising that, confronted with the inescapable debilitation of Black lives that do not matter, Du Bois raises the very question that haunts The Souls of Black Folk about the surplus value of Black lives under New South racial capitalism: as Du Bois muses in closing, “Are there so many workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away?” (214). By the time that Du Bois concludes “The Passing of the First-­Born” it is precisely this refusal to explain away, to find comfort in the tossing away of Black lives stricken by morbidity and death, that makes this effusive and contradictory meditation a pivotal moment in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Although in his survey of the Black Belt Du Bois had tried to maintain a detached spectatorship, recording, yet refusing to feel, the statistically numbered “creeping” and “crooked” manhood and chronically fatigued womanhood that so disturbed his hopes for racial progress, “Of the Passing of the First-­Born” names what had become the daily suffering and chronic time of racial progress: it names the experience of the disabled Black lives who insisted on “speaking,” or at least disturbing, and having their presence felt, heard, and “unveiled” over the cheering for racial rehabilitation and progress. In the chapter’s ending series of questions—­unanswered, unanswerable—­Du Bois witnesses to the senseless death of African American lives, and of the inconsolable grief that African American families feel—­not only his own—­in being unable to protect their children, their partners, or elders. In place of Washington’s naïve faith in a disciplined self-­care and risk management, Du Bois calls attention to the unbridgeable gap between love for family and the senseless death caused by a Southern debility politics: “The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak.” As Du Bois’s contrast between the poor tenemented in unsanitary alleyways and the idealized middle-­class family radiating “Love” underscores, no motherly (or fatherly) cleaning with broom or toothbrushed self-­care can finally overturn and transform a systematic disregard for Black lives that would “toss them away” or let them “waste away.” In his abrupt ending, thus, Du Bois’s essay form underscores the urgency for some yet unimagined alternative to the persistent necropoli-

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tics governing black lives. In the contradictory “unbecoming” (“ugly” but also unsettling) of his failed consolation of philosophy, Du Bois implies the need for more creative ways of combatting a Black debility that has been used to manage and contain African American freedom in the postemancipation United States. If Du Bois proposes no clear alternative to Washington’s rehabilitative gospel of hygiene and self-­care, this despair, this failure to find meaning in the senseless, yet preventable, death of African Americans, carries its own sorrow song: “Of the Passing of the First-­ Born” finally enacts a “crip negativity” that refuses to resort to the typical rehabilitative promises of awareness, education, and personal responsibility. There are larger structural inequalities that must be addressed—­ inadequate housing, access to clean water, and medical care. But even more fundamentally in terms of Jim Crow politics there is the larger structural value that black debility and the disposability of black lives plays in constituting, as Du Bois illustrated, ideas of whiteness, meritocracy, and citizenship. To gesture toward a different Black futurity, thus, requires not only the saving of individual Black children but the birth of a different meaning of “blackness,” one dissociated from an inherent debility and unsanitariness that affirms, as the oppositional other, a vital white working class for the New South’s economic miracle. Burghardt’s death makes clear that debilitated Black personhood was at one end of the continuum needed to produce the meritorious white laborer. The Souls of Black Folk is, thus, full of ghosts, the ghosts of those post-­ Reconstruction black lives that debilitated, deformed, disappeared, and died slowly and unnamed, and whose stories resisted the easy sociological case study.65 Each decline, each death, however, as Du Bois recognizes, was the result of real decisions and policies made by politicians, doctors, manufacturers, landlords, and community leaders seeking to maximize profit through privileging the vitality of some, while putting others at risk. Du Bois’s obsession with the “creeping crooked” present reflected the way the chronically disabled of a New South collaborated in the writing of The Souls of Black Folks, raising his consciousness to a postemancipation biopolitics centered around who was healthy and fit enough to work and who would be let to debilitate as surplus life. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois recognized that in the chronic time of post-­Reconstruction debility—­in which freedmen and women were said to be forever sick and dying—­New Southern capitalism colonized the possibility of a racial future: it sought to put an end to imagining political futures, for the morbid and chronically

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ill were being trained to simply survive, and to endure in resignation. As Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk witnesses, however, although the daily struggles of poor chronically disabled southern Blacks were not witnessed within political discourse, or did not register as radical activism, these chronically disabled, like Josie, demonstrated an everyday agency without mastery, a care that kept the community open and alive to a different time of progress.

2  |  Narrating Slow Violence Post-­Reconstruction’s Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction Other centuries looking back upon the culture of the nineteenth would have a right to suppose that if, in a land of freemen, eight millions of human beings were found to be dying of disease, the nation would cry with one voice, “Heal them!” If they were staggering on in ignorance, it would cry “Train them!” . . . but [there] was not one voice [against] the countercries and echoes, “Let them die!” “Train them like slaves!” “Let them stagger downward! —W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 1899

How does one tell the story of letting die? How does the African American writer plot a racial violence that unfolds according to the slow accretive time of contamination? As W. E. B. Du Bois concludes in his final remarks in his massive statistical survey of urban migration, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), post-­Reconstruction African Americans were being permitted to sicken and die as part of the unequal accumulations and distributions of racial capitalism because they were said to be, as he noted in his chapter on “The Health of Negroes,” a “dying race” in the aftermath of emancipation. And there were few countercries to protest—­not to mention, recount—­this slow violence of letting die, particularly within turn-­ of-­ the-­ twentieth-­ century African American “protest fiction.” African American literary histories extensively examine post-­ Reconstruction’s traumatic stories of lynching and mob riots, of Jim Crow segregations and economic discrimination, to trace out the various ideologies and racial politics that legitimated or resisted the period’s inequalities, injustices, and exclusions. Yet, at the same time, these histories have largely ignored 83

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a post-­Reconstruction racial order’s more dispersed, yet more virulent, attritional “slow death,” a slow death that is only recognized and named belatedly as a “health crisis.”1 In the following chapter, I will more fully examine through the works of W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt an African American literary history of “slow violence,” but one that also raises questions about the narrative strategies that turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­ century African American writers used to testify to the differential vulnerabilities, risks, and devaluations of Black life as part of a calculated necropolitical neglect within early modern racial capitalism. To recover this representational history of slow violence is to raise questions about how, as Jodi Melamed contends, official and institutionally sponsored liberal antiracist narratives often undercut the emergence of a radical transformative politics and, in turn, served as modes for rationalizing the privileges and material inequalities of New South racial capitalism.2 In his 1975 lectures later collected as Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault argued that health emerged as a political issue with the rise of modern physiological, epidemiological, and public health work at the end of the nineteenth century to manage and regulate labor production, family life, individual conduct, and populations. As part of his lectures, however, Foucault also argued that biopolitics works not only by “making life” through the body’s disciplinary regulation, but also by “letting die.”3 This “necropolitics” and its relation to racial orders has been most notably elaborated upon by Achille Mbembe, whose framing of the racial politics of letting die complements the work of Rob Nixon who has investigated the slow violence within our contemporary global toxic environments that inflict a gradual collateral damage disproportionately on the lives of the poor and people of color.4 Although, as Saidiya Hartman contends, the post-­Reconstruction era sought through a “burdened individuality” and self-­care to transform free men and women into a docile, rational, and self-­disciplined working class,5 we need better to account for the way post-­ Reconstruction racial prognosticators also predicted the race problem would be resolved in the political realm of the species by blurring outright forms of violence with other more subtle and naturalized constraints placed on African Americans due to health and sanitary environments.6 An African American literary history of slow death and its narrative figuration, thus, raises complicated questions about the temporality of violence—­one which in liberal protest fiction often took a melodramatic spectacular form—­and about the life chronology of a differentiated racialized citizenship.7 Recent studies of nineteenth-­century U.S. literature have

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analyzed the way conceptualizations of temporality had an extraordinary potency in organizing social life, in managing the interests of institutionalized power, and in implementing this power as somatic fact. In Archives of American Time and Arranging Grief, Lloyd Pratt and Dana Luciano, for example, examine how the emergence of nineteenth-­century notions of quantifiable, linear, progressive time underwrote national myths, heteronormative familial reproduction, and a capitalist discipline of productivity.8 To speak of the slow violence behind a post-­Reconstruction health crisis, however, extends this investigation of the temporal imaginary of U.S. liberal nationalism to raise questions about the imagined “time” of violence and degeneration and within a “chronobiopolitics” (to borrow Luciano’s term) that worked not just to structure the production of Black life according to naturalized development stages, or rationalized labor, but to manage its alternate becoming and unbecoming in order to fit “negro health” within the cycles of scarcity and surplus of labor demand within racial capitalism. As medical historians such as Michael Byrd, Todd Savitt, and Melbourne Tapper have noted, the turn of the twentieth century was a period of continual health crises within the African American community that suffered disproportionately from diseases such as tuberculosis, heart disease, and pulmonary disorders because of crowded unsanitary tenement housing without access to clean water and sewers, because of a post-­ Reconstruction downsizing and privatization of African American health care that reduced the number of Freedmen’s hospitals from one hundred after the war to one (the Washington, DC, Freeman’s Hospital) by the end of the century, and because of discriminatory hospital policies that segregated African America patients and prevented African American medical students from gaining the accreditations necessary to complete their medical training.9 Despite these calculated policies, public health officials attributed, justified, and ignored these health disparities through the medicalizing of an African American body that was said to be incapable of ever achieving what Charles Briggs has referred to as sanitary citizenship.10 As part of a myth of African American postemancipation pathology, it was repeatedly argued, as we saw in the last chapter, that freedom had left African Americans vulnerable to their un-­self-­disciplined immorality, primitive unsanitary culture, and hereditary disease susceptibility.11 In response, many African Americans leaders such as Booker T. Washington inaugurated public health education programs such as the National Negro Health Week in 1915, and the National Association of Colored

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Women’s Clubs such as that led by Lugenia Hope in Atlanta worked to refute these stories, to teach African American domestic hygiene, to establish community clinics, and to clean up the toxic environments causing diseases.12 Yet such urgently needed health work, in its focus on a gospel of self-­care, also often left unnamed the larger governing of Black lives through health precarity within modern racial capitalism. Although literary histories on turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century African American cultural production foreground the abolitionist legacy of sentimental fiction (as in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces) or the turn to a more assertive realism (as in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition),13 Progressive Era African American writers also fashioned a speculative realism to expose the incongruity between predominant liberal antiracist narratives premised on gradual inclusion and democratic progress and racial capitalism’s deliberate biopolitics of precarity, debility, and letting die. In using the multireferential term “speculative,” I want to bring together the recent genre criticism of “speculative fiction” and an object-­ oriented new materialism (a philosophy of speculative realism) to identity the tactics by which post-­ Reconstruction African American writers sought to conjure up and reconceptualize the time and place of violence and injustice. In its blend of fantasy and history, speculative fiction reimagines new meanings and possibilities for genders, races, sexualities, and other classificatory systems, while at the same time also rendering salient the problems in the current social, economic, and political situation.14 As Carla Peterson notes, identifying the methodology of nineteenth-­ century African American feminists, “speculations” beyond an often white and male-­dominated scientific empiricism were a key way African Americans challenged “established institutions, conventions and constraints.”15 Similarly, Du Bois and Chesnutt represent the impossible in their sociological realism as a challenge to mutually agreed upon fictions of race.16 But this speculation in queer time-­altered places of enchantment and transformative experiences also hints at another understanding of the speculative, one that connects with the ecocritical and new materialist interest in the actant power or agency of material things on subject formation.17 Although a recent development in canonical Western philosophy, speculative realism has a long history among indigenous people, including African diasporic peoples, who thought beyond Western reason and logic with its rigid subject-­object, self-­other dichotomies to identify a more complex and distributed agency.18 Through a generic hybridization of history with African folklore, both Du Bois and Chesnutt employ the

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unnatural narratives and temporalities of this diasporic speculative realism to imagine the time of contamination and to highlight the dispersed and incremental causality of a slow material violence whose virulent logic lay outside a liberal protest realism’s verisimilitude. To trace out this unstoried history of slow violence within post-­ Reconstruction America, I will first look at W. E. B. Du Bois’s study of “Negro Health” in The Philadelphia Negro, and then turn for a more detailed narrative analysis to his ignored first novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), to argue that Du Bois in his fictionalized account of his earlier scientific study of the health and working conditions of the tenant farmers in Lowndes County, Alabama, which he conducted for the Department of Labor, reimagines a repressed story of African American health by showing how a necropolitics of contamination cooperated with an economic neoslavery of debt and foreclosure. Although Arnold Rampersad famously labeled Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece a “failed novel” because of its inharmonious fusing of genres (the romance weakening a manly realism),19 Du Bois fashions a speculative realism whose disruptive breaks with mimesis give shape to the dispersed, actor-­less delayed slow violence of post-­Reconstruction racial capitalism. After recovering Du Bois’s speculative radicalism, I will then look at how the fiction of Charles Chesnutt worked both to circulate and overturn the antirace liberal protest narrative’s representational strategies. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a text haunted by a never quite fully named slow violence that is finally closed off in the novel’s healing image of racial friendship forged through a color-­line-­crossing vulnerability to disease and death. In contrast, Chesnutt in his earlier conjure tales (1899) speculates beyond this liberal protest narrative by turning to the time of conjuring, which in its accelerated injury, overlap of temporalities, and object-­oriented reversal of normal causal logic exposes the repressed story of the New South’s slow violence. A “Peculiar Indifference” to “Terrorism”: Du Bois and an Economy of Medical Foreclosure

In March 1912, The Crisis magazine, in an opinion piece entitled “The Terrorists,” reported that twenty or more representative leaders of the “negro race” had met with the housing committee of the Richmond, Virginia, city

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council. The city council had passed residency laws preventing African Americans from moving (or “encroaching”) into Clay Street, a section of the city the council had recently annexed for white homes. Richmond’s Black leaders, however, confronted the council less to decry this legalized neighborhood segregation than to talk about the law’s “bearing” on the “health” of their community. As Richmond’s Black leaders testified, the question of civil and political rights could not be separated from the slow and indirect racial violence that was gradually killing African Americans through inequalities in infrastructure, sewers, safe water supplies, city services, and fair oversight of local and state health boards. Although the city council did not recognize any of these discriminations in everyday living conditions as social or political problems needing policy solutions, or budgeted public resources, The Crisis editors titled them “terrorism,” thus naming a white supremacist violence and privilege often obscured within the ordinary, unremarkable, everyday workings of Jim Crow city life.20 In the post-­Reconstruction United States, the strategic figuring of an undeserving, self-­destructive, and unhealthy Black underclass depended, as Du Bois recognized repeatedly in The Crisis, on a new kind of “terrorism” operating through the physical and mental debilitation of Black life as part of a southern white supremacism’s reorganizing of racial exclusion around health. In her work on the social death of minorities of color within the contemporary United States, Lisa Cacho has argued that Blacks and Latinos, as a part of neoliberalism’s killing abstraction, have been “criminalized,” or seen as always essentially nonhuman, unworthy, and criminal, and hence, ineligible to become deserving law-­abiding citizens with moral and political claims.21 But as the Richmond leaders’ protest against an unnamed Jim Crow “terrorism” outlines, a killing racial logic of Black disposability has centered not just around the criminalizing of Black personhood abstracted from social and political context, but also through the legalized and structured daily debilitation of Black lives implemented through deliberate decisions about sanitation, infrastructure, redistricting, and water service.22 This health precarity, as Du Bois well knew, moreover, played a particularly important disciplinary role in the managing of post-­Reconstruction capitalist modernity and in the rationalizing of Black labor in the New South. Even though Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899), with its massive collection of statistical data, is seen as a key document on turn-­of-­the-­ twentieth-­century urban migration, it also stands as one of the most powerful documents witnessing a necropolitics of slow violence—­one that Du

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Bois tries to capture in all its discursive and affective tactics in speaking of what he calls post-­ Reconstruction America’s “peculiar indifference.” When he was hired by Susan Wharton of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Settlement Society in cooperation with the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois saw his fieldwork and house-­to-­house surveys in Philadelphia’s lower wards as implementing the reformist possibilities of emerging statistical practices within scientific sociology.23 As Kirstie McClure notes, many reformers at the end of the nineteenth century envisioned a “republic of letters” giving way to a “democracy of numbers.” Not only would empirical data collection be more unbiased and objective, but the numbers—­generated as they were from the observed themselves—­ would give the invisible, excluded, and marginalized a “voice” against the often unexamined prejudices and assumptions of authorities who understood little of the experience of the poor whose lives they sought to advance.24 Although Du Bois later lost faith in this statistical sociology to effect racial change—­one he reflects in his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece—­Du Bois’s surveys of Philadelphia’s lower wards prompted him to tie African American progress to, as the title of his tenth chapter indicates, “The Health of the Negro.” In his unflinching record of the living conditions of the inner-­city Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Wards, Du Bois repeatedly notes the correlation between the poorest neighborhoods and higher morbidity and mortality rates, which had nothing to do with an alleged postemancipation myth of African Americans as a “dying race.” Among the 234 families that Du Bois lists as living in the most degrading poverty in the Seventh Ward, for instance, Du Bois notes that “40 percent” of them have been reduced to a meager life due to “sickness and misfortune” (most notably workplace accidents or toxic fallout resulting in physical impairment) (275). Among his description of 25 “typical families” to illustrate the conditions of life among the destitute in the Seventh Ward, Du Bois repeatedly enumerates various mental and physical disabilities: “No. 3 Dean Street. Woman paralyzed; and partially supported by the Church”; “No. 6 Stockton Street. Woman has just had an operation performed in the hospital, and cannot work yet”; “No. 8 Richard Street. Laborer injured by falling off a derrick” (275). Although Du Bois debunks public health reports that the “Negro” was a dying race by pointing out alternative environmental causes for African Americans’ health disparities, he also implicates an undisclosed history of another, more disbursed racial violence that did not fit into liberal antiracist projects: a silenced history of active indiffer-

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ence, deliberate deregulation, and a tactical passivity toward the material inequalities of capitalist expansion that create an injurious and unjust distribution of disease, risk, vulnerability, and unsanitary environments. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois extrapolates from his statistical surveys the pervasiveness of a complementary kind of slow violence that did not name itself as violence, but is, nevertheless, intentional and instrumental in the managing of devalued and allegedly unproductive Black lives: The most difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health is the peculiar attitude of the nation toward the wellbeing of the race. There have, for instance, been few other cases in the history of civilized people where human suffering has been viewed with such peculiar indifference. Nearly the whole nation seemed delighted with the discredited census of 1870 because it was thought to show that the Negroes were dying off rapidly, and the country would soon be rid of them. So recently, when attention has been called to the high death rate of this race, there is a disposition among many to conclude that the race is abnormal and unprecedented, and [since] the race is doomed to early extinction there is little left to do. (163) As Du Bois’s account of Philadelphia health disparities attests, the racial management of slow death often became contained within explanatory medicalized discourses (a biological disadvantage within the Darwinian progress of races) or operative within calculated affective tactics—­that of indifference, according to which the “dying off ” of tubercular Uncle Toms depended on their worthiness as determined by a postabolitionist white charity. As Du Bois summarizes, in the logic of post-­Reconstruction necropolitics, a race so doomed to extinction could not expect to be incorporated into national narratives of civilization and progress because they were said inherently—­hereditarily—­to follow another “abnormal” biochronology: one of slow irredeemable decline that should be left “indifferently” to run its course and, thus, to solve over time the “negro problem.”25 In the end, Du Bois contends, such an indifference to African Americans’ health is “peculiar” because it is a neglect that is, somewhat paradoxically, deliberately intentional. Du Bois’s efforts to refute the medicalization of African Americans as the incorrigible “sick and defective” race would achieve its most organized

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response in the May 1906 conference that he would convene at Atlanta University on the “Health and Physique of the Negro.” In the published proceedings Du Bois and his fellow presenters, including the anthropologist Frank Boaz, repeatedly argued that “racial diseases” were a matter of social justice and “conditions” rather than “due to racial traits and tendencies.”26 But the counterfactual reports of Du Bois and his colleagues did little to overturn a preemptive southern public health policy that medicalized an incorrigible Black body whose supposed corporeal reality occluded any response other than indifference to New Southern industrialization and its slow violence. In his presidential address entitled “The Destiny of the American Negro” (1905) before the Tri-­State Medical Association (including Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas), Memphis physician H. L. Sutherland reveals most directly how the new racial surveillance, education, and preventions of public health could work as part of a calculated biopolitics of slow violence. In his report, Sutherland repeats many of the myths and accusations of racial inferiority that biased post-­Reconstruction medicine: that African Americans were healthier under slavery, that the epidemic spread of diseases such as tuberculosis were slowly rendering the race extinct, that African Americans’ own primitive culture and behavior caused the health crisis (evident by the higher incidences of syphilis), that African Americans had an hereditary susceptibility to various pulmonary diseases (hence the spread of tuberculosis and pneumonia in African American neighborhoods), and that domestic servants formed a particular contagious threat. But if this language of health allowed public health officials such as Sutherland to push for legislation that would regulate African Americans in terms of employment (health inspection boards), home surveillance (visiting nurses for the contagious), and national citizenship (he favored recolonization), at the same time Sutherland concludes with a prophetic vision of the “future of the race” that would be determined through a peculiar indifference toward slow violence.27 Although, at first, Sutherland argues, the Christian humanitarianism of white physicians might suggest that southern physicians do something about the “burden” in their midst, he, nonetheless, concedes that “preventive” public health is impossible with African Americans since the race cannot be reformed by educational outreach. For Sutherland the always already medicalized African American makes him or her a part of the incorrigible sick who must be either disciplined or let to die: “Despite an army of sanitarians . . . any improvement of the negro’s condition, based on education, is chimerical and will never be realized” (624). In the end,

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barring the federal government’s complete legislative control over African American lives, one Sutherland concedes as unfeasible, many African Americans will die and their jobs will gradually be filled with white labor. As Sutherland concludes, drawing out the links between health and politics, “This loss would be repaid to us in re-­civilization, and then in truth we would have a ‘New South’” (626). In his speech on the Negro’s “destiny,” thus, Sutherland reveals the often virulent medical racism that led to the post-­Reconstruction era’s health disparities. But his speech also discloses a vision of New South industrial and commercial progress implemented through a debilitative slow violence cooperating with the regulation of African Americans within other forms of neoslavery, from peonage laws to debt bondage. If racial capitalism, as Cedric Robinson has argued, defines the way economic development depended on justifying an unequal system of capitalist accumulation through ascriptions of “race” to bodies of color as markers of relative value—­or here disposable valuelessness28—­ New South capitalism also depended on a racialization that was both discursive and material: these assigned meanings to Black personhood justified privileges and exclusion, but also allowed the regulative management of some bodies to suffer, to debilitate and die, thus ensuring, to modify David Roediger’s phrase about working-­class Anglo American privilege, a “living” wage to whiteness.29 Although Sutherland’s views were extreme, they nevertheless capture the way that health within post-­ Reconstruction American was also politics—­and a gradually lethal one—­by another name. It is this surveillance, control, and calculated neglect of Negro health in the creation of a New South of mills and rationalized agribusinesses that Du Bois would address in his 1911 novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece. In the Dusk of Dawn (1940), Du Bois would retrospectively label his earlier fictional work an “economic study,” and literary histories have largely read the novel as a sociological document of Du Bois’s economic views or his socialist beliefs.30 But Du Bois, through his examination in The Quest of the Silver Fleece of the various forces keeping Black labor in Tooms, Alabama from advancing, reveals how rural laborers’ bondage by debt overlapped with and depended on Black labor’s health deficit. Both debt and contamination colluded as part of a broader narrative foreclosure of Black lives and progress. I want to start with a scene that shows Du Bois grappling with the connection of slow violence and labor management within New South industrialization. In Quest of the Silver Fleece, Du Bois depicts what he calls the

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“Cotton Combine,” or the alliance of northern finance and southern plantocracy to form a monopolistic control over southern cotton production (the silver fleece), a control that the novel’s antagonists assert will require the shaping, disciplining, and managing of Black labor. In a key early scene Mary Taylor, the New England school teacher at Miss Smith’s Negro School, is taken around the Cresswell plantation by the debauched scion Harry Cresswell. As a representative of the postabolitionist generation of apathetic New Englanders who care little for the “Negro question” and equally little for personal intimacies with Blacks, Mary had only agreed to a southern teaching position at the encouragement of her brother, John Taylor, one of the “Watchers of the World of Trade,” who hopes to gain “information” valuable for his speculations in cotton.31 During her drive around the Cresswell estate—­one that recalls a long historical trope of the northern visitor within southern plantation fiction to prove slavery’s supposed benevolence—­Mary observes the field hand Jim Sykes (Uncle Jim) being cross-­examined by Harry Cresswell. When demanded why he is not in the fields, Jim explains, as “he swayed against the cabin,” that he hurt his leg in the cotton gin (67). Cresswell, however, denies this account and instead attributes Jim’s unsteadiness on his feet to “whiskey” and his love of “idleness.” Because of Jim’s purported dereliction of duty, Cresswell fines Jim, thus increasing his debt bondage to the Cresswells and extending his contractual obligations to the plantation. In this scene between Jim and the overseer, Du Bois’s novel calls attention to the widespread belief of the African American laborer as the incorrigible sick, for the worker’s sickness could only result from his own immorality and shiftless cultural practices rather than to unsafe working conditions or unsanitary housing. But Du Bois here also exposes the strategic value of debility to the New Southern economy and its system of debt bondage. It is significant in this scene that Jim appeals to Cresswell to do “right ‘bout my cabin,” as he alludes to its unsanitary environment. In the same year that Du Bois published The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), the U.S. Supreme Court in Baily v. Alabama finally overturned the practice of “presumptive evidence” that had been used to force southern Black labor’s bondage by contract. In the Baily case, a southern plantation owner had argued, as was common practice, that the field hand Baily’s leaving the plantation to pursue other employment was “presumptive evidence” of his decision not to repay his debt.32 In the exchange between Jim Sykes and Cresswell, Du Bois, however, shows that the logic of presumptive evidence was also used to turn illness into an incontrovertible sign of Black refusal

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to work and intent to default on his debt. In this scene Cresswell does not just ignore Jim’s sickness and debility, blaming his intemperance rather than the dangers of the cotton gin. He profits from African American debility for it further secures Jim’s long-­term bondage within an exploitative labor system that the Cotton Combine needs to create its market monopoly. Throughout this scene, and in similar stories—­such as Du Bois’s account of the young father Rob, who becomes so indebted to the Cresswells after missing work to care for his sick wife Millie and their baby that the plantation creditors seize all his possessions, including the baby’s cradle—­Du Bois shows that slow violence works, much like debt, according to a logic of foreclosure. In part, slow violence is a “foreclosure” because African American illness is something, Du Bois implies, that is both treated (to accrue greater productivity), and yet allowed, with almost “peculiar indifference,” to foster greater dependency, surveillance, and indebtedness to the plantation. However, illness in The Quest for the Silver Fleece also forecloses the time of African American advancement in ways that exceed this outright speculation on African Americans defaulting on their debt due to bad health. As Du Bois shows, this slow violence, much like other, more spectacular forms of violence, from lynching to mob violence, ultimately was meant to deter ambition, hope, and investment in personal and collective progress. As Du Bois’s protagonist Zora, the child of the swamp who rebels against Mary Taylor and her disciplinary power in the northern-­financed Negro schools, notes, her people stay in bondage because they have come to accept that there is “no way out of “debt”; they have been so worn down that they do not have any expectations that they can ever pay off their contracts to the plantation master and they are too sick and broken down to invest in their advancement. In his analysis of what he calls the “laboring time” of slavery within Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Lloyd Pratt notes that the “repetitive, unbroken and unremitting labor” that Douglass experienced was meant to confine him to a particular and brutal nonprogressive experience of time.33 In Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece, however, the disciplinary regulation of Black bodies and their despair of a progressive future is imposed not only through brutal labor but also through a managed “peculiar indifference” to African American health, one in which slow debilitating sickness would alternately be cured for enhanced productivity, but also permitted to spread in order to ensure the Black laborer’s continued indebtedness and the foreclosure of opportunity and freedom.

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Although in sociologically realistic scenes such as the exchanges between Jim and Rob with the Cresswells, Du Bois testifies to the complex knotting of labor regulation and biopolitical strategies of slow violence, it is most tellingly within the novel’s speculative realism that Du Bois tries to name the incremental and attritional violence that unfolds according to the slow time of contamination.34 In her essay, “Being Black There: Racial Subjectivity and Temporality in Walter Mosley’s Detective Novels,” Daylanne English argues for a distinctive “atemporality” in African American fiction that reflected the “curious not being in time” of Black lives due to a lack of change and the predictability of early death.35 Yet, even as Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece reflects this curious atemporality of impossible progress and imminent death, he also invokes the altered and enchanted time of the African diasporic folk tradition in the South to witness the foreshortened time and the “entanglement” of Black lives in the everyday materiality of their tenement worlds.36 One of the novel’s clearest breaches of realism is the depiction of Zora’s mother, Elspeth, who is described as a hideous, fairy-­tale monster: “short, broad, black and wrinkled, with fangs, and pendulous lips and red, wicked eyes” (5). When Zora tries to escape labor bondage to the Cresswells, it is the “gnarled and black and claw-­like fingers of Elspeth [that are said to be] gripping and dragging her down” (58). Despite the fact that in part Elspeth represents a typical gothic monster projecting the anxieties and fears of a particular cultural moment,37 she also invokes the traditional aged crone within African folklore to relocate readers outside a Western linear progressive time and thus to invoke a new way of viewing Black lives that resists nationalist myths of modern capitalist progress. Indeed, with her clutching “claws” Elspeth stands for that which would suspend the expected character development within realist fiction. In his fantastic story of a grotesque black hag who seems to hold Zora (and the race) back, Du Bois unsettles the complex foreclosure of growth, development, and health within the New South’s slow violence. At first glance, Elspeth, the former Cresswell mammy during slavery, can seem a remarkably perverse portrayal of the stereotypical dysfunctional Black matriarch unless we recognize the tactical power of Du Bois’s blend of history and fantasy. Her house, built in the distant swampland on the Cresswell plantation, serves as the makeshift brothel and barroom where the Cresswell men and other local plantation sons come to rape the plantation’s Black daughters, including Zora when she was only twelve years old. Elspeth’s passivity before these horrors and catering to the plantocracy’s drunken needs, which if

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never directly solicited, are never defended against and thus seem to come close to pandering. The “evil” that is Elspeth in this monstrous fantasy born of the plantation, however, is not of her own making. Elspeth’s house is a direct reference to the cottages of the kept Black mistress that were commonly a part of Southern plantation life, and frequently represented in antislavery fiction (from William Wells Brown’s Clotel [1853] to Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic [1867]). But in Du Bois’s speculative retelling, Elspeth’s cottage is less the site of sin or even sexual exploitation than of repeatedly underscored unsanitary degradations. Although Elspeth is a “horrible thing—­filthy of breath, dirty, with dribbling mouth and red eyes” (60), her contagious embodiment results from her segregation in a “smoke-­shadowed,” “dirty,” and “dingy” room (6). Forced to live in such unhygienic and debilitating conditions, Elspeth’s disfigurements indicate the exaggerated physiological, mental, and morbid outcomes induced in her by the peculiar indifference of slow violence. As we later learn, the philandering Harry Cresswell has syphilis, which he gives to his wife, Mary Taylor, causing her to bear a stillborn child, become barren, and to fall so ill that she loses her hair, beauty, and physical health. Since Elspeth is repeatedly sexually assaulted by the Cresswells, it is hardly surprising that she has the physical symptoms of tertiary stage syphilis that has been left untreated. In the story of Elspeth, Du Bois reverses the health narrative extracted from the vital statistics that higher incidents of syphilis among African Americans prove their immorality. Indeed, it is the immorality of the Cresswell family that by infecting and then neglecting the slave mistress creates a slowly dying “grotesque monster.” In the rupture of Elspeth’s fantasy form amid the sociological realism of his economic study, Du Bois captures the slow time of contamination with its diffuse causality from disease, dirt, and unsanitary housing. What reaches out to entrap Zora in the gnarled, claw-­like hand of Elspeth is, thus, the repeated time of her own mother’s contagious history, not the willed obstruction of some traitorous Black mother. Indeed, readers learn that this seeming racial sellout has worked to secure her own and her children’s survival, even as she has acquiesced to her master’s authority. It is Elspeth who has preserved the “black seeds” from which will grow the “silver fleece” of Zora’s cotton harvest on the reclaimed maroon island in the swamp and which she has preserved across the African diaspora from three conjure men. Elspeth has long waited to see “de see[d] done sowed!,” as she exclaims in gleeful fulfillment. In the circular temporality

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of the return of the “seed,” Du Bois invokes the ahistorical time of folklore in which past, present, and future coexist, and if the success of Zora’s farm cooperative finally promises to end the Black tenement farmer’s debt bondage, it is significant as well that, within the altered reality of Du Bois’s speculative realism, that this imagining of a transformative Afro-­futurity occurs simultaneously with the sudden and fantastic vanishing of Elspeth’s cabin: Zora saw “the cabin of Elspeth tremble, sigh, and disappear, and with it flew some spirit of evil” (258). In this sudden vanishing of the “evil” of Elspeth’s cabin, Du Bois hints at a renewal that comes not just through Black owned farms, but when the contaminated, unsanitary tenement cabins (the ones Jim Sykes pleaded to be changed) are sanitized and expelled as obstructive animated objects blocking African American progress. In Du Bois’s speculative realism, the debt of weakness, debility, and sickness that has foreclosed Black freedom and self-­actualization ends only with the emergence of a new community activism that also addresses the distributive material agency of disease, dirt, unsanitary water, and medical neglect on Black lives. In defying, mocking, and speculating beyond a mimetic sociological documentation in The Quest of the Silver Fleece Du Bois sought to find an unnatural representational form for slow violence. But in its fantastical break with the time and plotting of realism, Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece also questions the very idea of the “real,” or at least the sociological real that he had resorted to in The Philadelphia Negro and The Health and Physique of the Negro to record a “Negro health crisis.” In the Quest of the Silver Fleece, Du Bois reveals that “sociological facts” may be little more than fictions, tactical fictions used to discipline Black personhood. Indeed, this fact is its own form of “speculative realism.” In the figure of Mr. Bocombe in The Quest of the Silver Fleece Du Bois indicts sociologist’s complicity in obscuring a southern slow violence within its myths of African American postwar pathology and regression. When the Negro Educational Steering Committee visits Miss Smith’s school, Bocombe, whose name invokes an obvious homonym for “bunkum,” or empty, ridiculous talk, is continually satirized as a figure of myopic detachment. Throughout the tour of the school, the nonnative informant Bocombe keeps himself removed from the children, never speaking to them, “only collecting data to confirm his thesis that ‘the race is undoubtedly dying out’” (119). But Bocombe’s bunkum is no mere “empty rhetoric” as his name might indicate, but a constitutive discourse that creates what it claims to find: an African American population’s incorrigible sickness that

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is beyond prevention. Standing amid Miss Smith’s pupils, he exhorts the Educational Board Steering Committee to see his facts: “Now—­er—­let’s see—­oh, yes. Did you notice how unhealthy the children looked? . . . ln fact. No hope. Weak. No spontaneity either—­rather languid, did you notice? Yes, and their heads—­small and narrow—­no brain capacity” (119). Bocombe’s “speculative empiricism”—­a reality more disembodied and fantastical than the fantasy of Elspeth’s tumorous eruptions of syphilis—­ invokes a long history of phrenological and anthropometric measurements of African American intelligence.38 However, Du Bois does not just impugn scientific racism. Bocombe’s words become the foundational rationale for a peculiar indifference to Black health. As a result of Bocombe’s words, the Cresswells do nothing to improve the sanitary conditions of the tenant farmers’ cabins. They do not correct the toxic working environments and unsafe gins that cripple laborers such as Jim Sykes. Nor do they seek to treat Elspeth’s syphilis, for it is only the manifestations of the Black woman’s “impurity.” Nor do they bring to the laborer’s cabins safe water and sewers. In Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece stories of postemancipation pathology and regression do not just confirm racial ideologies of Black inferiority; they justify, sustain, and are ultimately used to steer an unequal distribution of risk, vulnerability, and calamitous fallout that threaten to turn Zora into another disfigured and filthy-­breathed Elspeth and to reduce African American laborers such as Jim and Rob to a bare life foreclosed by the inescapable hand of debt and debility. Such a foreclosed life can only (and without Faulknerian romanticized nobility) be “endured.” It is little wonder then that Miss Smith rejects the Negro Education Steering Committee’s offer of help, for she insists she wants to raise “full-­fledged men and women, strong, self-­reliant, honest, without any ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ to their development” (118). It is also little wonder that in the final deathbed repentance of Colonel Cresswell, the reparations he confers on his mulatto granddaughter Emma funds the community’s hospital as well as the labor cooperative, for Emma is a northern-­trained nurse who has returned to the South to address the health needs of her people. To end the foreclosure of Black life and advancement, Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece implies, demands both the economic uplift that comes from Zora’s cooperative farm and the health care of Emma’s hospital. Only through a marriage of health and economic opportunity, as Du Bois implies in his final “envoi,” will there be an end to the “maiming, and mocking and murdering of my people” (300).

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Racial Protest’s Cosmetic Surgery

Most readings of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) have taken the profession of the main protagonist, Dr. Miller, as little more than a narrative convenience, an occupational characterization that allows Chesnutt to imagine, after the racial riots, a timidly hopeful final scene of racial reconciliation. Despite the mob violence that destroyed the Black hospital and led to the brutal murder of innocent African Americans in Wellington, Dr. Miller agrees to operate on the white child of his mulatta wife’s white half-­sister Olivia Carteret, and, thus, we see a tentative dismantling of racial barriers around a “colorblind” shared precariousness about health.39 Such an ending of shared human vulnerabilities certainly, on one hand, invokes, as Jodi Melamed notes, the dominant narrative in official liberal antirace fiction that progress will come through the white man’s attitudinal alteration—­here, Major Carteret’s about-­face in admitting a “negro physician” into his home—­and that this change of heart will be brought about through African Americans coming to achieve (like Dr. Miller) a normative bourgeois respectability.40 But Chesnutt’s novel is steeped in a far deeper awareness of a turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century African American medical crisis–­and the racial meanings that were given to it—­than this reduction of doctors to a racial uplift role model would allow. More importantly, the novel’s final reification of an African American health crisis into a liberal narrative of shared precarity that erases material inequalities and an unequal distribution of risk, sanitary conditions, and health care access is haunted (if not ever completely disrupted) by another counternarrative of slow violence. As Janet Watson has argued about the recent shift within twenty-­first-­century humanitarian narratives toward a shared precarity to unite diverse global communities, this assertion of a common corporeal vulnerability ignores that precarity is imposed unequally among poor and marginalized communities of color.41 Indeed, slow violence’s power comes, as Chesnutt’s novel implies, through its obfuscation of its outcomes as the colorblind fate of all humanity. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, thus, is a contradictory text, one that discloses how a liberal narrative of racial friendship through shared vulnerabilities (one symbolized in the Carteret heir Dodie’s medical problems) displaces and overshadows the time and plotting of a strategic slow violence.42 To discover this buried necropolitics still spreading like a fungus in the architecture of Chesnutt’s novel, we need to recover the circulation of the post-­Reconstruction African American health crisis in the

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background of the protest narrative’s seemingly more traumatic story of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot. When Polly Ochiltree, for example, during her carriage ride with her niece Olivia Carteret discovers with wonder the new “handsome brick building of modern construction” that is the “Negro hospital,” she repeats the familiar belief of African American debilitation and morbidity. Dismissing this “new colored hospital” as a futile solution to the Negro as a “dying race,” Aunt Polly, like Sutherland, quips that “[b]efore the war the negroes were all healthy, and when they got sick we took care of them ourselves” (123).43 Similarly, when describing Major Carteret’s propaganda campaign to incite antiblack sentiments, Chesnutt has Doctor Miller note that his newspaper spread not only “statistics of crime,” but also “vital statistics [that] were made to prove that he [the Negro] had degenerated from an imaginary standard of physical excellence which had existed under the benign influence of slavery” (190). As Major Carteret notes in his secret meetings with Major Belmont and Captain McBane, he and his coconspirators strategically inculcate the belief that the race was “a corpse chained to the body politics” (94).44 This view of the African American as a corpse chained to the body politic—­and an instrumental one—­is the key ideological false consciousness promoted by Major Carteret, who like Du Bois’s Cresswells resorts to slow violence to regulate and manage Black labor. Like Du Bois, Chesnutt repeatedly connects New South racial capitalism and African American health precarity. Although Major Carteret is the scion of an Old South plantation aristocracy and serves as the editor of the Wellington Morning Chronicle, he acquires his wealth from the investment of his wife’s money in mines and mills (“paying ten per cent”) (62), and much of the novel’s precipitating action, as a result, takes place during the visit of Carteret’s northern investors and their wives to evaluate a “projected cotton mill” (116) that he hopes to start by employing the “fringe of job-­hunting negroes” that “disfigure” city hall “like a string of buzzards” (62). Similar to Harry Cresswell, Carteret seeks to exploit an excess of African American unemployment and desperation tied to a “disfiguring” health. To these outsiders, as Carteret informs them directly, the “negro” is a “dying race, unable to withstand the competition of a superior type” (62). By emphasizing Carteret’s manipulative mythmaking as well as the actual material utility of African American debility as part of the conspirators’ plans for capitalist development, Chesnutt testifies to the role of necropolitics in the unequal accumulation of wealth within a New South capitalist order. Chesnutt’s story world is built around the foundational function of a slow

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“disfiguring” violence in the New South that would advantageously turn African Americans both into a dying race and, when needed, a docile labor force.45 Although the climax of Chesnutt’s novel turns from this ubiquitous slow violence to a melodramatic spectacle of racial mobs, this suppressed story returns to haunt and disrupt the novel’s final liberal faith through the embedded tale of “Mammy Jane.”46 In the face of Major Carteret’s plan to exploit the Negro as a “dying race,” Dr. Miller can only repeat the liberal faith in gradual inclusion through racial uplift. If African Americans achieve economic self-­sufficiency, moral probity, and bourgeois respectability, they will accrue, in time and with white sympathy, full citizenship.47 As Dr. Miller avers, in pinpointing the best political strategy for the community, “He liked to believe that the race antagonism which hampered his progress and that of his people was a temporary thing . . . [was] bound to disappear in time . . . when a colored man should demonstrate to the community . . . that he possessed character and power” (85). Although in part the riot exposes the flaws in such accommodationist optimism, Jane, by contrast, understands that there is another slow death, one unfolding in the seemingly agentless, delayed time of contamination that undermines such blindsided optimism. Jane may frame her account of the insidious and delayed spread of germs and disease in an “unscientific” language of evil spirits and “malign influence,” but at the same time she recognizes and names what Dr. Miller’s (and Chesnutt’s) liberal narrative of preventive sanitary character and ensuing progress cannot. In her own hybrid language of science and diasporic wisdom in response to the chronic lung disease of the white child Dodie, Jane testifies to what lies outside protest realism’s narrative of redeeming liberal promise: “Prayers and charms, after all, were merely temporary things, which must be constantly renewed, and might be forgotten or overlooked, while the mole, on the contrary, neither faded nor went away. If its malign influence might for a time seem to disappear, it was merely lying dormant, like the germs of some deadly disease, awaiting its opportunity to strike in an unguarded spot” (109). Unlike Dr. Miller, who believes his heroic interventions can heal the community, Jane knows that there is a violence that resists such heroic individualist struggle against legible legal, social, and economic barriers to equality and opportunity. There is also a “germ-­like violence” that unfolds slowly over time, and by animating the deforming mole on Dodie’s skin as a malign influence, Jane challenges Dr. Miller’s autonomous claims about liberal citizenship to recognize a dispersed and material influence that is

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woven into Black personhood, lives, and actions. The keeper of the indigenous wisdom of her African ancestors, Jane offer a “speculative” (and not merely superstitious) alternative to New Southern scientific rationality—­ one that recognizes the agential power of things and, in turn the accumulated harm that can unfold unpredictably and incrementally across time and across generations. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition is really the story of two doctors—­Dr. Miller and Jane. As was typical of most medical discourse in the turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century era of professionalization, “Mammy Jane,” as she is most often called, is depicted as an endearing, if somewhat comic, remnant of the race’s “savage” past, as Tuskegee physician and founder of John Andrews Hospital John Kenney would state about these still pervasive homeschooled midwives in his book The Negro in Medicine (1912).48 But even as Chesnutt contrasts Mammy Jane to the “newfangled” professional nurses that the Carterets hire to replace their aging nurse, in the residual voice of Jane, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition allows a different understanding to shadow the dominant liberal realist narrative of spectacular racial violence. In The Marrow of Tradition Jane administers to another “unimagined community” unseen within liberal antirace protest, the surveyed but unstoried sick and dying counterparts of Du Bois’s Seventh Ward.49 Tellingly, when Olivia Carteret summons Jane to come to care for her sick child, Jane was “visit[ing] a sick woman in the country” (213). Such a brief detail for a moment renders visible the logic of New South slow violence and its peculiar neglect of and indifference toward a disenfranchised community of invisible, disposable others. In its seemingly trivial explanatory line about Jane’s ministering to the sick, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition brings into relief a sick and dying African American community relegated to the margins of Wellington. Even though Dr. Miller experiences a bourgeois revulsion from “the noisy, loquacious, happy, dirty, and malodorous” working-­class communities despite his “racial sympathy” and “democratic ideal” (82), his failed empathy also signals the novel’s turn away from the slow violence rendered against these “dirty,” “disease-­ridden” communities hidden behind the veil—­communities that must disappear so as not to complicate the more dramatic story of the gentlemanly racial elite’s encounter with an undeserved racial violence. But the sick woman doctored by Jane is equally underserving of the slow violence that reduced her to a social, and finally physical, death. In the end it is this community of unimagined others that neither Dr. Miller—­nor Chesnutt—­could quite make legible: this dis-

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tressed community hurting from the consequences of unregulated housing, impure water, contaminated food, and environmental pollutants as they struggle to survive on the “exhausted,” cleared, and “devastated land” that, as Chesnutt notes, abandoned turpentine farms stripped (131) and that has been scarred by the toxins spewed from Major Carteret’s mills and mines. What haunts The Marrow of Tradition’s medicalized racial uplift argument for a moral—­and biological—­African American citizenship based on a shared precariousness, as a consequence, is Jane’s witness. Tellingly, Jane is one of the first victims during the riot, for it is she who must be removed to sustain Chesnutt’s forced faith in racial sympathy forged around a common humanity. Although the novel plots a narrative reversal that turns the discourse of a dying race back upon white southerners, as symbolized by the chronically ill Carteret heir, Dodie, Chesnutt’s protest against a spectacular southern mob violence finally silences Jane’s reminder of another time and place of death. Chesnutt in the ending keeps readers in suspense, though hopeful, about the white heir Dodie’s recovery and the ensuing evolution of a new integrated generation; however, at the same time, we should not forget that we are still left uninformed about the well-­being of the sick woman on the other side of the color line. Thus, in its unresolved shadow narrative, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition indirectly acts out (without protest) how a dominant liberal narrative of racial friendship premised on a shared colorblind vulnerability and fate can displace another story of slow violence in which precarity is itself unequally distributed, and only sporadically treated, as part of the disparate accumulations and securities of racial capitalism. The novel’s final promise of Dodie’s restitution still leaves doubtful another recovery: the recovery of those victims of slow violence like Jane’s patient who depend not just on individual medical attention, but on a larger social transformation of those material inequalities and social policies that breed disparities in disease, risk, hygiene, and health. Conjuring Slow Violence

In 1901 Charles Chesnutt wrote an essay, “Superstitions and Folklore of the South,” for the journal Modern Culture that has often been taken (and troublingly so) as providing the ars poetica and the cultural logic behind his conjure women tales. In its evolutionary contrast between science and

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barbarous earlier (racialized) stages of civilization, Chesnutt’s essay can seem, as both Neill Matheson and Eric Sundquist have argued, to cast a condescending skepticism on Black folk beliefs in such a way as to make Chesnutt little better than an African American mimic of Joel Chandler Harris.50 Omitted from these readings of Chesnutt’s attitude toward an African diasporic southern folk culture in “Superstitions and Folklore of the South,” however, are Chesnutt’s translations of these conjure stories as patient-­centered medical anecdotes. Despite satirizing these tales as evidence of now outdated “superstitions” from the perspective of modern cultural anthropology, Chesnutt hears within these stories—­stories similar to Mammy Jane’s folk wisdom—­a community’s own way of framing and attaching meaning to disease. Thus, Chesnutt, assuming the role of cultural mediator, explains that Old Uncle Jim’s faith that a lizard was tenanting his body “may have derived its existence from the fact that certain tropical insects sometimes lay their eggs beneath the skins of animals or even of men.”51 Less than a decade later, it is important to note, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (1909–­15) would travel throughout the South to eradicate hookworm by educating white and Black southerners that indeed “tiny snakes” did transfer themselves to the “human system” through “eating or drinking from the contaminated vessel” or human waste in the manner Uncle Jim describes.52 In what follows, I want to argue that Charles Chesnutt’s conjure tales witness the wisdom of Mammy Jane that haunts his realist masterpiece, The Marrow of Tradition: a highly complex and sophisticated (and not just superstitious) alternative folk wisdom that offers its own speculative objected-­oriented blurring of human and nonhuman worlds and plays on folklore’s “chronotropic disruptions” to bring the past into the present and disturb the progressive linear time of liberal antirace realism.53 To begin to decode The Conjure Woman’s blending of history and fantasy to expose the gaps between contemporary national histories about gradual democratic inclusion and an unacknowledged slow violence, we need to start by noting how crowded the tales are with images of disease, disability, and death: Henry’s accelerated restitution and debilitation in health, Sandy’s mutilated body in the face of deforestation and industrialism, Primus’s clubfoot from being treated like a mule, Sis Beck’s child that turned so “peaked” as a result of the separation and damage done to Black families (145). If most of these illnesses and injuries are attributed to or sought to be cured by conjure, it is because, as Chesnutt notes through Uncle Julius in “The Goophered Grapevine,” the conjure woman’s power-

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ful goopher “could make people hab fits, er rheumatiz, er make ‘em des dwindle away en die” (14). Throughout all of Chesnutt’s tales, the conjure woman’s only power is tellingly over the health or corporeal status (through transformations) of her targets. In his discussion of slow violence, Rob Nixon notes the difficulty of giving a “plot and . . . figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time.”54 Through Uncle Julius’s words, by contrast, Chesnutt indicates that poor southern African Americans, who often found themselves “displaced without moving” as New Southern industries stripped away and polluted the land on which they depended and created toxic tenement environments with urban immigration, turned to the conjure woman’s goophering or voodoo power to give concrete form to a seemingly agentless and belated post-­Reconstruction violence.55 The wonders of Chesnutt’s conjure stories, thus, do not just recount the lives of the unnamed and unimagined communities of poor African Americans on the margins of Wellington that Mammy Jane treated in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. These fantastic speculations about magically transformed Black laborers suggest that racial identity is, in the end, only a transient configuration of bodies performing with and within the limits of their material world. This relation between “goopher” and the precarious Black body, however, needs to be situated within the larger narrative dynamics of Chesnutt’s stories about racial capitalism. Unlike Harris’s Uncle Remus who entertains the plantation children, the trickster Uncle Julius relates his tales to the northern investor John who has relocated from Ohio to North Carolina to buy a vineyard, one that later turns into plans for a more expansive agribusiness with the “new railroad” that will allow him to “ship” produce north at a “good price” (105). As John notes at the end of “The Goophered Grapevine,” his vineyard serves as a “striking illustration of the opportunities open to Northern capital in the development of Southern industries” (33). Although Chesnutt has the trickster Uncle Julius protest behind the disguise of his conjure tales the commodification of Black personhood first under slavery, and now with industrialism,56 these tales such as “The Goophered Grapevine” depict not just the abuse and exploitation of Black labor: they conjure up this industrialism’s toxic biomedical collateral damage and slowly accruing aftermath, even as some workers are better cared for to ensure their optimized performance. In John’s skeptical response to Julius’s stories—­which he reduces to mere ploys to extract property or profit from him (the schoolhouse, the employment of his grandson, the sale of a lame horse, and of

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course, the vineyard)—­Chesnutt reveals the specific affective strategies of slow violence’s immunity from critique: the manufactured doubt, and subsequent delaying indifference, that returns blame to the victims.57 In the conjure stories Chesnutt uses folklore, I would argue, to expose how the assertive progress and blustering modernity of the New South depend on an unimagined community of ghosted casualties whose race-­ specific debilitating precarity and slow death has no meaning within liberal realism’s story of colorblind human vulnerabilities. In drawing on folklore, Chesnutt blended modern scientific realism with local knowledge to create a historical fantasy that anticipates the speculative alternative fictions of contemporary Afro-­futurists. Yet in drawing on the indigenous aesthetics and worldview that he studied for his essay “Superstitions and Folklores of the South,” Chesnutt also hints at a new kind of “speculative realism”: a speculative realism that disrupts liberal racial capitalism’s ideological fantasies that veil the co-­constitution of Black personhood within a dense network of material relations.58 In the “unnatural narratives” of folklore, Chesnutt like Du Bois, found a way not just to imagine an alternative world, but a systematically abnormal world that by operating according to a different logic disrupts mystifying accounts of New South progress and highlights the slow violence that lies forgotten outside racial capitalism’s direct exploitation.59 Chesnutt’s use of the conjure tales’ speculative realism can most clearly be seen in the opening tale of his 1899 collection, “The Goophered Grapevine.” As I have already indicated, Chesnutt uses Uncle Julius’s story to give narrative shape to what is omitted from John’s tale of Patesville’s profitable economic opportunities since African American “labor was cheap and land could be bought for a mere song” (1). Yet John’s story is not just one of industrial expansion, commercialization, and profit. It is a progress that, Chesnutt shows, depends on other myths: that John will bring stable, better jobs that will end the precarious, haphazard lives of African Americans such as Julius who depend on what they can salvage from a depleted landscape of exhausted turpentine farms and “shiftlessly” cultivated plantations (6), and, more importantly, that this commercial growth will bring greater racial equality. As John informs Julius when he invites him to share the pine log on which he and his wife are sitting in the shade of the old plantation’s spreading elm, “don’t let us disturb you. . . . There is plenty of room for us all” (8). Even though the new economic and cultural order that John would implement may bring jobs, opportunities, and new racial attitudes, Julius in his story reminds John that it also ushers in its own

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ecological disturbances and medical casualties that serve simultaneously both to discipline and care for African Americans to increase their profitable labor, but also allow a surplus population to debilitate, suffer, and die. In the embedded story of Henry, Julius testifies to a biopolitical management that revolves around what Jasbir Puar has called alternating cycles of capacity and calculated debility.60 In his tale of the “goophered grapevine,” Julius relates how the former plantation owner, McAdoo, to prevent the theft of his valued scuppernong grapes, paid a freeborn conjure woman to put a “spell” on, or goopher, the grape vineyard, so that any slaves who purloined grapes would sicken, be injured, or die. Despite the fact that modern capitalist developers like John scoff that such fantastic improbable tales were obvious deterrence narratives aimed to frighten an uneducated, superstitious enslaved population from trespassing in the vineyard, Julius insists the tale is true because immediately after the curse’s implementation, a visiting gentleman’s coachman who munched on the grapes was killed in an accident and a small child who “got in de scuppernon’s” died the next week. Such an alternative speculative reality that seems to insist on a different logical causality, however, Chesnutt implies, reveals what the white folk’s abstracted and decontextualized notion of disease does not: that the child’s debilitation and decline indeed were a result of the “goopher” or the master’s indifferent care of his workers. Concerned only about the slaves’ criminality, the master was unwilling to provide better living conditions, diets, and health care so they would not need to steal from the vineyard. As Julius implies, the whole chain of disasters occurs because Master McAdoo can only imagine the innate criminality of his workers, but not their needs. It’s an historical blindness that John repeats when he can only imagine Julius’s tale as a ploy to secure his property and not a tale about the collateral damages of southern economic development past and present. The bulk of Julius’s embedded tale of the “goophered grapevine,” however, recounts the story of Henry, whom McAdoo purchases to replace another field hand that died midseason. Before his fellow slaves can warn Henry of the curse because of the chaos surrounding the escape of one of the plantation slaves, Henry partakes of the grapes. Once again, Julius links the goopher with killing, debilitating labor, and impermissible freedom. When Henry starts to turn pale, the “oberseah” takes Henry to Aunt Peggy who gives him some “conjuh medicine” and prescribes a therapeutic cure that involves rubbing the sap of newly pruned grapevines on his head. This “medicine” that the observer procures for Henry, however, has

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intermittent healing properties aligned with the seasons. In the spring, when the demand for labor is high, Henry becomes physically stronger—­ even younger—­with thickened hair and muscles, while in the late autumn and during the winter, when once again, the demand for his service and labor decreases, he rapidly declines in health. As a result of Henry’s seasonal strength and value, McAdoo devises a scheme to further profit from Henry’s labor by selling him when he is at his rejuvenated peak of health in the spring and then buying him back again the following autumn when he appears to his new owner as a disposable, moribund hand. Henry, Julius says, “nebber say nuffin” about this bargain because he knows that his health only matters when he can prove his productivity to Master McAdoo, who will then in the winter “give’im w’iskey ter rub his rheumatiz, en terbacker ter smoke, en all he want ter eat” (27). In his conjure tale, thus, as he noted in his “Superstitions and Folklore of the South,” Chesnutt translates a story of disease, disabilities, and precarity within a different “unscientific” causal logic. In the seasonal rhythm of Henry’s fortitude Chesnutt specifically unsettles the prevailing logic of health disparities that leaves unexamined the temporal rhythms of African American wellness—­rhythms that often varied according to the labor demands of New South industrialization. But even as the speculative realism of Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine,” with its accelerated time, returns what is erased from nationalistic stories of modernity’s linear progress—­an equally deliberate but also delayed, incremental, collateral impact on African American health—­it also challenges a liberal racial uplift’s story of self-­help, and a concomitant moral and political responsibility. In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett raises questions about how political responses to public problems need to take seriously the vitality and distributed agency of nonhuman things. To speak merely of the deterministic power of structural constraints, Bennett argues, fails to recognize the entanglement of bodies as part of “human and non-­human assemblages,” a co-­constitution of human and things, in which tools (dangerous or not), microbes (contagious or not), minerals (toxic or not), odors (pernicious or not), and other materialities all challenge the meaning of freedom, agency, and personal accountability enshrined within traditional political theory.61 By emphasizing that the goopher that transforms Henry was the sap from the grapevines that had an adverse collateral damage, Uncle Julius’ tale hints at a more ecological, object-­oriented ontology that has always been a part of indigenous folklore. The animating sap with its fabulous wonders figures forth the nonlin-

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ear and distributive agency exacted by disease, unsanitary conditions, toxic pollutants, and occupational accidents permitted as part of the New South’s “peculiar indifference.” Uncle Julius underscores this calculated dynamic between humans and thing in the story of Henry’s death. Henry dies when a northern entrepreneur’s fertilization scheme to increase the profitability of the vineyard produces a toxic fallout. The northerner’s chemical-­based technology, including a “mixtry er lime en ashes en manyo,” only desiccates the roots of the grapevines, and as the vineyard withers and dies, so does Henry: “en when de big vine whar he got de sap ter’ n’int his head withered en turned yaller en died, Henry died too” (31). To John, Julius’s story of Henry can only be another deterrence narrative meant to inspire panic and to thwart his plans to acquire the vineyard so that Julius can derive a “respectable revenue” from it (35). John, like Dr. Miller’s scoffing at Jane’s superstitions, refuses to listen to a different logic of causality and to a different time of violence, and thus to acknowledge more than a trickster’s con or primitive culture’s backwardness. This refusal to listen to the words of Julius’s story, however, has had its equivalency in modern interpretations of Julius’s conjure stories that find greater meaning and importance in the trick than the material specificities of the tale itself: the precise details and content of their plot being taken as less important than their value as some abstracted art of resistance or diasporic cultural retention. But Henry isn’t simply some abused slave or industrial laborer. At the center of his story is the question of his health, of African American labor vitality, its visibility and value (with proper discipline) when it is needed to fuel productivity and industrial expansion, its surplus cost and its precarity when it is not, and its accumulated exposure to toxic contamination as part of the peculiar indifference to Black lives within racial capitalism. In contrast to John’s cost-­benefit analysis, which quantifies what Julius will lose in revenue with the loss of the vineyard as equal to what he will gain in wages, Julius knows that there is a remainder that exceeds this trickle-­down economic benefit and gradual democratic progress within New South racial capitalism. Despite John’s scoffing, Julius insists that part of the goopher will remain and will continue to cause harm. This goopher is not just some legacy of slavery, or the persistence of racism and inequality, but, as revealed in the speculative realism of Julius’s seemingly unnatural tale, it is a complex story about race, precarity, and health, and about the denial and forgetting within racial capitalism of the slow violence it can cause. Such an optimistic story of regional or national liberal progress, like the utopian botanical growth that the Yankee ped-

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dled in Julius’s story, depends on the gaps between a liberal story of self-­ help and gradual democratic inclusion and the Black body’s entanglement within a network of things. Coda

In a 1901 letter that Joel Chandler Harris wrote his children (and which was later collected by his daughter-­in-­law for the epistolary collection Dearest Chums and Partners), he jokes about the malingering of the family’s housekeeper, Chloe Henderson. Illness and disabilities among the African American poor of Atlanta, crowded into cheap tenement housing without access to sewers or water lines, are not real to Harris: I haven’t seen the Chloe tribe in some time. Mrs. Richardson, who is now a widow, wants to collect some back rent from them. She might as well try to make them use soap. As soon as anything is said about money, Johnson takes down his crutches, and begins to limp, Chloe goes to bed with typhoid fever, and Rufus’s legs lean in further than ever. If they hear that they have to pay back rent, three or four of them will permit themselves to be buried alive.62 In Harris’s comments we see the dynamics that Chesnutt’s conjure women tales re-­created. Not only did Chesnutt imitate the local-­color folk tale popularized by Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, but he also re-­created in Julius’s relation with John and Annie an African American working class’s relation with their employers in the New South. Like John, Harris casts doubt on the legitimacy of African American suffering: Rufus’s disability can only be feigned; Chloe cannot have typhoid fever; and the family’s health crisis can only be a trickster’s tale to dupe a white landlord out of justly owed rent. Even if there were, Harris notes, in concurrence with public health officials at the turn of the century, genuine sickness, this health crisis can only have resulted from the family’s own unsanitary cultural practices that make the race too constitutionally disinclined to use soap and adapt to modern hygiene. In contrast, I have tried to show Chesnutt’s conjure stories attempt to capture a biopolitics of slow violence and its complicating of questions of African American agency promoted within official liberal antiracism. In Chloe’s family’s witnessing for their landlord their limps, their fevers, their illness, it never occurs to Harris

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that the Hendersons might be testifying to something else or that their protest might be about more than rent. Chloe Henderson testifies to the precarity and slow violence inflicted on African American bodies, and what Harris would dismiss with ridicule and exaggeration as tricksterism has for the family a grim quotidian reality: the family may very well be “being buried alive” since they have been left by a New South’s “peculiar indifference,” discriminatory racial health policies, and environmental injustices slowly to debilitate and die. For this African American working poor there is no heroic African American physician, or a Dr. Miller, to protest their exclusion from a segregated railroad car that they do not have the money to ride. Such a physician, as Chesnutt’s Dr. Miller does in The Marrow of Tradition, would have only insisted that they display a more respectable character lest white employers see them as lazy, shiftless, and contagious. But Chloe’s work stoppage, like Uncle Julius’s tricks, were attempts to find a way to tell a different story and in a different time, a story protesting necropolitics and the way that violence unfolds slowly as its victims are “buried alive.”

3 | Vibrant Naturalism African American Women, Respectability Ecology, and Reimagined Accommodations

In her classic 1946 naturalist novel The Street, African American writer Ann Petry repeatedly confers an anthropomorphic assertiveness onto the cold wind, moldy walls, smelly rubbish, and piercing noises of World War II–­era Harlem. During Lutie’s quest for housing for her and her son Bub, Petry asserts that the winds “found all the dirt and dust and grime on the sidewalk and lifted it up so that the dirt got into their noses, making it difficult to breathe; the dust got into their eyes and blinded them, and the grit stung their skins.”1 In most accounts of Petry’s novel such personifications concretize the structural racism of poverty, housing discrimination, and unemployment that determine poor African American lives.2 But what would it mean, I want to ask in the chapter that follows, to take this language as both literal and figurative, and, in doing so, to take seriously its material particularity and potency. In Petry’s description, Black skin becomes a point of encounter between a racialized subject of becoming and the everyday material world. Psychological and physical well-­being, as well as potential political transformation, cannot be understood apart from interconnected material, even toxic, flows through the body that make it difficult to breathe, see, think, feel, or hope. All the pollution, smells, and noise reach out in an aggressive attack against Lutie as if they were part of a tactical necropolitics, less of letting die than of being unprotected and “exposed.”3 As Lutie reflects, as if to summarize the link among disability, social justice, and everyday matter in the novel: “Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs . . . the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place” (323).

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Most literary histories of African American naturalism, as John Dudley notes, citing critics such as Bernard Bell, debate the extent to which Black identity is constrained or determined by the environment.4 However, there is still an assumption in such accounts of a preexisting human will and agency separate from the objects within the everyday material world—­objects that are typically abstracted within a Marxist-­based structural analysis, or within a sociology of commodity culture that would reduce things to their semiotic value as signs of bourgeois status. In Petry’s Harlem, in contrast, there is no time before the fall into environmental determinism, or barriers that can simply be removed to allow greater freedom. As Petry’s language indicates, there is no self prior to a constitutive transcorporeality unfolding within the constant interchange between the body and its racist environments, one that breaks down traditional distinctions between subject and object, self and other, and between private lives and public space within liberal notions of individualism and autonomy.5 Indeed, in Petry’s fictional world the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman are constantly slipping, or more precisely, melting away, so that environment itself becomes—­and unbecomes—­character. When Lutie first spies Mim, for example, in Superintendent Jones’s first floor apartment, she remarks with surprise Mim’s dissolving into the furniture: “How could anyone sit in a chair and melt into it like that?” (23, my emphasis). Animative things in Petry’s Harlem inhabit the lungs and belly, or characters open up into their environment, as Min does, as if to “melt” into a lifeworld that prompts and scripts their behavior. In such a world, Black liberation struggles for freedom, agency, accountability, and justice, Petry shows us, require a new micropolitics that recognizes a radically different relation to place and to the everyday matter in Black ecologies. Although recently critics such as Evie Shockley, Keith Clark, and Elizabeth Machlin have argued that Petry’s personified landscapes signal an indebtedness to an African American gothic tradition invoked to enhance the terror facing Black lives within the novel’s social realism,6 I want to argue that we should read the numerous entanglements between human and things in Petry’s The Street as tapping into and extending an emergent early twentieth-­ century Black women’s community-­ based political ecology—­one that I will call respectability ecology—­that promoted an everyday ethical and political sustainable becoming in the home and in the streets as part of a reimagined racial “response-­ability.”7 Amid the organized cleanups, neighborhood surveys, health advocacy, and home missionary work that early twentieth-­century African American club

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women performed to combat the period’s health inequalities, they developed a complicated, if not always coherent, philosophy that reimagined racial uplift’s rehabilitative politics in terms of artfully arranging sustaining ecologies. In what follows I will bring together recent work in critical disability studies with theories of political ecology in order to trace out how early twentieth-­century Black women developed a posthumanist, or more accurately “beyond humanist,” activism that sought to address the slow antiblack racial violence working through practices of exposure: exposure to germs, to toxins, to poisons, to rotten meat, but also to light, noises, smells, and other sensations that all can incite, or prevent, the “festering sores” of dream-­deferring urban environments. Early twentieth-­century African American women writers developed what we might call a “crip ecology.”8 Ecological studies and critical disability studies converge around a number of common ideas. Both disability and ecological studies recognize the subject’s capacities—­what it can and cannot do, as well as its identity and well-­being—­as always contextual and relational to environments. But those interrelations with the environment that contribute to the abling/disabling, exposing and capacitating of Black lives also included the everyday living conditions and material things in early twentieth-­century segregated neighborhoods that were set up to debilitate Black vitality and prevent migrants to northern cities from thriving. Early twentieth-­century African American women called for a new ethico-­political politics of sustainability, or racial “response-­ability,” that recognized that Black freedom struggles begin with an attentiveness and mindfulness to the potentiality of all things—­nonhuman, material, inanimate, as well as human and systematic and legal—­to shape, organize, and inhabit Black life.9 In her study of what she calls “post-­humanist performativity,” Karen Barad adapts Judith Butler’s ideas of subjectivity as the iteration of discursive scripts within the body to argue for the interaction of matter in the process of vital becoming.10 It is this idea of embodiment as a process of relational and interactive becoming, and of the human as always intermeshed with a more than human world and its agency, that informs the vibrant naturalism of writers such as Ann Petry and Marita Bonner. In arguing for a “crip ecological” reading of early twentieth-­century African American Black women’s activism, I need to clarify upfront that I will, however, in some ways, be recentering the human.11 African American artists and activists in their vibrant naturalism struggled with questions of racial justice more than the environment for its own sake, and

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linked questions of matter and its sensate effects to Black agency, justice, and equality. Critiquing the nature/culture, subject/object divide, many object-­oriented materialists seek to detach things from their usefulness to humans and argue for a greater ethical responsibility that extends beyond the human, particularly to a precarious natural world. But in working out their community-­based respectability ecology, African American club women concerned themselves, as Jane Bennett notes in Vibrant Matter, with how political responses to public problems have to change if we take seriously the vitality of nonhuman bodies,12 and particularly as part of a community activity to combat an everyday dispersed necropolitics of “exposure” and risk pervasive within Jim Crow segregation. For early twentieth-­century African American club women, the advancement of African American lives and the realization of economic justice and democratic freedom weighed more than environmental sustainability per se even as these women recognized the intimacies of human-­nonhuman relations that caused them to broaden the range of sites of political reform. In their calls for “better homes, prettier yards, cleaner premises, quieter streets,” early twentieth-­century African American club women did not just insist, as is frequently argued, on a middle-­class, heteronormative moral probity to counter stereotypes of Black pathology.13 They drew upon and remixed inherited ideas of sentimentalism, Romantic epistemology, aesthetics, germ theory and the new science of sanitation, religion, and a nascent environmentalism to argue for a human/ nonhuman entanglement that was not just material, but also affective, sensuous, and aesthetic. Respectability ecology, thus, I finally need to point out, focused on an “ecological aesthetic” that emphasized the potentially affective and mood-­altering power of sensory matter.14 Ben Highmore identifies human embodiment as part of what he calls “social aesthetics,” seeing it as often a “densely woven entanglement” of not just humans and things, but also the senses, the emotions, discourse, and perceptions.15 In working out a political ecology for the sustainability of African American vitality, African American women in their neighborhood unions and clubs highlighted a mindfulness to the “aesthetic” in its original philosophical sense as having to do with the creaturely material experiential life and with the very way the world strikes the body in all the senses as part of even our most plebian everyday interactions. Calls for “better homes, prettier yards, cleaner neighborhoods,” therefore, did not just ensure hygiene and healthy lives.16 They infused and shaped the character of the race by altering the aesthetic,

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sensory experience of African Americans inhabiting, and being inhabited by, their neighborhoods. In the three sections that follow I will examine first the community activism of African American club women to recover their respectability ecology. I will then turn to a close reading of two African American women writers, the proletarian author Marita Bonner, who published most of her short stories in the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazine in the 1930s, and the “naturalist” writer Ann Petry, whose 1946 novel The Street talks back to Richard Wright’s classic Native Son to broaden African American naturalism’s race and class consciousness to picture the necessity of a new feminist materialist practice of sustainable becoming to end slow violence. Both of these women witness a different understanding of racial response-­ability as the cultivation of new forms of care and survival attuned to the transcorporeality of human and nonhuman objects in order to advance a long deferred African American freedom and equality. Although Bonner’s stories are often seen as criticizing the hypocrisy and moralism of racial uplift, her stories offer biomappings of the city that complicate protest fiction’s melodrama of oppression by showing how a racialized poor are always becoming with (and being cultivated by) the sensuous, scripting matter of their urban ecologies.17 By showing this entanglement of humans and things, Bonner challenges liberal antiracisms as well as leftist naturalisms that depended on a logic of worthy, or deserving, victimized lives as based on a false (and ontologically impossible) notion of innocence. Similar to Bonner, Ann Petry also draws upon and radicalizes the respectability ecology being worked out in practice among African American club women. Petry’s novel delves into the sensate world of Harlem from its sights, smells, and materials. Although Lutie seeks to attain ownership over her body to resist the dehumanization of Black lives, Petry depicts Lutie’s failure as a necessary rupture to this logic of human rights to begin imaging new ethical and political practices of liberation grounded in an awareness of how Black lives are always already a part of, and constrained by, an active and racially managed material world. Tracing out an alternative vibrant naturalism, Petry shows that a political accommodationism that would offer African Americans greater opportunities and access with the removal of racial barriers only obscures how the matter of Black lives cannot be separated from the actant power of everyday things to organize and mobilize the will, hope, and capacity to be free.

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Respectability Ecology: Sustainable Becoming versus Rehabilitation

In her October 1929 address to the membership of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), President Sallie W. Stewart announced a new campaign for the coming club year, 1929–­30. This “crusade,” as Stewart identified it, would bring together the organization’s historical efforts in three key areas—­domestic outreach, public health, and social work—­and would be identified by the slogan: “Better Homes, Better Health, More Happiness.” In her editorial elaboration upon this call to the “women of the United States,” Stewart fuses an inherited sentimental discourse regarding the mother’s moral influence on the character of the nation’s citizens with a new scientific language of domestic management and disease prevention in a way that came to define the porous sanitary, morcentury African alistic, and aesthetic overlap within early twentieth-­ American club women’s remaking of a respectability politics into an urban political ecology. As Stewart notes in an exhortation that would be reprinted in a bold type advertisement on a separate page of the newsletter throughout the year: Our children live and have their being in homes, and here it is that impressions are made on their young lives that can never be erased. The home should form a beautiful setting in which children can be born and reared in. Give the child the best environment in his formative years that he may grow to love the beautiful; grow to love law, regularity, and order. Give him pleasant surroundings in early years that he may have a cultural background formed by the time he reaches five years of age and may present himself at the door of the public school a fine specimen [for] the teacher.18 In speaking of the mother’s moral influence NACWC president Stewart taps into a long tradition of the middle-­class mother as rearing the character of patriotic citizens prominent within nineteenth-­century domestic ideology.19 In part too Stewart’s language recalls a Romantic discourse of nature’s morally uplifting properties that inspired city park planners such as Frederick Olmstead.20 But we should not ignore the particular splicing of sentimentality, sanitary guidelines, and Romanticism in Stewart’s editorial call to arms in her 1929 campaign theme. In Stewart’s urban reform, environment and character interfuse as one, as “beautiful settings” im-

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print themselves on the child, forming impressions, associations, and propensities that in-­habit the child’s behavior, feelings, and identity and cultivate a “fine specimen.” In her discussion of the “Pioneers of U.S. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice,” Susan Mann challenges a familiar historical genealogy that places the beginnings of ecofeminism in the 1970s by tracing out how many of the key assumptions of the movement did not originate among an intellectual elite, but among local neighborhood women of color in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who as part of their roles as mothers made the link between toxic waste and their children’s health. Despite being blamed as the cause of contagious health epidemics, African American urban migrants pushed local governments to recognize that race and class were integrally related to the distribution of environmental hazards and the risks they created for vulnerable populations.21 Bringing together a language of housekeeping and a community-­based environmentalism, these early twentieth-­century women sought to clean up air and water pollution, garbage and injurious toxins, and to insist on healthy food and industrial workplace safety. But the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs—­and their affiliated neighborhood women’s groups—­did not just concern themselves with environmental racism as part of their community activism and uplift: they developed a more complex micropolitics that extended a Victorian era language of the “home’s influence” to an awareness of the entanglement of African Americans lives with the everyday matter of their urban neighborhoods. They were remaking key African American race leaders’ rehabilitative politics around health into a respectability ecology that highlighted the power of everything from tin cans to teacups to impact, propose, and sustain Black lives. The National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, which formed in 1896, represented the continuation of a long tradition of African Ameridetermination, self-­ can voluntary associations that encouraged self-­ improvement, and community development in the decades following the Civil War. During a period that Rayford Logan famously referred to as the “nadir of African American history,”22 the 113-­member Colored Women’s League, formed in Washington, DC, in 1892, and the 85-­member National Federation of Afro-­American Women came together to fight white racism and to defend Black women, while fostering a community consciousness and sense of social responsibility.23 As Deborah Gray White notes, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs became a “primary vehi-

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cle for race leadership” as it extended women’s duties as mothers to social work in the community.24 At a time when many Black migrants struggled to adjust to city life, these Black women sought to promote racial uplift by teaching poor African Americans self-­help and domestic care: from educating mothers and improving home life to opening up health clinics and petitioning city officials to build schools and extend water and sewer lines to Black neighborhoods. By 1916 there were 1,500 local women’s groups associated with the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and their community work was regularly reported within the association’s national newsletter, The National Association Notes, and after 1922, The National Notes, housed originally at Tuskegee University. In their work and in their publications, as Elizabeth McHenry notes, these women collaboratively defined a “womanist philosophy” that expressed disappointment with a male leadership and insisted that women were most fitted to uplift the race, as their more nurturing, moral, and altruistic nature made them better qualified for community-­based social work.25 In a January 1912 essay entitled “The Cultivation of the Aesthetic,” club woman G. S. Ferguson offers an overview of how an inherited language of the mother’s home influence morphed into the moral, aesthetic, sanitary, and environmental convergence of African American women’s respectability ecology. For Ferguson the proper home life of the child has as much to do with the furniture, wallpaper, and flowers as it has to do with parenting, and as we saw in Stewart 1929 call for ‘better homes” and “prettier yards,” there is a distinctive displacement of the actual human figure of the mother—­and her moral and psychological influence—­in favor of an obsession with the materiality of “beautiful settings,” “pleasant surroundings,” and “clean” physical environments. The mother’s formative influence is not just about her personal care, or her moral example and instruction, but the material world she creates. In introducing her subject on the “aesthetic” in home life, Ferguson discloses that she had been asked by the NACWC’s members to address the issue’s importance within their educational and missionary work. At first, Ferguson confesses that she thought her task would be easily accomplished through the enumeration of the “size of the room, the tint of its walls, the articles it contained, the cut of the dress,” but she concludes by arguing that the “cultivation of the aesthetic” involves less the particularity of any décor or dress than the creation of what Ferguson refers to as elevating “atmospheres” that incubate character. As Ferguson writes,

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This [the cultivation of the aesthetic] is accomplished, only in so far as [it] is injected into the every-­day atmosphere—­experiences—­ practical experience, of purity, unselfishness, and the hearty participation in all the home activities—­be they the cleaning of a room, the serving of a meal, the entertainment of a friend, the attendance at a party, the purchase of a garment or article of furniture—­disappointments based upon a joy in and loving sympathy toward the things that make up life—­for love is no spectator. To my mind these suggestions of the true and the beautiful inject uplifting, helpful, optimistic thoughts that lead toward the light.26 (my emphasis) Once again Ferguson, like Stewart, blends together the moral, the hygienic, and the aesthetic to define the mother’s responsibility to create “everyday atmospheres” that constitute set behaviors, habits, affects, and identities. Such “everyday atmospheres” for Stewart are more than figurative, but a recognition that the sensory matter of the home and of the street, appeal to, alter, and attune the individual’s feelings and moods as well as behavior. In such an ecological aesthetics, Ferguson as well as other club women pushed for an enhanced understanding of the connection between the physical and sensuous properties of things and their affective atmospheres to shape perceptions, emotions, and habits. As a result, the mother’s responsibilities that link domesticity with public health also ties this sanitary mothering to “art”: cleanliness, arrangement, and “beauty” are equal parts the mother’s cynosure, both touching upon and cultivating the “city’s children”—­not just by keeping them free of germs or disease, but influencing and in-­habiting the identity of the child. In many ways, the NACWC women borrow the language of Lockean epistemology that often shaped nineteenth-­century women’s sentimentalism. In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690), Locke had challenged an earlier idealism by arguing that all ideas derive from experience, or more specifically the tandem workings of sensation and reflection. In the early formative years of the child, sensations, or the entry of ideas into the mind, dominate, and they continue to exert a strong and sustained influence even as the individual matures and develops a capacity for reflection.27 If Locke and a sentimental discourse of moral influence then always linked the early stages of mental development to environmental influences, Ferguson’s essay on “The Cultivation of the Aesthetic” adapts and broadens this traditional sentimental rhetoric to include the physical and sensory

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matter of the home, yard, and street to shape that contagious sympathy between individuals and their environments. If African American club women emphasized how everyday things in the urban homes and neighborhoods of migrants come to in-­habit Black personhood it is important to note, they tended to see domestic management and sanitation as an art, and not simply a hygienic science. Not only did objects script or predispose certain habits, muscle memories, or identities, the actant power of things for the NACWC women also particularly lay in their socio-­aesthetic influence. The animating propensities of things arose in their invoking of specific affective and psychological responses as a part of sticky and densely interwoven entanglements of sensation, discourse, matter, and affect. For the NACWC members healthy and uplifting home and urban environments meant creating a proper sensuous as well as hygienic and moral influence. In an 1899 article that appeared in the NACWC National Association Notes on a “Woman’s Work, Where Does It Begin,” the unnamed author summarizes her message about an ecological aesthetic with a quote from the British art critic and aesthetic theorist John Ruskin that declares that “the essence of vulgarity lies in the want of sensation.”28 In arguing for not only sanitation against germs and disease, but proper “artful” sensations produced by the home and neighborhood environments, these women saw the body as scripted by things in a way that encompassed feelings as well as sensuous impressions.29 Starting with assumptions about the interrelation between bodies, minds, and material substances, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs sought to create a politics of sustainable becoming through what might be called “things scripts.” Among the most widespread activities sponsored by the NACWC as part of their local community organizing was the annual “clean-­up” and “fix-­up” day campaigns. Later, these clean-­up day campaigns would become a key component of National Negro Health Week launched by Booker T. Washington in 1915. As the Chicago Defender announced in its June 19, 1915 article on the campaign organized by the women’s clubs that year, the event also involved sermons, pageants, and contests, from the best poster presentation, to prizes for the school or child that collected the most tin cans; in their annual reports, local members proudly inventoried the number of tin cans that the winning neighborhood boys had collected.30 It is revealing, then, as we will see in the next section, that Marita Bonner took the “Tin Can” as the title of one of her stories, for this ubiquitous sign of urban waste represented a central metonymy within the NACWC’s understanding of respectability

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ecology. In addition, as part of these clean-­up day campaigns, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs created specific “thing scripts” in the songs, rhymes, and pageants created for these clean-­up day campaigns.31 In identifying what she calls “things scripts,” Robin Bernstein suggests the animative power of material cultures to “script” human actions, or direct people to perform and behave in particular ways. Within such “thing scripts,” racial subjectivities are not just constructed through language and discourse, but interrelationally constituted with material culture as individuals learn to perform repeated kinds of actions and feelings, from distinctive and meaningful motions of eyes, hands, and feet to habitual moods and affects in response to specific objects. In its 1915 article on the women’s clubs’ clean-­up day campaign, for example, the Chicago Defender proudly reprinted a song composed by local club woman Miss Meta Wellers to be sung as part of the “clean-­up day” pageant. According to the Chicago Defender, girls were to be costumed in aprons and dust caps and to carry fly swatters, while boys were to wear overalls, straw hats, and bandanna handkerchiefs and carry watering cans (so as to pour oil on the trash heaps that bred flies). As they “tramped” through the neighborhood, the children were to chant the following chorus: “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! Together marching, / cleaning up as we move on, /With hearts so light and gay / We have entered into the fray / Till the last of the pesky flies is gone.”32 Such incorporations of music and dance worked to enhance the precognitive, sensory, and aesthetic influence that clean urban environments were to impress on the child. In such salvific sanitary songs kinesthetic memory and sensual aesthetic impressions comerged to invite and move Chicago’s urban migrants to incorporate and absorb salutary and respectable habits, lifestyles, and moods. In such literal choreographings of human behavior, African American club women, therefore, underscored that waste, unpaved streets, and tin cans shape and script habits and psychological responses as part of moral, hygienic, and aesthetic knottings. Even though the militant language of “marching” and “frays” echoes the martial rhetoric common within early twentieth-­century public health campaigns, the emphasis on “cleaning up” the causes of diseases such as malaria from mosquitos goes beyond a concern for bodily health. By having the children sweeping, pouring, and “tramping” as part of a rhythmic dance about trash, the club women’s sanitary campaigns brought together clean-­up days, beauty, affect, and African American citizen making in constitutive ways. Sweeping was not to be connected just with cleanliness, but also artful and pleasurable corporeal

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movements and emotionally uplifting atmospheres, which would inspire and leave somatic markers in reflexive habits of self-­discipline, fastidiousness, and optimism. In turn, the resulting pristine environments would provide beautiful hygienic ecologies that would both save and mold African American citizens. If there was one individual who most clearly represented respectability ecology in the first decades of the twentieth century, it was Lugenia Hope and the Atlanta-­based Neighborhood Union she founded to address the problems she witnessed in the crowded working-­class tenement neighborhoods that arose around the historically Black colleges of Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University in southwest Atlanta. As the Chicago Defender noted in its 1925 retrospective article entitled “Atlanta Thanks College Women for Community Service Center,” Lugenia Hope and the other Neighborhood Union women differed from many of their counterparts by organizing their work around the new methodologies of “sociological survey” and “house-­to-­house visitations.”33 Dividing the West End neighborhood around Atlanta University and Morehouse into a grid plan, the women appointed volunteers to inspect all the homes in the neighborhood and to canvas residents through questionnaires about the conditions of their homes, yards, and streets to assess their influence on the health of the migrants (see the questionnaire in figure 5). Often working in collaboration with Atlanta University faculty including W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier, the Neighborhood Union women interpreted this data to develop community outreach projects, a local health clinic, and urban improvement projects from parks, schools, to sewer lines. Although the Neighborhood Union had been originally conceived as having a civilizing mission similar to other settlement work—­and Lugenia Hope had worked with Jane Addams in Chicago before her husband John Hope accepted a faculty position at Morehouse College—­its members quickly shifted the focus from teaching young girls and boys domestic skills, the arts, and proper manners to addressing what they saw as the “health crisis” in the community. By the 1910s and ‘20s the Neighborhood Union worked to remedy the lack of clean water, sewer lines, and garbage pickup in the Black neighborhoods of southwest Atlanta, as well as opening up a health clinic that saw nearly 2,000 patients annually.34 Yet, although Hope’s Neighborhood Union replaced the settlement house with the health clinic, and broadened civilizing uplift to include public health intervention, it also, like other NACWC’s clubs, tied character, education, and embodiment to uplifting “atmospheres” that recog-

Fig. 5. Questionnaire created by Lugenia Hope and the women of the Neighborhood Union to survey the material, moral, sanitary, and aesthetic conditions of the home and yards in the neighborhoods developing around Atlanta University, Morehouse, and Spelman College in the first decades of the twentieth century.

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nized the power of everyday matter. In the writings of the Neighborhood Union, African American well-­being—­from physical health to moods—­ evolved within a “viscous porosity” with things and places, and the affective atmospheres they create.35 We can see the Neighborhood Union’s thinking about respectability ecology in its emphasis on light and air that continually recurs in their writing. Even though, as Margaret Garb notes, sanitarian reformers often demanded building codes that required adequate light and air, Hope and the other Neighborhood Union saw this “atmosphere” as having both aesthetic, psychological, and salubrious influences.36 Thus, between 1913 and 1914, for example, the Neighborhood Union conducted detailed surveys of all the “colored public schools” in Atlanta, which they published as a report in 1914 and sent to the Atlanta City Council as well as to prominent ministers and reformers in Atlanta. After having inspected every colored public school over a six-­month period, the Neighborhood Union’s Social Improvement Committee outlined four major impediments to Black children’s educational advancement. After noting the overcrowded and congested classrooms (4,102 spaces for 6,163 students) and the related practice of double sessions whereby some children took shortened classes in the morning and the remaining students lessons in the afternoon, they testified that the two main barriers to Black children’s educational advancement were, first, “that the sanitary conditions were very unhealthful” and, second, that “light and ventilation in the majority of cases were usually poor so that many children suffered from eye strain, or were sick because of the impure air.”37 As a result, the Neighborhood Union called for a clean-­up and fix­up campaign for “better schools” that paralleled the NACWC’s campaigns for better homes, prettier yards, and cleaner streets that blended ecological aesthetics and sanitation. In arguing for the importance of sanitary racially uplifting atmospheres filled with air, light, and clean painted hallways, the Neighborhood Union once again crystallized the various intuitions about vibrant matter that circulated among early twentieth-­century African American women and that shaped Marita Bonner’s Chicago stories and Ann Petry’s The Street. Lugenia Hope and the Neighborhood Union mixed together moral, hygienic, and sentimental discourses to identify what they saw as the distributive agency of nonhuman objects and brought attention to a different kind of racial violence with an alternative temporality of accumulative, attritional, and dispersed effect that shaped African American health, well-­being, and future possibilities.38 Light and air and brightly painted

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walls were now formative agents that scripted or that made impressions, exerted influence, and inhabited character. In contrast to many male race leaders, these club women insisted on the need to examine and transform the everyday material effects frequently ignored within debates over economic systems and public policies. Behind the Neighborhood Union’s work lay, then, a call for a reinvigorated material politics that recognized that advancing African American lives means taking into account the agency of porous human-­nonhuman interrelations and broadening the range of sites for reform to include clean, airy, and beautified homes and schools in a way that refused to separate human becoming from the everyday matter of the home and the street. If in the first half of the twentieth century, African American private lives were public matters to be regulated in terms of moral and social behavior, as Candace Jenkins has argued, the private was also a public matter because private lives and everyday public matter—­from tin cans, to sunlight, to painted walls—­all played a key role in African American freedom struggles.39 Thus, Nannie Burroughs, one of the cofounders of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs famously preached a “gospel” centered on the call for a bathtub, broom, and Bible in every home.40 Her “bathtub,” however, sought both to regulate and inspire middle-­class habits of propriety and to fight back against the slow violence of risk and exposure waged against African Americans who were debilitated and left to die in crowded dilapidated homes that lacked clean water and sewer lines.41 Marita Bonner’s Biomapping of Social Death

At the end of Marita Bonner’ 1934 story “Tin Can” the judge pronounces at the sentencing of Jimmie Joe, who knifed his rival Dan in a brawl over a girl, that “you young lawless creatures who take a life with as cool an indifference as you tear a piece of paper—­must be blotted out of humanity.”42 As in most of her stories, Bonner combats the criminalization of African Americans as delinquent, rightless, and illegible (not even quite human) noncitizens in the “Tin Can” by telling the backstory that explains Jimmie Joe’s stabbing of his rival as not simply a matter of personal responsibility. But Bonner’s stories, I want to argue, do not just contextualize African American lives abstracted in liberal narratives of personal accountability;43 they also imagine a transformed Black politics that foregrounds Black persons as permeable sites shaped, circumscribed, and

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transformed by both social forces and everyday material substances, from toxic pollutants, to rusted sinks, to peeling walls. Bonner shows that such a reimagined “naturalist” ecology is essential to a fight against an African American social and civil rights discourse that often slips back into a familiar logic of respectability that has been and continues to be central to racial protest.44 Such counternarratives of African American worthiness or fallen innocence familiar within naturalist fiction imply that rights are not inherent, and must be earned, thus disavowing marginalized minorities like Jimmie Joe, who do easily fit some category of deservingness. Thus, these protest narratives reinscribe a Black alterity that continues to serve as that devalued life (as the judge proclaims) against which a rights-­ deserving citizenship can be defined.45 Although Marita Bonner, as part of her proletarian fiction, documents and publicizes, as Judith Musser notes, the environmental forces that shaped African American lives, especially African American women, to seemingly create cross-­ racial sympathy,46 her antirace fiction points toward a more radical, and at the same time, more mundane vision of Black politics that intervenes in the everyday ecology of Black lives to contest and rearrange, as well as clean up and fix up, what “matters,” or is excluded from mattering, in Black lives. As a consequence, in telling the story of Jimmie Joe in “Tin Can,” Bonner calls attention to two different ways of thinking about his formation. Before the judge declares Jimmie Joe disposable, Bonner recounts how the principal at Jimmie Joe’s high school had tried to drill into the students’ heads, like a “Black Bass Drum,” that “Character is everything . . . it’s easier to be good than to be bad” (128). Bonner, however, satirizes the principal’s empty rhetoric of race transcendent character and self-­help when her narrator interrupts this story of moral uplift to explain an alternative theory of Jimmie Joe’s development: instead of the principal’s “talking [respectability] from a platform,” Bonner’s narrator avers, “things  .  .  . [are] induced gently, firmly, carefully, steadily into the essence of you every moment of your life. It’s too late when fourteen years or more of haphazard, slap-­dash, hit-­or-­miss, grab-­ bag living has snatched you through the lowly life of poor colored homes in black sections” (128). In this narrative intervention, as part of a strategy that recurs throughout Bonner’s fiction, character and reader become blended into a second person “you,” as if to erase narrative distance into a shared sensual “f(r) iction.” In telling syntactic turns as well Bonner shifts from social conditions and economic systems to record the material impressions that mark

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and constitute Jimmie Joe’s body: a body that is said to have been “snatched,” kicked, and dragged like the tin can in the story’s title through the dirty, contagious, and toxic waste left “haphazard’ and “slap-­dash” in the back alleys and yards of Chicago’s Frye Street. Over time these everyday things, these “unbecoming” everyday atmospheres bereft of beautiful impressions and full of toxic pollutants, Bonner implies, induce and come to inhabit the essence of Jimmie Joe. In the end, the rattling tin can, Bonner implies, is not just a symbol of Jimmie Joe’s life, but a substance that inserts itself into Jimmie Joe’s transcorporeal identity. Unlike traditional naturalist fiction from Stephen Crane to Richard Wright with its slowly building accumulative, deterministic forces that complicate the moral choices that Maggie or Bigger make, there seems in Bonner’s stories at times no clear chain of causality shaping the seemingly random, unpremeditated, or accidental acts that, in the end, result in her characters being jailed, electrocuted, raped, or institutionalized. To read Bonner’s stories like the “Tin Can,” is to notice how they frequently border on the absurd, or unfold according to a dark comedy, where freak accident and gross misperception often combine to ruin individual lives. Not only, for example, in the “Tin Can” does Jimmie Joe kill his rival Dan unpremeditatedly after his friend George thrusts a switch blade into his hand and the blade seems to propel and take over Jimmie’s actions and his body, but his mother in the story’s denouement is arrested as a drunkard when she faints from grief, hunger, and exhaustion while waiting for a streetcar. In Bonner’s stories, structural racism, poverty, and virulent prejudices are a given, undisputed, omnipresent, hovering in the background like atmospheric fog. But causality, such as it is, seems to arise from a more local, material interactivity such that agency is less something the characters have, or even lose, than the result of specific localized “intra-­ actions” with the objects and materials of the characters’ homes, streets, and neighborhoods.47 In Bonner’s stories, lengthy descriptions of setting replace plot because settings—­and the material things so detailed—­are character and conflict. To better understand the narrative dynamics of Bonner’s stories, I want to look in detail at one of Bonner’s earliest stories, the brief piece “The Hands: A Story” that appeared in the NACCP publication The Crisis in 1925. Like many of Bonner’s stories, despite the ironic subtitle, there is little action, plot, or even motivating conflict. The so-­called story instead centers on the act of storytelling itself to raise questions about what stories will be told—­and what subject will be known, or come into being—­as a

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result of this rhetorical exercise. In “The Hands: A Story,” a deliberately self-­identified “race-­less” narrator, who claims to have “no complexion, no hair,” plays a “game” of imaging “Christ-­in-­all-­men” as he observes the passengers on a streetcar. Yet, if the story seems to invoke a long history of liberal antiracist fiction centered on creating cross-­ racial sympathy through the representation of a shared humanity, Bonner’s metanarrative frame highlights the role of the unreliable narrator, and the questionable meanings that society attaches to working-­class bodies, or at least their metonymic “gnarled hands.” In her proletarian fiction, Bonner tells an “unbecoming” story—­one that deliberately attempts to undo the traditional moralistic or political stories told about laboring men, and other marginalized African Americans, to make them worthy citizens and to insist on a more sustainable becoming of a posthumanist Black life. Before the narrator chooses to imagine—­ and, as we will see, rematerialize—­the experience of the Black worker, it is important to note that he fails at his imaginative game of fantasizing about “being what he is not.” Prior to his decision to sketch out the story of the gnarled hands, the narrator had momentarily considered the countenance of a prostitute, but her “purple scarlet cheeks” repelled his sympathy. In calling attention to the narrator’s distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy” objects of imaginative sympathy, as part of the game of “Christ in all men”—­a distinction that, it should be noted, depends on a persistent stigmatization of Black female sexuality—­Bonner signals that her story is not simply about learning to feel for the lives of an African American working class, but about disrupting the logic of deservingness that underlines liberal strategies of democratic sympathy. As the narrator says, once he has discovered an “innocent” victim for his proletarian protest tale, “[n]ow he can play the game in earnest” (60). But in reminding us that it is only a game, that, moreover, it is a game played less to find out the truth of the other (and the narrator never asks the Black laborer or the prostitute for his or her story) than to designate worthiness, Bonner underscores that a politics of democratic visibility relies often on the reracialized nonpersonhood of others (particularly Black women of presumed ill repute). Just as Bonner creates a metacritical frame to raise questions about the assumptions behind proletarian storytelling, her style itself serves as the key strategy to underscore the material intra-­action behind racialized subject formation. When Bonner’s narrator recounts the man’s story, the narrator significantly and repeatedly omits a grammatical subject, and I would also argue, an ontological subject for what becomes a depersonal-

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ized list of actions. Repeatedly, Bonner strings together sentences that leave out the subject of the verbs, and thus in turn displaces any agential actor. In describing the daily routine of the “hands,” for example, the narrator enumerates: “Ran errand, lugged coal, lugged oil, lugged washing, sold papers . . . went to school sometimes” (60). In the repetitive synecdochic logic that frames the story, the hands come to stand in for the worker’s humanity, but not simply as in a traditional naturalist Marxist-­ based protest to indicate his reduction to an exchangeable commodity. Instead, Bonner’s story insists on the sensuous, tactile interaction of the worker’s hands with the material objects of his world (coal, shovels, oil, ink-­staining newsprint, dirty laundry), and thus the hands serve literally as touch points of material intra-­actions and the everyday slow violence of racialized exposure that cannot be abstracted (sentimentally or ideologically) into a story about poverty, or about labor exploitation. In a key line that captures Bonner’s shift from sympathy to this more immanent “narrative f(r)iction,” Bonner disrupts both the sentimental and ideological reductionism of liberal antiracist fiction by omitting any grammatical subject: “Scraped square-­toed across a wharf, across a plank, down into a ship” (61). Here in this passage Bonner once again omits the human actor, or even its synecdochic stand-­in, the hands, and even morphs these hands into “squared-­toed” boots. In the following sentence, as we saw in her short story “Tin Can,” moreover, Bonner tellingly slips once again from third person to second person direct address (“you”), so that the reader, the narrator, and even all workers can see themselves as not sharing an abstracted common humanity, but an equal formative un-­ becoming within the everyday material relations of the hands’ experiential world: “the sun baked the flesh on your hands in the winter” (61). In this unbecoming moment—­ unbecoming in both an aesthetic and ontological sense—­the subject and object, the subject and the viewer, blur; and the causal sequence of agent and action, the doer and the predicative object, becomes unclear: Who/what is doing what to whom? To what? Who feels this splintered rough board, the pain and suffering of this volitionless state being dragged down into a ship? Although it might be argued that Bonner’s style simply helps the reader enter more empathetically into the worker’s hard life, it is precisely that leap into abstraction that Bonner’s narrative “f(r)iction” seeks to prevent: her plotless story makes us feel the everyday sensations and abrasions of the “hands,” which lack any independent will as they are scraped (passive voice) across a wharf, across a

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plank, down into a ship. Unlike in traditional proletarian fiction—­or what Elizabeth Anker has called the “leftist melodrama”—­where we would expect to have the villain named—­the greedy, bigoted, or corrupt boss, landlord, or politician—­Bonner deliberately, in contrast, keeps us in the scene, in the everyday experiential networked world of the laborer where subjects/objects seem equally to have dispersed agency. At the end of the story, moreover, Bonner returns to her critique of imaginative sympathy. After this story of sensory experiences as a form of racial violence, the narrator wants to extrapolate once again a humanitarian universalism, or a Christ in all men. But in such a metanarrative moment, Bonner blocks this need to turn the hands and their sensations into either a story of victimhood (and exploitation) or of respectability (hard working, economic self-­sufficient family man). What both of these counternarratives ignore is, as the final narrative question suggests, the game: as the narrator says once again, “which game must I play more?” (63) The turning of “hands” into some abstract ideological message is an imaginative game, but one with ethical and political implications. This imaginative game, however, Bonner reminds us through the manner in which the story is told, felt, and sensed, is a dangerously reductionist one, if it doesn’t take into account the specific material embeddedness of the hands’/the man’s lifeworld. He is not only an actor, but someone acted upon, constituted out of the scrapes, blisterings, bending, and touchings done by and to the hand: he is not just the subject or doer, but the object done to by the shoveling, wiping, and scraping. Any political and ethical story that seeks to work for greater justice and equality for the man must refuse, therefore, detaching and abstracting the hands from the everyday world and its objects that wear, like friction, on his life. In the end, Bonner’s narrative style, as much as the content, in “Hands” suggests that any sense of a transformative and redistributive justice for working women and men requires not just new laws or government programs, but a new micropolitics that takes into account the confederation of humans and the often splintering matter of their thing world that gets under the skin.48 The tactile senses of the hands arise as the touch point of a revitalized understanding of racial violence and a reimagined politics of racial response-­ability. I want to look now in depth at one more of Marita Bonner’s key early stories to trace out more clearly her biomappings of Chicago’s “Frye Street” that both build upon and challenge African American club women’s respectability ecology. In using the term “biomapping,” I am borrowing the language of Christian Nold’s experimental Bio Mapping project

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designed to record and visualize individuals’ emotional responses to their external world. By hooking pedestrians up to what he calls a Galvanic Skin Responder, Nold captures their arousal in response to the objects, places, smells, and sounds of their neighborhood environment and then prints out individual and collective maps showing the spots of residents’ heightened sensual, affective, and psychological responses.49 Even though Bonner in her stories does not seek such a data driven, and quantifiable, record of the affective and material intra-­action between Chicago’s black migrants and their environment, her stories too connect Black freedom struggles to a recognition of African Americans’ relation to the objects, sounds, and sights of their racially circumscribed environments. As Kimberly Ruffins notes, in her journals Bonner repeatedly refers to her plan to create through a series of stories what she called a “Black Map” of Chicago’s migrant neighborhoods centered around Frye Street, and she meticulously kept a record of the details about the buildings, objects, and landmarks on specific street addresses.50 Published a year after “The Hands” (1926) in Charles Johnson’s Opportunity magazine, “Prison Bound” (1927) unfolds in many ways like a biomapping of Chicago’s Frye Street as Bonner once again substitutes descriptions of setting for plot, and largely records the emotional, kinesthetic, and psychological responses of a husband and wife, Charles and Maggie, to their environment. Although interpretations of Bonner’s “Prison Bound” have tended to focus on Bonner’s linking of gender oppression to the race and class immobility that Maggie faces, Maggie’s life is shaped by the actant power of things in cooperation with the patriarchal insensitivity and coercion of her husband.51 “Prison Bound,” in its impressionist slice of life structure, captures a simple breakfast routine between recently arrived southern migrant Maggie and her husband, Charles, in their decrepit Frye Street tenement apartment. Although the story begins in the limited third person point of view of Maggie as she reflects on why she has begun—­without the prompting of any immediate event—­to cry tears that have slipped into her tea, the perspective shifts to that of her husband in the last third of the story so that Bonner can explore both the material and discursive forces at work in prompting Maggie’s visceral, uncontrollable actions. Filtered largely through the consciousness of Maggie, “Prison Bound,” thus, on one level, critiques domesticity’s entrapment of Black women, and men’s inability to see that the home can become a literal prison: Charles grumbles angrily, “Why didn’t she dress and fix up the place” (67). But Maggie’s oppression cannot be abstracted so simply into the constraints of patriarchy or racist

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discrimination. In Bonner’s biomapping of the tenement, things reach out to shape and script Maggie in all their physical and aesthetic influence. As part of Bonner’s substitution of setting for depth psychology, “Prison Bounds” tells readers little about the particulars of Maggie’s life. Indeed, in Bonner’s story, it is implied, we do not need to know much about Maggie: about why she has come north, or why she and husband have become alienated from each other, or what might have happened this morning to prompt her sadness. Instead, we learn about Maggie by experiencing the material specificity of her tenement world, such that Maggie and her environment, subject and object, mood and furnishings seem to blend into and equally constitute each other. In its focus on the home as an impressing, or imprisoning, animate character, Bonner’s story recalls the respectability ecology of African American club women in their push for beautiful homes and yards. At first it might seem that Maggie’s disillusionment and despair arise from some failure to realize the “American dream” or to achieve bourgeois respectability since she longs for “curtains and a nice hat and carpet. The place might look nicer—­a long iron wall—­” (66). However, these domestic furnishings are more than commodified signs, either of status or propriety, but literal things that, as Bonner’s abrupt syntactic break with dashes indicate, enter into and inhabit her personhood. Curtains here, as in the writing of club women, are not merely the finer things of life that would add beauty or comfort to a home, but literally aesthetic objects that can free or bind Maggie’s becoming. Indeed, the absence of any objects that might make the place “look nicer” generates in Maggie a physical inertia, a sense of shame and despair that touches her on a preconscious, emotional level, so that we find her at the end automatically washing and wiping the greasy dishes as if that might make “tomorrow” “not be so bad,” though Maggie, we are told, could not have clearly explained why. As we previously saw in Bonner’s “The Hands,” human subjects in “Prison Bound” disappear in truncated sentences in which actions simply happen to and in place of characters, while domestic objects take on an agency of their own. I want to examine for a moment a passage in the opening of Bonner’s domestic sketch to argue that the story once again is as much in the formalistic features of the telling as in any event, named or unnamed. It is as if objects are the motives and events in the story: Grease and soot and waterbugs always covered the kitchen. That’s what everybody on the three floors above her and the three floors beneath her said. If you lived in a colored tenement you had to take

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grease and soot and waterbugs along with a constant “break down” of things. Yesterday the stove had smoked a little. Today it smoked a little more. Six months from now it would fill the whole room with smoke when you lit it. The sink was stopping up. The zinc under the stove curled up and tore your skirts when you passed. Little crumblings of things that nobody fixed. Charles would not. He was too tired when he came home. Always too tired. And the agent and the owner was abroad. (64–­65) In many ways, Bonner’s story enacts a descriptive survey that mirrors the inventories that Lugenia Hope and the other members of the Neighborhood Union took in the West End neighborhoods of Atlanta, and what is seen, as Bonner in her refrains indicates, is the crumbling and breakdown of “things” that predisposes Maggie’s own breakdown. But once again this mutual reciprocity between the crumbling things and Maggie’s frustrations, despair, and shame reveal the actant power of things. Maggie’s behavior seems a part of a posthumanist performativity: the repetition of these objects and their impressions reiterate and inhabit her subjectivity. These object’s daily repetitive smoking, greasing, and crumbling seem to constitute Maggie herself so that, we are told, she could no longer laugh like the “woman across the hall” and has become, as a result of the physical despondent inertia that they have constituted in her, the stereotypical “undeserving” “slovenly” poor—­the other against which even African American race leaders, as part of their respectability politics, defined themselves. Maggie’s lack of a strong deserving character, however, reflects the agential and aesthetic power of things more than her own lack of will or ability to make responsible moral choices. In this extended opening description of Maggie’s prison/home, moreover, Bonner particularly calls attention to the actant power of things: the zinc under the stove has a predatory intent here, reaching out and tearing Maggie’s skirt as she passes. The stove, moreover, does not just smoke; it “smothers,” so that in six months it will disappear Maggie and the entire tenement in a noxious veil. Neither Maggie nor her husband act in Bonner’s story; only the objects seem to have intent, will, and agency. But in re-­ creating the “senses” of things that create Maggie, Bonner as part of her vibrant naturalism works thus to interrupt the readers’ own detachment: one cannot just feel sympathy for Maggie or abstract into a realm of safe ideological standpoints about social conditions, however relevant those

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arguments may be. “You,” the reader, Bonner insists in her rhetorical injunctions, must “take’ the soot, the grease, and the waterbugs and let them cover you so that the oppositionally necessary distance that “you” would set up between a normative sanitary and respectable citizenship and the “undeserving,” “prison-­bound” (as the title indicates) poor cannot be sustained, must be felt as cruel falsifying detachments that like the rebuking words of Maggie’s husband ignore the networked agency in which migrant women are entangled. It is not just laziness, unsanitary habits, or irresponsibility that sap Maggie’s will, but the visceral real gut-­wrenching disgusting smells, tastes, impressions of soot, grease, and waterbugs that in their repetition over time expose Maggie to a debilitating violence. In her essay “The Dead Book Revisited,” Saidiya Hartman argues for the need to investigate more fully what she calls the “practices of the hold.” What, Hartman asks, are the “daily practices of refusal and waywardness and care in the space of captivity,” or, we might add, the “prison-­bound” enclosure of a Frye Street tenement flat where Black lives face the long slow dying and debilitation that were a key part of the post-­ Reconstruction afterlife of antiblackness. In her narratives of unsustainable ecology, Marita Bonner practiced just this refusal and care as she raised questions about the interactions of migrants with the everyday trash, cramped, airless, and ill-­lit flats, and broken “things” (stoves, windows, stairs) of their urban environments. For Bonner, early modern “practices of the hold” must witness to the co-­constituting of body and things, and how these interactions shape materially embodied black lives in such a way as to challenge traditional liberal theories of an autonomous self that can overcome its environment or even Marxist theories of worthy proletarian subjects victimized by their environment. These unrespectable ecologies may have already constituted and made the self “unbecoming.” In all her stories, such as “Prison Bound,” Bonner depicts that Black freedom struggles must extend into an everyday fight against “little crumblings of things that nobody fixed,” for “you” cannot make Black lives count, or bring about a more complete emancipation, without first fixing the rusty sinks, moldy walls, putrid smells, and other everyday objects that tear at and inhabit Black lives. Ann Petry: “Un-­Loosing” Black Ecologies

When asked about the inspiration behind her bestselling novel The Street, Ann Petry recalled that she wrote the first chapter of the novel in a single

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burst of frenzy and later did not revise a word. As Petry elaborated, “I put all my feelings, my sense of outrage into the book. I tried to include the sounds, the smells, and sights of Harlem. I wanted a book that was like an explosion inside the head of readers.”52 Petry’s linking of the effects of the “sounds, smells, and sights of Harlem” to an “explosion inside the head,” I will argue in what follows, identifies the intrarelationality that she witnesses between Black citizens’ everyday world and their political agency. But, for Petry, things also have a specifically affective power to induce (or depress/suppress) the feelings that precede and enable a radical political consciousness. It is racially managed environments throughout The Street, with their sounds, smells, and sights, which slowly wear and tear on the mood of African American migrants and thus restrain them from coming together for social, economic, and political change.53 Before Lutie significantly explodes in her own head against Junto, Boots, and the social forces that conspire to keep her trapped, Lutie tellingly has a vision of some “creeping, silent thing,” a “something disembodied” that always seems to stalk her and hold her back. In this vision she sees Junto, the white Harlem slumlord, fade into and out of the “couch,” the “blue-­glass coffee table,” the “walls” of her apartment, and the “congoleum rug.” Witnessing this dissolving of white patriarchy into the objects and impressions of her tenement world, Lutie thinks that “she would start screaming and never be able to stop, because there wasn’t anyone there. Yet she could see him and when she didn’t see him she could feel his presence” (418). In The Street white supremacism’s power to regulate and marginalize Black citizens is deployed in the calculated risks, exposures, and debilitation within Lutie’s “thing world.” If Harlem functions as a “re-­incarnated plantation of Junto,” as Keith Clark has argued,54 white supremacism exercises its control in Petry’s world by making itself a widely distributed, material presence within the Harlem urban ecology, exercising a diffuse power that accumulates as an indirect, delayed, and attritional violence to the brain, heart, and muscles of the city’s migrants. Yet this “something disembodied”—­this racializing power that melts like a white ghost into the material sensations and objects of Lutie’s apartment, as Petry notes—­affects not only Black citizens’ physical health but also their moods, nerves, reflexes, and emotional well-­being. As we saw in Marita Bonner’s stories, Petry’s The Street reaches toward a more vibrant naturalism that recognizes the interconnectedness of people and things. But Petry’s novel also raises questions, as did the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, about the affective life and the automatic emotional responses that operate as a part of Junto’s white con-

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trol. If Lutie sees Junto ghosting the objects in her tenement apartment, it is because the everyday environment that enters into her muscles and reflexes is atmospheric, aesthetic, and affective as well as material.55 In discussing the affective dimensions of biopolitics William Connolly notes that a material discursive biopolitics circulates not simply to produce subjects whose behavior expresses internalized social norms, but to prompt and direct racial subject’s fluctuating modulations of moods, affects, and feelings of capacity and potential.56 At the heart of Petry’s The Street is, thus, also a concern with what it means to be in the mood for a revolution.57 Such a revolutionary mood requires not only a raising of consciousness or organized community action. It requires an understanding of how the material world becomes a part of the very substance of a relational self and its capacities and moods. The street renders its slow violence against the people of Harlem, Petry shows, by infiltrating, predisposing, and finally strangling individuals into resignation. In debates over Ann Petry’s “radical” politics, critics such as Bill Mullen have often pointed out her reporting for the People’s Voice, a left-­ leaning Harlem newspaper published during the 1930s and ’40s, and suspected by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover of communist leanings and unpatriotic critiques of American racism during World War II. As a reporter for the People’s Voice at the time she began composing The Street, Petry wrote stories on housing, segregation, and employment discrimination.58 But we need also to look at another site of Petry’s political involvement to better detect the material politics of her naturalist novel. During the early 1940s Petry collaborated with other Harlem neighborhood women to start a women’s consumer rights group called Negro Women Incorporated, which would later become an auxiliary branch of Adam Powell’s People’s Committee, an advocacy group for Black employment. In the invitation to join Negro Women Incorporated that ran in the May 2, 1942 edition of the People’s Voice, Petry and the other women listed a mixture of goals that recall the blending of art and sanitation in the writing of African American club women: health care, neighborhood cleanup, nutrition, and art classes. And the invitation ended with a bold lettered and capitalized appeal: IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN YOURSELF AS A WOMAN, IN HARLEM AS A PLACE TO LIVE DURING AND AFTER THE WAR IS OVER, COME TO THE FIRST MEETING.”59 Like the NACWC women who came before her, Petry and the other members of Negro Women Incorporated recognized that Black emancipation started

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with creating a livable Harlem community that had safe food, nontoxic environments, and affordable consumer goods. Objects throughout Petry’s The Street, not surprisingly then, seem to have an enormous power over the characters: continually we are told that the walls “reached out” toward Lutie, to “envelop her,” (12) and that they seem to “come in toward her, to push against her” (79). The rubbish in the backyards, piles of “rusted tin cans, piles of ash, pieces of metal from discarded automobiles,” had an animated presence that allows them to creep over the fences, and to erase any human-­made “orderly pattern.” Similarly, all the characters, like the pattern in the landscape, seem to be replaced by objects that come to define them: Min’s ornate table, Boots’s car, or Mrs. Hedges’s turban. Since things seem to have a life of their own and to prompt human behavior or social order in The Street, Lutie significantly traces the origins of her tragic downfall less to the lack of well-­paying jobs, affordable housing, or prejudice than to a thing: an enamel white kitchen sink. When Lutie sees an advertisement on a commuter train for the same kitchen sink that was in the home of her employers, the Chandlers, she claims that it was “that kitchen sink in that advertisement or one just like it . . . what had wrecked her and Jim” (30), and later she concludes “that kitchen in Connecticut had changed her whole life—­that kitchen all tricks and white enamel” (56). In most readings of Petry’s novels, the shiny white sink in the “miracle” kitchen, as Lutie calls it (37), of the Chandler’s suburban home represents an elusive American dream.60 But we should not be so quick to dematerialize the kitchen sink and the other everyday objects in Petry’s novel as status signs of middle-­class achievement or symbols of a superficial or commercialized American dream. Such a reification ignores a long history of urban ecology among colored women’s clubs that, like Petry’s The Street, struggled to link the vulnerability of Black lives to the material world. Although the sink represents the normative bourgeois good life that Lutie longs for, Petry indicates that the white sink also bleaches out and reifies the racialized labor that lies behind this consumerist utopia: it trivializes the physical toil that the domestic labor to maintain its hygienic whiteness takes on Black women—­transforming Min, as Petry says, into a “dish rag” (57). In saying the sink had changed Lutie’s “whole life,” Petry suggests how material things must be understood as a part of racial becomings into identity. For Lutie the Chandlers’ kitchen sink enacts rippling damage: from her separation from her child and husband, her sexual harassment by her employers, to actual physical and psychological fatigue

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that wears down Lutie’s body and her moods so that her husband, Jim, no longer finds her fun or attractive. The sink wrecked Lutie’s life not only as a symbol of something else, but by its very materiality. In The Street, Petry repeatedly draws upon the respectability ecology of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, one incorporated into the mission statement of the Harlem-­based Negro Women Incorporated. Just as Sallie Stewart noted in her call for better homes and prettier yards to uplift the children of the race, Petry’s The Street is built around a master plot of saving Bub through a better home, a better yard, and a better neighborhood. Lutie’s struggle for some seemingly timeless American dream taps into the semiotic coding and ecological aesthetics of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. Lutie, for example, repeatedly exclaims that securing a better life for her son means a house with “sunlight.” Such a symbol may seem clichéd, but it recalls Lugenia Hope and the Neighborhood Union’s insistence that “sunlight” had a literal physiological and psychological ability to save lives—­ensuring healthy bodies, improved vision, and better behavior and motivation in children. Sunlight was a key part of respectability ecology’s social aesthetics and the creating of stimulating and sustaining impressions. Thus, it is not insignificant that again and again Lutie notes that “she had looked down the length of the hall and seen Bub growing up in some airy, sunny house” (311). Or that Lutie constantly dreams that “[s]he could get an apartment some place where there were trees and the streets were clean and the rooms would be full of sunlight” (151). When she is forced to live in a cramped and dark apartment with Jim, she even paints one of the chairs a bright yellow in the belief that “it makes sunlight walk right into the room” (182). More than sentimental trope, Lutie’s emphasis on a sunlit atmosphere for her child repeats a micropolitics of social aesthetics that emerged among neighborhood women and that raised key questions about political agency, responsibility, and the effecting of an emancipatory politics of justice and equality through renovating the daily matter of Black lives. Lutie’s desire for a “sunlit” home for Bub, moreover, is complemented by the story of Superintendent Jones, whom Min declares “would have been different” if “he’d had more sun on him” (370). In Petry’s The Street, as in Bonner’s Chicago stories, the reduction of African Americans to bare life, or as the criminalized and dehumanized other, unfolds gradually through an everyday material politics. Like Bonner, Petry seeks not to make Jones simply some victim of larger abstracted social conditions and

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forces, but as the in-­habited racialized subject created within discriminatory urban ecologies that must be changed. Instead of trying to make Jones a deserving and respectable race man, an innocent victim corrupted by his environment, Petry highlights that there is no time and selfhood before the racially profiled Black man’s fall into criminality. Jones may be a rapist (or at least a failed one) who believes that sexual virility, domination, and violence will restore his manhood, but Petry also pushes readers to take seriously Mrs. Hedges’s assessment that Jones is literally “cellar crazy”: his body, his soul, his identity are birthed and scarred by his damp, moldy, coal-­fumed world as much as Mrs. Hedges’s skin is visibly scarred by the fire that burned down her hazardous tenement home. In describing Superintendent Jones, Petry once again significantly resorts to a language that melts character into setting, to suggest that character is a porous hybrid composite of the human and its material world. This melting of character into thing can be seen when the Super emerges out of the cellar to attack Lutie and his body is distorted by the light dissolving him into the dimly lit halls: “His long gaunt body seemed taller than ever in the dim light. . . . She couldn’t see who or what it was that moved, for the cellar door was in deep shadow and she couldn’t separate the shadow and the movement” (234, my emphasis). In this scene, Petry’s phrasing recalls Marita Bonner’s bleeding of character into setting: in this vibrant naturalism it is unclear whether what rises from the cellar to attack Lutie is a human or a “what,” or, more exactly, whether the human itself is separate from a material performance in a dynamic relationship with the light, air, walls, and shadows of its lifeworld. Now, in arguing that Petry represents in her novel a materially embodied racial self shaped through its interaction with material things, it might at first seem that this attention to the inanimate further objectifies those already dehumanized, repeating a long history of African Americans as commodities under slavery, and as nonpersons under Jim Crow laws. However, as Monique Allewaert demonstrates in Ariel’s Ecology, African diasporic enslaved people, who were often classified as less than human and as having the status of either animals or objects, often did not assert some counterhumanity, but critiqued and suspended Western ideas of the human, often invoking traditional African beliefs that recognized a mutually affecting relation between humans and an animate object world.61 As Petry’s The Street shows, a turn to the nonhuman objects (the walls, the chairs, the tables, the garbage, the streets) is not to further African Americans’ objectification and dehumanization but to see how this degradation

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and disempowerment has always fit into a long history of “friction and leakage” between Black persons and their racist object world.62 Petry’s The Street draws upon and engages with the respectability ecology of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in order to speculate on the ongoing work and complications of African American emancipation, an incomplete post-­Reconstruction process of achieving greater social justice and freedom that must recognize in literal ways how Black lives “matter,” and live in matter. For Petry, as for Bonner, to restore the agency of Black lives seen as “nonhuman” is to recognize the role of the nonhuman—­cellars and streets, fumes and noisome mold—­in the reduction of African Americans to illegibility and social death. Even though Lutie is rescued from Jones’s attempted rape by Mrs. Hedges, Mrs. Hedges in this scene serves as more than a physical protector. Mrs. Hedges becomes the novel’s spokesperson for a new sustainability ecology that Petry dramatizes through Lutie’s story. Mrs. Hedges has often puzzled readers of Petry’s novel—­seeming at times both a powerful (and protective) black matriarch, and yet also a perpetrator of the controlling forces, cooperating with white power (Junto) to prostitute back women.63 Her surveillance, however, offers an important alternative gaze, one that represents a street-­smart remaking of the respectability ecology of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. It is particularly Mrs. Hedges’s avoidance of judgment that most makes her a counterlens expressing an emergent vibrant naturalism that has defenestrated the moralism within racial uplift. As we have seen in Bonner’s slice of life stories, Mrs. Hedges refuses sentimentality, and, equally, she refuses to extrapolate into some larger proletarian narrative of victimhood that might claim for Jones a lost innocence, promise, or deservingness. She understands that African American women’s racial “response-­ability” must be understood in relation to African Americans’ inhabitation by the things of their racist environments, having gotten her start as a junk collector. After stopping Jones from raping Lutie, Mrs. Hedges thus chastises the Super: “You done lived in basements so long you ain’t human no more. You got mould growing on you” (237). What would it mean, I think we need to ask, to take literally Mrs. Hedges’s pronouncement that Jones is “cellar crazy,” that indeed he has “mould growing” on him. Although Petry’s novel blends realism with gothic imagery to imagine African American entrapment and burial in poverty and blight, such gothic imagery also speculates on the way things predispose and constitute black lives. Placed back within the context of

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the NACWC’s urban activism, Mrs. Hedge’s assessment that “mould” molds character suggests the unsanitary, infectious environments that caused black migrants to have disproportionate rates of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other respiratory (airborne) diseases. But, for Mrs. Hedges, moldy walls, foul odors, and fetid air have also the power to constitute subjectivity—­a subjectivity understood less as identity than, as Jasbir Puar argues, as “capacity.”64 Although the lack of access to good jobs and the daily humiliations of being a “boy” all shape Jones’s manhood, his reduction to a social pariah and crazed “criminal” differentiated from a contrasting white “humanity” takes shape within a specifically “molded” urban ecology that implants muscle memories, inflects moods, compromises health, and incites nervous responses that exceed and cannot be understood within some overarching proletarian narrative of ideologically determined moral choices. As Mrs. Hedges explains to Lutie when she questions why the watching eye of the street’s Black matriarch does not have Jones arrested or committed, “He ain’t really responsible. . . . He lived in cellars so long he’s kind of cellar crazy” (240). In contrast to Bigger Thomas’s lawyer in Native Son, who extrapolates into the structural problems that castrate black manhood, Mrs. Hedges outlines an experiential micropolitics about the matter behind black lives: toxic coal dust, chemicals, cramped dilapidated walls, and the absence of light that all reek with the disembodied presence of Junto’s whiteness. Petry’s The Street speculates beyond naturalism to imagine a political ecology that restores the relationality between African Americans’ social death and their inhabitation through material lifeworlds. And, like Bonner, Petry also creates moments of f(r)ictional identification that work to compel readers to sense, taste, touch, hear, and smell the social aesthetics that stimulate moods as well as the physical well-­being of Black lives. Although Petry represents how Jones’s lifeworld made him “cellar crazy,” she is also aware that the streets have an affective impact on most Harlemites’ moods, often producing emotional states that foster depression, passivity, or, in the language of the novel, “resignation.” In a key passage about racial profiling and surveillance, thus, Petry broadens the meaning of racial violence to include a daily material exposure and assault on mood. After a sleepless night in which Lutie had nightmares about “the street,” and feared most of all that she would “get used to it,” or “that she would become resigned to it and all the things it represented” (194), Lutie stumbles upon a crime scene in which an anonymous Black man has been gunned down by a white store owner who claimed he tried to hold up his

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grocery. At a moment when once again we might expect that Petry would restore the humanity of the Black man whose life did not matter, to tell us about the joblessness, racism, and lack of housing that drove him to such desperation (if indeed he had even tried to steal), Petry relates instead how Lutie becomes obsessed with the man’s soleless shoes as if to underscore the interrelationality between everyday objects and interiority, sensations and mood. What most horrifies Lutie is not his racially motivated tragic death, or the profiling that dismisses him as merely another disposable Black criminal, but the “awful look of resignation” on his face that makes him soleless/soulless (203). As Lutie questions how such a look came to distort his countenance, his feelings, and his outlook, she finds herself returning to his shoes: But the thing she had never been able to forget were his shoes. Only the uppers were intact. They had once been black, but they were now a dark dull gray from wear. The soles were worn out. They were mere flaps attached to the uppers. She could see the layers of wear. The first outer layer of leather was left near the edges, and then the great gaping holes in the center where the leather had worn out entirely, so that for weeks he must have walked practically barefooted on the pavement. (196) In insisting on the constitutive relationality between shoes and the resigned black body, it may seem at first as if Petry is privatizing, or even trivializing, a larger social, economic, and political racism that discounts black lives. But Petry’s The Street troubles precisely this easy assumption that all of what might seem privatization means depoliticalization. In contrast to an earlier politics of sentimentality that sought to obfuscate institutional racism by locating the solution in cross-­racial sympathy rather than larger structural and redistributive transformations, Petry shifts the focus from the man to his shoes to substitute, as had Marita Bonner, narrative f(r)iction for sympathetic identification. Petry asks readers to sense (to share the material sensations of) the other, for to speak on behalf of the man is possible only through experiencing his becoming through and in the experiential sensorial everydayness of his urban ecology. Such a move asks readers not to substitute tears for radical activism,65 but to prompt a different understanding of ethical and political responsibility. For Petry, an ecological understanding of material politics means expanding notions of political action to include an experiential micropolitics on a variety of

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fronts, to include not only income distribution, government policies, educational access, but energy use, health care, and street landscapes.66 By tying the man’s death to his soleless shoes—­by tying sole/soul to matter—­ Petry reinvents a leftist politics that fails to include the “fragility of things” within the lifeworlds of the poor and marginalized and to understand their everyday vulnerabilities and debilitating exposures. By obsessing on how days of walking in soleless shoes might have driven the man to steal from the grocer, Lutie restores the materiality behind the community’s resignation, a resignation that keeps it literally worn down and out of a revolutionary mood. This link among matter, racial performance, and affect that Petry highlights as part of The Street’s tragic denouement insists on an alternative imagining of Black futurity that goes beyond traditional demands for rights within liberal narratives of gradual democratic inclusion. At first, as in traditional naturalist fiction, The Street can seem to narrate a chain of deterministic forces that lead up to Lutie’s culminating crime in which she bludgeons to death Boots Smith. However, when Lutie strikes out at Boots Smith, we are told that she saw “not one Boots Smith but three of him”; she has an “unstable triple vision of him” (429). More than dizziness from the slaps that Boots had given Lutie, the threeness that Lutie names identifies the various people and objects that had all attacked her: Boots, Junto, but also the “room.” When Lutie strikes out against Boots (patriarchy) and Junto (white institutionalized racism), she also vents “her rage against the dirty, crowded street. She saw the rows of dilapidated old houses; the small dark rooms; the long steep flights of stairs; the narrow, dingy hallways; . . . she saw all of these things and struck at them” (430). Once again Petry underscores that patriarchal and white supremacist violence expresses itself through the everyday matter of African Americans’ lifeworlds. The “room,” the street, the walls had constantly been alive, reaching out, touching, bending and breaking, and configuring Lutie to their dimensions, getting into and under her skin like the mold that penetrated the Superintendent’s body, until it filtered into her prerational being and moods. By describing Lutie’s both conscious and involuntary response to the room, Petry interrupts the naturalist logic of her novel to offer a metacritical comment on protest fiction’s abstraction from things. Although Lutie tells herself that the room is merely a symbol for the “sum total of all the things that she was afraid of ”—­from paying the rent to ensuring, as we have seen, the well-­being of Bub—­such a raised consciousness of her own exploitation still stands apart from, indeed cannot control, the impact of

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the room itself on her body: Lutie reflexively “draws back,” her automatic nervous responses gag with “suffocation,” her mood slips into, though she tries to halt it, that resignation that she had witnessed as part of the spiritual and social death of the murdered soleless man before his police shooting: “supposed she got used to it, took it for granted, became resigned to it and all the things it represented” (194). While Lutie knows that the walls represent larger social forces, she also knows that these objects also represent weaponized things: these objects shape her body’s habits, predispose her moods, and seep into her various performances of identity. To understand her fate she must then first come to a failure of her ideologically conditioned understanding that respectable black citizens can transcend their material world and can exercise an autonomous agency. In contrast to the melodramatic narratives of protest fiction that reclaim Black lives by restoring the lost worthiness, dignity, or innocence of the victim, Petry, like Bonner, reveals Lutie’s debilitation unfolded in long time, through a gradual everyday process, in which walls and rooms and streets touched upon and pressed into her skin. Although Lutie struggled to own her own body, she realizes instead the constant sensorial and in-­sensed (incensed) quotidian becoming and unbecoming of the Black body in racist urban environments. In a telling passage toward the end of the novel, Lutie struggles to understand how events have turned so abruptly: her lost chance at a singing career, the arrest of her son for mail fraud, her attempted rape by the building superintendent. However, if Lutie tries to trace back the chain of causality that has led her to this fate (reproducing the ideological thinking of the naturalist text), her thoughts dead-­end abruptly. “Her thoughts were like a chorus chanting inside her head. . . . And what did it add up to?” Instead of discovering a conclusion, Lutie finds that she hits a wall that prompts her to feel and sense instead the answer: “She pressed closer to the wall, ignoring the gray dust, the fringes of cobwebs heavy with grime and soot. Add it up . . . go on, she urged. Go all the way. Finish it” (389). Although Lutie cannot reason her way to an answer, in Petry’s ending of The Street, she touches upon it. As part of the vibrant materialism of The Street’s ending, Petry implies, a reimagined politics of emancipation must hit a wall, or melt into one. Like the women of the NACWC, Lutie must realize the way that cobwebbed and sooty plaster walls also exercise their own agency over African American lives as part of complex and layered political ecologies. Once again Petry shows how people and things melt into one another, how the depersonalized objectification of the Black

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body begins with the objects themselves: “She [Lutie] leaned further against the wall, seemed almost to sink into it, and started to cry. The hall was full of the sound” (390, my emphasis). Lutie’s failure to triumph over her environment in The Street, it is important to note, comes in this “almost.” Although, at the end, Lutie flees to Chicago to lose herself in the anonymity of another urban street and to escape arrest for Boots’s murder, Petry implies that Lutie realizes a compromised escape through her refusal of a resignation into the order of things: Lutie had always feared that she, like the murdered soleless/soul-­ less man, would become so in-­habited by the street that she would lose her will and identity. In the end, in contrast, Lutie cries out, she acts up, she does not slip into a learned helplessness and loss of agency. Amid the racist urban ecologies of the street, Lutie finds, agency starts in the “almost,” or in the “unloosening,” or the refiguration of the individual’s dynamic interaction with the material world. Even though in Petry’s The Street Harlemites cannot escape or transcend their material world, they can “unloose” themselves. In Petry’s crip ecological ending, Lutie comes to understand that she cannot just “accommodate” herself to her environment, or accommodate the environment to remove the barriers that hold her back. Such accommodationist practices—­ ones common, as we have seen, in both racial uplift ideology and disability rights activism—­ignore the visceral everyday entanglement of Black lives within a racist material world. To bring about greater freedom and opportunity for African Americans, or an “unloosing” of racial oppression, requires a new racial response-­ability that begins with the body’s permeability. This “unloosing” Lutie had first realized in an extended dream/nightmare that she had about Superintendent Jones. In Lutie’s dream, Jones had assumed the bestial shape of his dog, with a wolfish mouth and fang-­like teeth, but he had also had a “building chained to his shoulders” (191). Despite the fact that Lutie fears that the wolfish mouth will consume her (and it does bite off her mouth in her dream), “millions” of people swarmed into the street at the end of the dream hollering for Lutie to “unloose” Jones. Although it would be easy to see the crowd’s cry—­shared also by Mrs. Hedges and Min—­to “unloose” Jones as a call to free him, Petry’s language here is significant. To “unloose” the chain that ties the superintendent to the building, the chain that ties Lutie to the room and the street as well, acknowledges that in contrast to liberal theories of the autonomous individuality, neither Lutie nor Jones can be emancipated from a formative interaction with the material world. Instead, she

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can only begin to forward African American freedom struggles, as the NACWC witnessed, by reconfiguring the material/discursive/aesthetic dynamics that propose and perform racial subjectivities. Greater possibilities for freedom, or “becoming” in Petry’s sustainability ecology, as opposed to a mystifying liberal discourse of individualism and personal responsibility, starts with an “unloosening”—­a humbler politics of hope and social transformation rooted in the arrangement of everyday things to promote (and not just accommodate after the fact) well-­being and to meet the needs of all. Coda

On July 8, 1933 The Atlanta World ran an article announcing the 25th anniversary dinner and pageant in honor of Lugenia Hope, the founder of the Atlanta Neighborhood Union. As part of the pageant written by “Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, nationally known critic and writer,” symbolic dancers and actors reenacted the history of the women’s community-­based health care activism. While the “Spirit of the Union dancers” who represented the various “tasks” of the Neighborhood Union—­Health Education, Clinics, Clean-­up-­Campaign, Anti-­Tuberculosis, Playgrounds, Better School—­ reenacted the historical “laying of the corner stone” of the Neighborhood Union clinic, a classical Greek style chorus recited the history of the Neighborhood Union within the southwest Atlanta community: We hope to so draw out the history Of this thing of divers good and services, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . God grant that thoughtful men the world o’er Will blot the chronic ills from Life’s shore, So, freed from physical handicaps And mental, men can direct their hearts To the greater tasks as yet by them untouched, The nobler tasks God in His Divine plan Fashioned for the sturdy brain of the victorious men. Then joining hands in this new world kingdom All nations can sing a paean for the blessed dawn Of a New day on God’s earth.67

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In this chapter on African American women’s vital naturalism, I have “hoped to draw out” the history of African American women’s community activism expressing a respectability ecology to realize a more complete emancipation for African Americans—­this long delayed “new world kingdom.” Although Du Bois’s chorus celebrates an ebullient dawn of a “new day,” African American women writers such as Marita Bonner and Ann Petry knew that in order for such progress to happen, race leaders must first hit a “wall,” a wall designed to predispose and constitute disposable “prison-­bound” Black lives. Only through hitting this literal material wall—­and realizing, as Lutie did, its utility within racist and patriarchal structures of power—­will a revitalized racial politics seriously address the pernicious slow violence enacted through African American’s everyday exposures to toxic, demoralizing, and debilitating urban landscapes. Even though Du Bois praised the “clean-­ups” and “fix-­ups” of the Neighborhood Union’s respectability ecology, Bonner and Petry demonstrate that a vital and radical material politics would have to start, in contrast, with liberalism’s failures and the opening up of alternative ways of thinking about the political. Rather than defining freedom within a long history of racial uplift’s accommodationism, or an overcoming of social conditions and racial barriers, or even protest for civil rights, both Bonner and Petry start from a micropolitics of “unloosing,” or, that is to say, a slacking and realigning of the constrictive dynamics between Black citizens and the quotidian and domestic matter of their racist environments. Both Bonner and Petry, thus, raise a key question that, as we have seen, has been central to the long history of early twentieth-­century vitality politics: What would it mean to theorize freedom outside Western liberal political thought and from the point of view of the dehumanized, prison bound, and cellar crazy? To realize a “blessed dawn of a new day,” which the Neighborhood Union tried to implement, Petry’s The Street suggests, we may first have to let in a little sunlight, for the “sturdy brain of victorious men” cannot be rehabilitated or redeemed without first laying the literal “mold-­free” cornerstone of a new Black urban ecology.

4  |  Unsanitized Domestic Allegories Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African American Woman’s Risk Narrative

In her introduction to Prophylactic Topics (1916), a housewife’s medical guide that she published on behalf of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Chicago physician Mary Fitzbutler Waring summarized the goals of many Progressive Era African American club women: “If with intelligence and skill the homemaker can learn to do the work of the sanitary inspector and health officer we feel that we have not labored in vain.”1 For Waring the Black republican mother must be a hygienic home surveyor whose moral influence, mixed in with a generous dose of medicalized domesticity, would raise properly sanitary—­and assimilable—­ African American citizens for a U.S. global empire.2 In handy mnemonic charts Waring instructed African American women how to be “star performer[s]” on the “stage of household health”—­from eliminating foul sewer smells to swatting flies—­while issuing a charge to readers to lead “westward the star of empire” (38). As head of the Health and Hygiene Department of the NACW, Waring wrote periodic columns for the National Notes, the NACW quarterly newsletter, to preach the gospel of germs and preventive medicine emerging within public health discourse.3 Arguing that the African American home was “under attack,” Waring, as did other club women leaders, urged members to lead a “crusade” for “better homes, better health, more happiness.”4 Waring’s commissioning of African American women to be “crusaders” for health may seem at first little more than a call for urgently needed educational outreach at a time of medical “apartheid” when annual statistical reports declaimed the higher rates of African American “mortality and morbidity,” particularly from such “Negro diseases” as tubercu-

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Fig. 6. Image from Mary Fitzbutler Waring’s 1916 household medical guide Prophylactic Topics entitled “Upon the Stage of Household Health Be a Star Performer.”

losis that killed African Americans at four times the rate as for whites.5 But Waring’s figuring of the Black mother as domestic sanitary engineer, I will argue, taps into a complex history linking Progressive Era biomedicalization, gender, and ideologies of racial uplift. Community health care, as Darlene Clark Hine has noted, was an important site of Progressive Era movement activism, but it is one that has often been slighted as African American cultural historians, especially literary historians, have paid greater attention to the seemingly more and dramatic—­ story of the struggle for voting rights, foundational—­ against Jim Crow segregation, or to end lynching.6 While historians have begun to better recover the story of the “Black physician,” the “hospital

Fig. 7. Illustration from Mary Fitzbutler Waring’s 1916 Prophylactic Topics entitled “Death Lurks in Dirty Food.”

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movement,” and “medical racism,” the field of medicine and public health is still often interpreted as merely one more location of a ubiquitous (and monolithic) racial discrimination and oppression.7 But the story of late nineteenth-­century and early twentieth-­century racial uplift is deeply interconnected with a shift in the racial order of things as part of an early history of biomedicalization. Although medicalization, and particularly biomedicalization, is often seen as a recent phenomenon, the Progressive Era witnessed a key shift from biology as the foundation of a nineteenth-­ century politics of racial inferiority to biological and life processes themselves becoming important objects of political debate and action.8 In using the term biomedicalization, I want to capture the way the field of medicine expanded into, overlapped with, and was often employed to redefine, manage, and regulate aspects of the race question that were previously debated and understood as part of separate social, political, and ethical spheres.9 As Amy Fairchild, Susan Craddock, Priscilla Wald, and Nancy Tomes have demonstrated, emergent disciplines of bacteriology and epidemiology during the rise of twentieth-­century medicine provided a language of sanitation, contagion, and germs that shaped understandings of immigration and urban space, industrial labor, and social belonging and citizenship.10 Similarly, this language of medicine and public health, one tied to a panic about biomedical security, provided a whole new epistemology through which Black and white community leaders understood and sought to regulate racial progress.11 Black women, and more specifically Black women’s bodies, were at the center of this biomedical politics, serving as one of the most potent signifiers of the crisis, its risk and resistance. As Tera Hunter, Sarah Judson, and Andrea Patterson have noted, the image of the contagious “Aunt Hannah,” as she was most often called, or the African American domestic who would carry disease into her employer’s household, was frequently invoked in policy debates, and cities such as Atlanta throughout the 1910s proposed a municipal servants’ bureau that would carry out inspections to ensure the hygiene of its “help.”12 The medical knowledge that germs knew no color line functioned both as evidence for a universal humanity and, as was more often the case, for a stricter segregation based on an epidemic dread. But if such emerging biomedical pathologizations of the Black woman’s contagious body were all too common within segregationist policies, I want to unpack the function of another complementary and affectively charged public identity: the “unsanitized mother,” or “(un)hygienic homemaker” who emerged within the “salvific wish” of African American

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racial uplift. Amid the reciprocal coproduction of medicalized politics and racial uplift—­a twinned history prompted by health crises within many African American communities—­ this unsanitized mother and hygienic homemaker functioned not just to “police” Black women’s bodies, or as a forerunner of Daniel Moynihan’s demonized matriarch, but as the main agent within a dominant rehabilitative risk narrative that shaped and motivated the complex work of racial uplift.13 As part of the ideology of racial uplift, as Kevin Gaines has argued, a Talented Tenth of educated leaders within the African American community believed they were to set the standards for the race in the struggle for equality.14 But such a narrative of race progress in which African Americans would gradually accrue full citizenship through a demonstration of achievement, respectability, and economic self-­sufficiency increasingly turned to the compelling and “neutral” laws of health and risk prevention to solicit and regulate compliance. In calling this multilayered and affective image of the “unsanitized mother” a “public identity,” I want to bring together recent work in biopolitics and theories of affect. As Ange-­Maria Hancock argues in her analysis of the contemporary “welfare queen” as part of what she calls a “politics of disgust,” public identities such as the welfare queen or the unsanitized mother participate within policy debates not only by offering ideological justification but also by inciting the persuasive power of politically useful affects.”15 The medicalization of Black personhood and home life worked to further African American political delegitimization as unsanitary citizens incapable of bourgeois respectability and self-­discipline, and, thus, undeserving of full citizenship rights.16 But the particular strategic power of this biomediated image arose out of the way it was meant at times to be less informational than affective: its ambiguous and dissonant overlay of dirt and disease with dread, anxiety, shame and disgust was designed to prompt an automatic visceral response that would function to shut down and silence political debate within the African American community about class divisions, the disorientations and cultural shifts of migration, and doubts over the efficacy of self-­help and gradualism. In the first part of this chapter I will then investigate the circulation of a rehabilitative narrative around the work of the sanitary mother within the public health writing of race leaders such as Charles Victor Roman, founding member of the National Medical Association (1895) and first editor of its Journal of the National Medical Association, and E. Elliott Rawlins, the health care columnist for the Amsterdam News dur-

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ing the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance (1923–­28). While attempting to remedy the Black community’s medical crisis that threatened racial uplift, they simultaneously redeployed this language of health to medicalize and manage the class conflicts and cultural disorientations ushered in by an unprecedented Black urban migration. African American club women such as Mary Waring, in contrast, not only extended the domestic woman’s nurture and care from the private to the public sphere on behalf of sanitary education and the uplift of the race,17 but they also sought to renegotiate this constitutive link among gender, medicalization, and risk. Although the NACW National Notes served, as Elizabeth McHenry has argued, as a “collaborative space” for African American women to redefine their identity,18 Waring in her columns on health and hygiene both recirculated the public identity of African American women as unsanitized citizens and, at the same time, sought to reverse its affective politics by providing her readers with what she called, playing on the emergent language of epidemiology, “acquired immunity.” In the last half of my chapter, I will then offer a rereading of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Angelina Grimke’s play Rachel (1916) as biomedical risk narratives, or what, to adapt Claudia Tate’s defining terminology, might be called “unsanitized domestic allegories.”19 At the same time that Larsen’s Quicksand on a thematic level talks back to the biomedicalization of Black women’s bodies within racial uplift, it, as importantly, witnesses the absent voices of working-­class African American women and their cultural perceptions of a medicalized risk. More than an unsentimentalized story about one woman’s struggle for self-­expression against the race woman ideal, Larsen’s Quicksand is an unruly, unsanitized domestic allegory that exposes and destabilizes the interworking of medical language, affect, and gender in racial uplift. Similarly, Grimke’s Rachel, like Larsen’s Quicksand, testifies to the tensions and contradictions within an African American rehabilitative politics that sought simultaneously to alleviate the urgent medical inequalities of a community and to preempt dissent from an inviolable bourgeois respectability through a management of risk and affect. In the play’s title character’s melancholia and anxiety, or, that is to say, her embrace of negative emotions and the improper life, Grimke troubles racial uplift’s narratives of cure, rehabilitation, and overcoming that fail to address the necropolitics behind African American health disparities and that, in turn, inflict their own hurt and violence on Black women.

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Community Epidemiology: Racial Uplift and the Risk Narrative

In the July-­September 1915 issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association editor Charles Victor Roman published an article entitled “The Negro Woman and the Health Problem.” Roman, a physician at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, had been one of the founding members of the National Medical Association, which had been originally organized in 1895 during the Atlanta State Fair and Cotton Exposition to strengthen Black physicians’ professional standing and opportunities at a time when the whites-­only American Medical Association denied Black doctors membership, but also to advocate for public health education to address a medical crisis within the African American community. While Washington delivered his famous speech advocating “accommodationism,” NMA members met at the African Methodist Episcopal church across town pledging “to better the health and living conditions of the Negro people by educating them in matters of public health and hygiene.”20 In his articles for the Journal of the National Medical Association, as a consequence, Roman published not only current research in epidemiology or surgery but also less specialized articles geared toward public health education work. As Washington’s Tuskegee medical director John A. Kenney noted in a 1933 retrospective, histories of the African American struggle for civil rights need to bring these “two important events” for the “Negro race” together:21 Washington’s political program of accommodationism and a complementary public health education addressing African Americans as a population at risk would come together to form a “community epidemiology,” one in which African American scientists and laypersons collected statistics and information, educated themselves, and marshaled the knowledge and resources of the medical sciences to shape their own story about the risks and preventions necessary for the uplift of the African American community.22 As the title of his 1915 article suggests, Roman understood that the African American community had a “health problem,” but this health problem was both a physical reality and a public symbol that had been pressed into service as biomedical evidence of the failure of emancipation and the impossibility of integration.23 As W. E. B. Du Bois notes in his chapter, “The Health of the Negro,” in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), southern physicians, politicians, and public health officials had taken the effect of an instrumental practice of post–­Civil War medical neglect, unsanitary social and environmental conditions, and health care dispari-

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ties as evidence for the Negro as a “dying race.”24 Due to this myth of African American’s postemancipation pathologization, racial apologists reframed debates over discrimination, segregation, and racial progress around the supposed neutral fact of the freemen’s and women’s greater susceptibility to disease and their alleged debilitation not previously seen under slavery.25 As a consequence, racial apologists such as Edward Eggleston would assert succinctly in The Ultimate Solution to the Negro Problem (1913) that African Americans’ greater susceptibility to disease and their unsanitary lifestyle would ensure the “negro problem” solved itself by “natural causes.”26 With the rise of germ theory at the turn of the twentieth century, moreover, this belief in the racial character of diseases expanded to include a focus not just on the Negro’s “inferior physique” but also on the race’s unsanitary habits and lifestyle. Few southern physicians so dramatically depicted this post-­Recon­ struction historical prognosis of the “dying Negro” as a result of his risky behavior than did the southern physician Dr. Murrell, whom Roman quotes in a Journal of the National Medical Association editorial that ran in 1910: Whatever the motive that guided the pen which decreed absolute suffrage, it stands as one of the world’s greatest tragedies, for now the Negro was free, not to live but to die. . . . He was free to get drunk with cheap political whiskey and to shiver in the cold because his scanty savings went to purchase flashy and flimsy garments, free never to bathe, and to sleep in hovels where God’s sunlight and air could not penetrate—­absolutely free to gratify his every sexual impulse; to be infected with every loathsome disease and to infect his ready and willing companions, and he did it—­he did it all. The result is the Negro of 1909.27 In his incendiary public health lecture, Murrell rewrites social Darwinian arguments in an emerging language of medicine and public health. The inferior African American is now the “unsanitary citizen” who does not qualify for—­indeed, is too much of a contagious threat to be allowed—­full integration and political rights. The “New Negroes of 1909” are infectious disease carriers, part of a risk population, whose diseased state results from their own improvident habits and unhygienic lifestyles that unfit them for American Civilization. In his essay “The Negro Woman and the Health Problem,” Roman

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vehemently denies this image of the unsanitary African American citizen. But, at the same time, he recasts its logic of cultural deficiency within the public identity of the unsanitized mother to perform similar affective and discursive work within debates over racial uplift. At the beginning of his essay, thus, Roman refutes the African American’s racial susceptibility to disease and the myth of free men and women as a dying race unable to progress into full civil and political rights: “A careful study of American mortuary returns discloses no lethal diseases peculiar to the Negro. The history of morals discloses no vices peculiar to African blood.” However, at the same time that Roman overturns this tactical exploitation of the African American community’s health crisis as a victim-­blaming legitimation for segregationist policy, he reinscribes this southern public’s discursive linking of disease to unsanitary character and lifestyles. Ignoring the socioeconomic inequalities that lead to the disproportionately higher incidence of various contagious diseases, Roman attributes the higher rates of mortality and morbidity among African American to three behavioral factors, “sexual relations, diet, and unsanitary housekeeping,” and in all of these, he pronounces, “woman is the determining factor. . . . Here is where the Negro woman is the Negro problem.”28 Not only is the Negro woman the problem, but particularly the sexual freedom of the modern “Negro woman” ought to be the target of a necessary behavior modification. Accepting the widely circulated racist argument that many of the diseases plaguing the community, from tuberculosis to infant mortality, stem from an underlying debilitation of the race from venereal disease, Roman names the originating cause of this epidemic of syphilis as the fallen modern woman: if she does not spread the disease through her promiscuity per se, this liberated woman does so through her negligence of the housekeeping and home cooking necessary for proper hygiene and dietary health. Roman’s resignifying of a medicalized social Darwinian myth about African Americans as a dying race into a risk narrative centered on the unsanitized, undomestic Black women recurs throughout the literature of racial uplift. This focus on the risk of the unsanitized mother reflected, in part, a broader shift in U.S. public health discourse and its attitude toward prevention. With the advent of bacteriology and epidemiology, the field of public health acquired a more scientific and professional identity that discredited the older school of “social work” (now deemed “feminine”). Instead of improving sewers, water supplies, or tenement housing, the focus of public health work emphasized individual behavior modification,

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not living conditions.29 In shifting from the disease to the people at risk, from structural inequality and unsanitary environments to individual habits and lifestyles, from cure to prevention, public health education, especially in the context of Jim Crow racism, became inextricably connected with governing the individual behaviors of designated “risk agents.” For Roman and other race leaders, this risk agent was the “Negro woman.” As part of the risk narrative within racial uplift, Black women’s deviance from norms of domesticity was now no longer simply moral transgressions, but contagious actions that literally had the power to kill.30 Most recent discussions of “risk narratives” have tended to conceptualize an imaginative and literary response to risk as a contemporary phenomenon linked to late twentieth-­century environmental contamination, terminal illnesses, terrorist attacks, or economic collapses.31 These investigations of risk narratives frequently begin with the theories of Ulrich Beck, who identifies risk as the inadvertent side effect of an unexamined belief in technological and medical progress. Literary critics have largely focused on how fiction and biographies offer insights into a psychological and cultural perception of risk and into the specific narrative strategies writers have used to combat or come to terms with this new experience.32 As part of the biomedicalization of life processes within preventive public health work, however, risk emerged as an important affect interconnected with panic, anxiety, shame, and disgust to manage and regulate various populations—­and their behaviors—­said to be at risk. As Kathleen Woodward has noted, the modern medical bureaucratic world gave rise to new emotions, which were not just personal feelings about illness, but conditioned affects from outside that became associated with various activities, experiences, and forms of knowledge.33 Roman’s medicalization of racial uplift’s cultural program—­and its management of contagious deviant behavior—­would be translated for popular audiences in the weekly “Keeping Fit” columns of E. Elliott Rawlins that ran in the Amsterdam News from 1923 until 1928, when Rawlins died at age forty-­five from what would be the scourge of many in the New Negro Mecca: pneumonia. As a member of what David Levering Lewis has referred to as the bourgeois class of Harlemites who looked with suspicion on their more lax bohemian neighbors,34 Rawlins attempted to make sense of the class divisions and cultural dislocations within migration and, in turn, to control what he identified as the “excess” of the modern urban lifestyle through a language of public health.35 In his columns Rawlins shaped the identity of the “New Negro” through visual and affec-

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tive appeals identifying the health risks consequent to new liberated behaviors. We can see this reframing of the moral and cultural into the medical in Rawlins’s January 18, 1928 column, “Father Time and Our Body.” Asserting the new privatized and individualized gospel of health care that “it is in the realm of individual hygiene and care that trouble and infirmities come,” Rawlins moves from the causes of disease to how such a self-­awareness of disease risks ought to regulate behavior under the authority of the physician: “Our lives must be thoroughly guided. We must know what to do and what not to do. To tell you this is the duty of the good physician. . . . The immediate need is to search periodically our bodies and our lives for those sources of physical and mental decay and, through your physician, utilize the abundant means that medical science can supply.”36 If it was the goal of Rawlins to inculcate in his readers/patients a self-­ care and self-­surveillance under the laws of health imparted through the doctor’s medical authority, he particularly singled out the modern woman as in need of guidance and as a key risk factor in Harlem’s health. In a June 10, 1925 article, “The Woman’s Physical Status,” Rawlins warned women that “modern activities” were injuring their health and, particularly, their reproductive organs: “This new freedom of thought, freedom of action, freedom to do as they please, results in physical injuries and congestions to the female organs of many young women.” Although the use of such aversion therapy to deter deviant gender behavior was familiar also within white public health campaigns, Rawlins reworks this language of injury, shame, and fear to crusade against the “bohemian woman” in Harlem. In another column on “Morality and Health,” printed June 23, 1926, Rawlins once again warns that women are “devitalizing their health” and recites the tragedy of a “beautiful college girl” who is reduced to a “dried-­up, emaciated consumptive” by Harlem life. Among the risky activities that are debilitating Harlem women, Rawlins singles out the signs of their sexual freedom, or, as he says, their “perverted sexual indulgences” and “repeated abortions.” Not surprisingly, like Roman, Rawlins, thus, in his April 14, 1926 column concurs with the moral etiology within the public health narrative of “The Peril of Venereal Diseases” by similarly tying it to female promiscuity: “Men in the past have always been the greater offenders in the spread of these diseases; yet in these modern days a great many young women of 18 to 30 are the guilty parties.”37 Even as Rawlins sought to identify the modern behaviors and lifestyles of Harlem women as risk factors behind various contagious, debilitating,

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and sexually transmitted diseases, he did more than warn Black women that they would sustain physical harm themselves. Because women were the caretakers of the family and the community, their failure to be moral standard bearers and proper sanitary engineers also destroyed the community and the race. In his July 14, 1926 column, “Household and Personal Sanitation,” Rawlins singles out women’s slovenly domestic habits as genocidal: “I have known many families, parents, grandparents, and children to be completely wiped out in about four or five years by not attending to these rules and precautions.” Just as white southern physicians and public health officers had warned of the possible extinction of the “Negro” due to the race’s unsanitary habits, Rawlins recruits the apocalyptic panic of this risk narrative to resolve the cultural divides within the Harlem community and to sanitize female behavior. As his constant references to the future generation of children points out, Rawlins also invoked the sentimental figure of the child to enforce the community’s ideals and to coerce women’s behavior. As Rawlins notes in his September 30 1925 column on “Constitutional Weakness, “the mother must be careful not to pass along “avoidable diseases” to her infants, for “the race stock is at stake.”38 Although Black physicians such as Rawlins often acted as community spokespersons because they were better educated and had greater wealth,39 the primary agents of Black public health work and outreach were, however, as often during the Progressive Era, African American women. As we have seen, many African American club women saw their involvement in community public health work and neighborhood unions as an extension of their maternal responsibilities for the physical and moral health of their families.40 But these women did not just broaden their maternal influence into their neighborhoods; they redefined this maternal influence according to a new logic of medicalization. As a spokesperson for the NACW’s health and hygiene committee, Mary Fitzbutler Waring, in particular, engaged in an active reconstruction of the context, meanings, and affects associated with the medicalized public identity of the unsanitized mother in debates about racial progress. Even though Waring often recirculated a risk narrative about unsanitary housewives, she also fashioned an alternative community epidemiology, replacing the jeremiad about hygienic backsliding into a more future-­oriented gospel of promised liberation for women. Through following the laws of health and hygiene in preventive medicine, Waring urged African American women, they could obtain—­even amid the instability and chaos of their lives—­an “acquired immunity.”

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Medical intervention, as feminist historians such as Linda Gordon have noted, though paternalistic, was at times embraced by poor women because it provided explanations for their difficulties and could give them some scientific leverage with which to negotiate a better quality of life.41 It is just this tension between maternalism and empowerment that we can see in Waring’s columns that offer her readers a new framework for understanding and negotiation. As a supporter of NACW president Margaret Murray Washington (who also was editor of the National Notes), Waring shared the Tuskegee establishment’s conservative ideology, but particularly Washington’s emphasis on solving the race’s problems through educating mothers and improving home life.42 But if Waring incorporated this focus on maternal values, she also sought to tie it to the foundational metaphor within the emergent field of preventive medicine—­ immunity—­to offer African American women a promised control over their bodies and their environment. In A Body Worth Defending, Edward Cohen links the rise of immunity as a central trope within epidemiology to contemporary political, social, and governmental projects attempting to shore up borders against invasion by foreigners, class outsiders, and other deviants. To Cohen, immunity represented the importing of political values into the allegedly neutral processes of the scientific body, and such a self-­protective, boundary policing of life itself overlapped with contemporary political and social calls for homeland or neighborhood security.43 Just as Cohen identifies the embeddedness of immunity in Progressive Era fears of invasion, we need to ask how such a conceptual framework might have had a significantly different valence for African Americans in a context marked by racial violence and its ensuing vulnerability, unpredictability, and loss of control. Images of the home as a “haven in the heartless world” have a long history in nineteenth-­century women’s sentimental literature, and, as Claudia Tate noted, African American women adapted this domestic ideal as an expression of their political desire to escape the risks in their life.44 In Waring’s columns, this narrative, however, undergoes a sanitary makeover as emergent medical knowledge about bacteria and germs revealed the home to be under attack in ways that further undercut African American women’s personal health and family security. In her column on “Degenerative Diseases,” Waring, thus, makes an optimistic promise of controlling risk to women who follow the laws of health. After first citing how incidents of “contagious diseases” have substantially decreased since the beginning of public health campaigns focused on preventive medicine in

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1895, Waring argues, “The established immunity has been greatly argumented [sic] by acquired immunity.” This “acquired immunity” means, Waring goes onto add, that “[w]e have won the fight though we will only remain victors by continuing to think and fight.” Although Waring too invoked the dread of disease and contagion to impress on the modern woman traditional moral behavior and domestic duties, she practiced an alternative affective politics—­one not of risk, but immunity.45 Such optimism in the face of the alarming vital statistics that showed many African Americans experienced, particularly at sites of urban migration such as Harlem, “compromised health”46 may seem naïve, teaching the patience, compromise, and resignation to medical disparities that has often been the accusation against a Washingtonian gradualism. But Waring’s emphasis on a preventive self-­care must be understood within the larger politics of affect, risk, and gender within a medicalized racial uplift. In the face of a medicalized power formation that operated through the circulation and distribution of affects around a narrative of risk, Waring tries to dis-­infect this medical language of its power to shame, raise anxiety, and panic Black women. What she focuses on is not the contagion of disease, but the power of “immunity”—­of the laws of health to give women an agency to control their own bodies and the lives of their families. In her column on “Degenerative Diseases,” as is typical of most of Waring’s columns, she offers, thus, less physiological knowledge or even practical advice, but encouragement: since “the reduction of mortality from degenerative diseases is a matter of education in habits of work, exercise, diet, play, recreation and sleep,” Waring writes, anyone can reach the age of sixty without feeling the effects of degenerative diseases. As to what these laws of work, diet, and play are, Waring gives little detail, for the end of the war against disease for Waring is as much about morale—­one that can then enable later mobilization—­than practical advice. In another column from February 1929 on “Preventive Medicine” Waring makes her politics of affect clear. After first chiding her readers for not following medical advice, Waring assures them that her reproach arises from a confidence in the power of preventive medicine: “Preventive medicine would relieve not only physical pain, but mental distress and worry. When the layman learns to take advantage of preventive medicine, he will escape the suffering of illness and the dread of what is to occur.”47 To some extent, Waring’s column reflects the emphasis on providing the inspiration to persevere that had always been a fundamental goal of the NACW National Notes,48 and early public health education advocates as well fre-

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quently spoke with hyperbolic utopian promise. But Waring repackages this “immunity”—­both physical and mental—­to give it a specific resonance for her Black women readers. The club woman who follows the laws of health and hygiene can literally, according to Waring, escape physical suffering and fear. Just as other Black physicians rescripted religious rhetoric as part of their medical advice, Waring appeals to a liberation theology within the Black church—­with its promise of future deliverance from suffering—­to shore up African American women’s faith in their own agency. In her columns, then, Waring drew on twinned developments in medicine and racial uplift to offer a complex policing and immunization of the Black woman’s body. On one hand, Waring, as did Roman and Rawlins, addressed a pressing material reality in the Progressive Era African American community, and we should not equate their medicalization of the social problems with a simple instrumentalism, social control, or elitism. On the other hand, as I have tried to argue, although a struggle on the part of many Progressive Era African Americans for “bare life” complicates any simple class-­based analysis of an African American leadership’s coercive ethics of care, we cannot ignore this public health discourse’s productive power. It did not just at times put the collective good over individual freedom. This biomedicalization worked along with other cultural, economic, and legal tools to constitute subjects and functioned to define the community’s values. Whereas Waring’s columns offer us insight into the twist and turns of a medicalized risk narrative within an early twentieth-­century racial uplift ideology focused on the figure of the unsanitized mother, I want to turn in the next section to a recovery of those voices most at risk. It is just this productive power of public health risk narratives over the shaping of Black women’s subjectivity, I will argue, that Angelina Grimke’s Rachel: A Play in Three Acts and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand witness.49 “Always on the Edge of Health”: Larsen’s Quicksand and the Biomedical Risk Narrative

In his biography of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson speculates on what would have prompted a “Northern city girl” like Larsen to resign from Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx and accept a position as nurse supervisor at Tuskegee University’s recently established John A. Andrews Hospital. “Apparently idealism had much to do with it.”50 Larsen’s disillusionment

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with the Tuskegee Machine has been a key focus of criticism about Larsen’s first novel Quicksand (1928), but rarely do critics give more than scant attention to the particular nature of the “idealism” that would have taken Larsen to Tuskegee that was home not only to Booker T. Washington’s political organizations but of editor Margaret Murray Washington’s NACW National Notes. Larsen, whatever other personal reasons she might have had, was also fulfilling a particular gendered medical missionary narrative within racial uplift work. Indeed, at the time that Larsen published Quicksand the Harlem chapter of the National Health Circle for Colored People was spearheading a campaign to raise money to send more Black nurses to the rural South.51 Although critics such as Cheryl Wall, Candace Jenkins, Cherene Sherrard-­Johnson, and Deborah McDowell have all examined Helga’s struggle between self-­expression and sexual freedom and a confining bourgeois race woman ideal,52 Larsen was also intimately aware of the biomedical politics within racial uplift. When Booker T. Washington founded the nursing school at Tuskegee, as he notes in his essay “Training Colored Nurses at Tuskegee,” he sought to provide not only technical training, but tools for all women of the race to “arrange the whole life that goes on within these homes in an orderly manner.”53 It was this link between medical language and the arrangement of the whole life within racial uplift that Larsen would question in her first novel. Larsen’s Quicksand is saturated with the new biomedicalized language that permeated Progressive Era discussions of gender and racial uplift. As Layne Parish Craig notes, Larsen directly invokes the debate over middle class women, reproduction, and birth control.54 When James Vayle encounters Helga Crane at one of the “hedonistic” parties in Harlem that he “detest[s],” for example, he scolds Helga that Black women’s rejection of sacred motherhood for sexual freedoms is making “the race sterile at the top”: “But, Helga! Good heavens! Don’t you see that if we—­I mean people like us—­don’t have children, the others will still have? . . . Few, very few Negroes of the better class have children.”55 But if Larsen alludes directly to debates over middle-­class motherhood within racial uplift, her novel also witnesses the particular effects on Black women of a new power formation around an affective politics of risk. In its narrative style, its unsanitary description of communicable setting, and in its disruptive images, Larsen’s novel testifies, as part of its unruly narrative, to a new self-­ regulating, self-­ monitoring Black female subjectivity around the laws of health. In describing Larsen’s novel as an “unruly narrative,” I

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want to borrow Arnold Weinstein’s term to question the privileging of realism within a literature of medicine and call attention to the way the incoherencies within Larsen’s plot can speak.56 Even though Larsen’s novel taps into a widely circulated medicalized narrative of risk and unsanitized motherhood, her unruly text provides less a clear thematic statement about gender and health within racial uplift than fragments, dissonant images, and contradictions meant to destabilize its biomedical logic and affective politics. Larsen’s language in the opening scenes at Naxos announces her awareness of the connection between gender and biomedicalization. When Larsen’s fictional protagonist, Helga, decides to leave the Naxos “machine” because it seems to suppress individuality and beauty, she discusses her intentions with the newly appointed president, Dr. Anderson. Throughout the novel, Dr. Anderson has a semiotic connection with public health work. After Helga relocates to Harlem, for example, she reencounters Anderson during a “health meeting” featuring the lecture of a “pompous physician,” who—­like Rawlins and Roman—­berated his audience with the latest vital statistics. Later we learn as well that, after coming North, Anderson accepted a position with a northern manufacturer to ensure the health and safety of its “colored workers” (30). Not surprisingly, then, both Helga and Anderson invoke this new biomedical language as determinant of the role of women in racial uplift. When defending her decision to leave Naxos, Helga compares this fictional Tuskegee to a contagious, unsanitary place: “Naxos? It’s hardly a place at all. It’s more like some loathsome, venomous disease. Ugh!” In response Anderson cites, as we have seen, the widely circulated argument about the Black woman’s need to be a sanitizing role model: “And you don’t think it [her presence] might help to cure us?” (16). But Helga refutes such an appeal to her racial duty as a moral and hygienic influence: “No, I don’t! It doesn’t do the disease any good. Only irritates it. And it makes me unhappy, dissatisfied” (16). At first glance, such medical language, pervasive throughout Larsen’s novel, might seem merely figurative. But when Helga continues to insist on a woman’s right to “individuality” and “beauty,” Anderson, like Rawlins, recruits this biomedical language to control such modern notions of womanhood. Patronizing Helga as an ingénue unschooled in the “lies, injustice and hypocrisy of the world,” Anderson advises her to acquire (as if echoing Waring) a “protective immunity”: “Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn’t, they couldn’t endure” (16). Bringing home the discursive knotting of the

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medical, the racial, and the moral as part of a new preemptive language of risk, Anderson ends with a telling image, reminding Helga that hygienic homemaking lies at the center of a Black woman’s duties: “Service is like clean white linen, even the tiniest speck shows” (16). If Larsen in this scene witnesses the intertwining of racial politics and a new medical language within sanitary citizenship’s rehabilitative narrative, she also illustrates its affective dimensions. Anderson recruits not just the authority of hygienic science to scold Helga. He solicits her compliance, as did Rawlins in his own guidance on Harlem life, through affectively charged biomedical imagery associated with dirt and contagious disease. As a result, Helga’s response is more emotional—­anxiety ridden—­ than rational: such appeals to the race question in images of disease, germs, and the unsanitary make her at once “shamed yet stirred” to feel “again that urge for service” (16). Throughout the novel Helga’s meditations on her proper role and duties disclose a similar linking of medical language, risk, and a desired self-­fashioning. As Meredith Goldsmith notes, the ending of Larsen’s novel represents the return of the “material realities of race, class and gender” over the performance of race,57 but the “bio-­cultural” realities of disease, contagion, and death from the novel’s beginnings loom to constrain and regulate Helga’s dissenting performance of an alternative Black female identity.58 So pervasive, in fact, is Helga’s self-­monitoring under this new biomedical discourse and its affective politics that she even begins to identify herself as “diseased.” Reflecting on her childhood, Helga muses, “She saw herself as an obscene sore in all their lives, at all costs to be hidden” (23). If Helga is “neurotic,” as Robert Bone argued,59 her excessive introspection, uncertainty, and disquiet point not just to the tragedy of the mulatta caught between two worlds: they also witness to a newly awakened medicalized consciousness of symptom monitoring.60 Through its free indirect discourse following the flow of Helga’s thoughts, Larsen’s Quicksand evidences the historical emergence of symptom monitoring and mental mood management as disciplined under medical supervision, one that was to generate a self-­governing anxiety. Such symptom recognition had formed a large part of the preventive health education that club women as well as Black physicians had sought to instill within a migratory African American population. “Born in a Chicago slum” (17), Helga—­and Larsen—­would have both been recipients of the settlement work of club women such as Mary Waring. In the specific “neurotic” flow of Helga’s constant self-­scrutiny, Larsen records one working

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class—­bourgeois aspiring—­Black women’s experience and cultural perception of a new language of risk and health at a time of massive migration and cultural dislocation. When Helga looks inward to gauge her response to events, she frequently resorts to a language of physical disease: she seeks not only to understand herself, but to determine if her feelings and thoughts are signs of some sickness. After reencountering Dr. Anderson in New York, the “disturbed” Helga worries that “memory filled her with a sort of aching delirium” (39). She similarly translates her perturbations into physical ailments while in Denmark: “She was so harassed that she smiled in self-­ protection. And suddenly she was oddly cold. An intimation of things distant, but nonetheless disturbing, oppressed her with a faintly sick feeling. Like a heavy weight, a stone weight, just where, she knew, was her stomach” (62). Helga’s reflections read like self-­diagnosis, and her neurosis enacts a metacritical double consciousness, or what might be seen as a neurosis about having neurosis. Even though Helga longs to “belong to herself alone” (49), Larsen intimates that such self-­possession becomes more elusive in a world where a woman’s deviance is seen as a violation of the laws of health. If Helga fails to achieve an authentic and healthy racial solidarity, trapped in a personal isolation between worlds, Larsen captures how a new language of contagion shapes the forging of communities and even individual ties. In her descriptions of setting, Larsen traces out the imagining of new racialized urban spaces such as Harlem in a language of urban epidemiology, in which disease, sanitation, and contagion were not only real threats to the community but also powerful and productive tropes through which social connectivity, whether on an individual or communal level, could be imagined as a calculation of risks.61 This translation of setting into urban epidemiology can be seen in the novel’s often parsed passages about Helga’s attraction and repulsion from Harlem that are read as signs of her racial confusion. We can see this most clearly in the description of Helga’s response to the crowded colored car during her flight from Naxos to Chicago: A little distance away a tired laborer slept noisily. Near him two children dropped the peelings of oranges and bananas on the already soiled floor. The smell of stale food and ancient tobacco irritated Helga like a physical pain. A man, a white man, strode

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through the packed car and spat twice, once in the exact center of the dingy door panel, and once into the receptacle which held the drinking water. (20) Such passages of bourgeois distance from working-­class African Americans in Jim Crow train cars were not uncommon class-­coded images during the Progressive Era. But Larsen’s language discloses how these class differences within the African American community have been overlaid with unhygienic biomediated images provoking disgust. To Helga her fellow passengers are contagious unsanitary citizens whom she wants to shun. Once again, as in her previous reflections, Helga’s feelings turn into visceral symptoms—­“a physical pain”–­as if the “soiled” folk were literally infectious. Yet even as Larsen draws on an image of contagion pervasive within public health discourse, she also complicates its racial trajectory. Despite the fact that spitting arose as a specific focus of racial uplift’s public health outreach, Larsen portrays the supposedly more civilized “white man” as the truly unsanitary citizen who leaves Helga with a stinging thirst. Even though this passage makes no clear racial protest, its unruly image testifies to the overlap of segregationist policy and a politicized language of health, as well as the uncontainable affects this biomediation generated within racial uplift’s rehabilitative narratives. Almost all Helga’s failed relationships, particularly with other members of the African American community, are pictured within a language of similarly contagious contact. When Helga goes to work as an assistant to Mrs. Hayes-­Rore in her work for the National Women’s League Club, Helga repeatedly figures her ambiguous revulsion in a language of dirt and contagion. The accumulative effect of this wry commentary seemingly destabilizes the Women’s Club’s disciplinary language of hygiene and heath. As Helga underscores, her employer has a discomforting unsanitariness: she is said to have “dirty fingernails” (28), “a soiled face” (29), and an “untidy head” (29). When after Mrs. Hayes Rore helps Helga attain a job with an “insurance company” and a home with Anne Gray, the class differences between the two women is still qualified by a sanitary divide that reverses the gaze on women from the slum: “And so great was her gratitude that she reached out and took her new friend’s slightly soiled hand in one of her own fastidious ones” (33). By repeatedly describing Mrs. Hayes Rore as “soiled,” Larsen taps into the health education work of these club women as if to turn their language of dirt and disease and dis-

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gust back on them and as if to witness the shaping impact such a new medicalized discourse had on Black women’s self-­understanding and perception of others. Just as Quicksand’s description of setting and of character taps into the link among biomedicalization, racial politics, and gendered affects, the novel’s plot as well correlates to the risk that Black physicians and race leaders warned would befall the modern woman in Harlem. As a result of her rejection of domesticity and a newly discovered sexual openness (though one Dr. Anderson rejects), Helga descends, as Rawlins predicted, into frayed nerves, physical exhaustion, and hysteria (86). Her life could have run as an anecdotal lesson in Rawlins’s “Keeping Fit” columns on Harlem health. Although Helga’s surrender to religion, motherhood, and the patriarchal authority of Rev. Green during the revival at the storefront church can seem a surprising narrative about-­face, Helga does so—­as if finally following the medical advice within public health education—­only after weeks of “voluptuous visions” and of “desires [that] burned in her flesh with uncontrollable violence” (85) had caused “nausea” and “physical weariness” (89). Biographical parallels have often guided discussions of Larsen’s narrative in Quicksand, but her novel is also plotted along the lines of public health’s deterrent risk narratives. Thus, the final section of Helga’s return south as the bride of Reverend Green, although it disappoints contemporary critics, would have been seen by the club women of Harlem as not only noble and self-­sacrificing, but preventive medicine. By invoking the master rehabilitative narrative within sanitary citizenship, Larsen indicts a patriarchal race culture that would crush the independent Helga under the weight of marriage, religion, poverty, and the burdens of unwanted pregnancies. But she also taps into the complex workings of biopolitics, affect, and gender amid the humanitarian goals of women’s social work. When Helga accompanies Rev. Green to the South, she fulfills the vision of Harlem’s club women who raised money to send Black nurses to the South to educate a rural people in health and hygiene: “Her young joy and zest for the uplifting of her fellow men came back to her. She meant to subdue the cleanly scrubbed ugliness of her own surroundings to soften inoffensive beauty, and to help the other women to do likewise” (92). Although the ending of Larsen’s Quicksand is read, like the conclusion of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, as a statement of the impossibility of escaping the gender expectations placed on the “race mother,”62 Helga’s return to the South represents her awakening to—­and liberation from—­

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the class-­based politics within a language of gender and biomedicalization. Despite her initial missionary self-­righteousness, Helga learns to recognize and hear the voices of working-­class women and to understand their own story of “bad health” as they define it in their own terms. In Helga’s decline, Larsen’s novel registers the middle-­class Black woman’s need to listen to and to understand a more complex dialogical narrative of health, risk, and affect that does not fit so neatly into the privatized and self-­blaming story of unsanitary habits, lifestyles, and behavior. Helga, for the first time, understands the coping strategies and perspectives of southern Black women, who had earlier received her advice about character and self-­control with ambivalence as they already live in a world structured by the harsh discipline of work and the constant worries of everyday life. It is only among these poor rural southern women that Helga for the first time—­in contrast to her tepid connection with Mrs. Hayes Rore—­ learns to put her “fastidious” hand to the “soiled” hand of the other. She understands that to connect is a contagious risk. It certainly does involve becoming infected by the perspective of the other: “How, she wondered, [did] other women, other mothers, manage? Could it be possible that, while presenting such smiling and contented faces, they were all always on the edge of health?” (97). Reversing the risk narrative within overlapping stories of rehabilitative sanitary citizenship and public health, Larsen recovers the voices of working-­class Black women and the structural inequalities and social forces that make them a risk population. And it is Helga’s tragic destruction under patriarchy at the end that grants her an empathy with the contagious class other. Even though Helga may fail to escape patriarchy, she becomes a reformed unsanitized mother who revises a biomedical language of risk and health to forge a new community epidemiology built on women’s shared vulnerability and care rather than moral judgment or the false optimism of immunity: “After the first exciting months Helga was too driven, too occupied, and too sick to carry out any of the things for which she had made such enthusiastic plans, . . . For she, who had never thought of her body save as something on which to hang lovely fabrics, had now constantly to think of it. . . . Always she felt extraordinarily and annoying ill, having forever to be sinking into chairs” (95). In Helga’s defeat Larsen overturns the biomedicalization of a sanitary citizenship that had celebrated the middle-­class sanitized mother and her influence at the expense of the voices of working class and rural women who experienced the complex reality of class, race, gender, and health within a differ-

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ent risk narrative. If middle-­class women such as Waring (and Mrs. Hayes-­ Rore), with their prophylactic stories of acquired immunity, ignored the socioeconomic realities of Black women’s lives, Larsen complicates this sanitized story with the material reality of lives that were “always on the edge of health.” Grimke’s Melancholic Failure

Angelina Grimke’s 1916 Rachel: A Play in Three Acts has often provoked bemused, and even outraged, responses. As Grimke notes in her own commentary about the “reason and synopsis” of the play, many in the original audience thought her play, about a woman who refuses to marry and have children because of the “fear, terrible, suffocating fear” a Black mother has about the welfare of her children in a racist society, preached “race suicide.63” Contemporary critics, building on these perceived eugenic overtones, have, as a consequence, often placed the play within Progressive Era debates over Black women’s use of birth control or abortion—­ medical issues of bodily control—­often condemned by race leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois who urged better educated, middle-­class women to have children as part of a racial progress that would evolve through the higher reproduction of the better class.64 But such readings can flatten Grimke’s idiosyncratic play into a blackface version of an Ibsenesque problem play about choice. Much of the power of Grimke’s play operates not on some rational ideological level, but through its inflated and “hysterical” (seemingly irrational) images that solicit the audience’s perception of risk, dread, and anxiety. Whereas Grimke rewrites the domestic allegory of Black women’s political desire by having Rachel reject marriage and the strong Black man (literally named John Strong), such a meager and never convincing romantic plot is less significant than the improvisational, ambiguous, and often contradictory irruptions into the text that make it, finally, an unruly and incoherent failure of a play, a text, that is to say, that embraces indeed a “suicidal” seeming bad subjectivity and improper emotions that go against the compulsory aspiration imposed on Black women toward mental and physical well-­being.65 Even though Grimke’s play taps into a widely circulated medicalized narrative of risk and unsanitary motherhood, her unruly text provides less a clear thematic resistance to this disciplinary language about gender and health (just as we saw in Larsen’s Quicksand) than fragments and images that invoke, and

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at the same time, destabilize sanitary citizenship’s biomedical logic and affective politics. To understand Rachel’s destabilizing of a Progressive Era African American risk narrative, we need to resituate it back within its history of production. Although contemporary critics have often seen Grimke’s play as an “outdated,” “sentimental, Victorian and precious” melodrama with its overly idealized image of the Black mother,66 Rachel was first staged at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School on March 3 and 4, 1916 in Washington, DC, under the auspices of the recently integrated NAACP, which had decided to develop an African American community theater that would disseminate race propaganda. Grimke’s father, the lawyer Archibald Grimke, was on the board of the NAACP chapter that sponsored the work with the intention of illustrating the organization’s racial uplift discourse,67 and Grimke had been raised in an atmosphere shaped by her father’s strict religious, political, and racial ideology since her white mother had committed suicide when Angelina was 10. But if the original play bill for Rachel trumpeted its important race propaganda work, this intertextual relation to racial uplift’s rehabilitative narrative is marked by often exaggerated and ironic performances of some of its key themes, and more particularly, of its key character, the sanitary mother. If the “mother-­woman” Rachel is too histrionic and precious, as critics repeatedly argue, it is just this hysterical ambivalent exaggeration that witnesses Grimke’s disruption of the proper risk narrative about racial well-­being and progress. Grimke’s unsettling of a biomedicalized affective control over Black women’s bodies finds its expression most clearly in the play’s recurring invocation of panic and dread. In her reading of Rachel as an “anti-­ lynching” play, Kathy Perkins argues that the play traces the “psychological impact of racism.”68 Even though Rachel does invoke the traumatic death of Rachel’s father and brother at the hands of a lynch mob 10 years earlier, this buried secret represents only one—­and arguably the less immediate—­trouble weighing on Rachel, her family, and the “children of the race.” It is the failure of the sanitary mother to exercise what Waring called her immunizing influence that Grimke also depicts as a risk to the Loving family. When act 2 opens, the tenement apartments where the Lovings live have been hit by an epidemic of smallpox, and they have adopted the neighborhood boy Jimmy after both his parents die from the disease. Although in act 1, Mrs. Loving had been the heroic single mom supporting her family through her sewing, in act 2, four years later, we see that she suffers from a rheumatic limp that curtails her ability to

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work. Similarly, Rachel undergoes a degeneration that traces all too literally the feared decline of the African American race by disease and death during the great northern migration. When Rachel enters the play, she is described as a free spirit of “abounding life, health, joy and youth” (6), but by the final third act, this innocent schoolgirl has become, as her suitor John Strong chides, “sick”—­both in body and soul (120). Despite its sentimental rhetoric, Rachel is plotted according to the naturalized biomedical deterrence narrative that we have seen in Roman’s and Rawlins’s columns: one that repurposes fears about germ-­infested contagious tenement housing and the epidemic spread of disease to insist on the Black woman’s self-­adaptation to an obsessive sanitary motherhood. Tellingly, as a consequence, Rachel informs her mother that she heard a voice in a dream that told her that “Rachel, you are to be a mother to little children,” or, as Rachel goes on to say, to all the “little black and brown babies” who are “in danger,” even though she admits she does not know what they are in danger from (12–­13). As a result, Rachel studies the “domestic sciences” as a college student so that she can implement the laws of health, hygiene, and bourgeois housekeeping to “protect and guard” her family and neighborhood (13). It is precisely in Rachel’s “hysterical,” but clearly socially mediated, atmospheric dread that compels her to mother and protect all Black and brown children from ubiquitous dangers that we see how Grimke registers the normalizing of what Brian Massumi has called the operative power of a “generalized crisis environment” to shape and monitor women’s behavior.69 In Rachel’s zealous adherence to the public image of a risk-­obsessed sanitized motherhood, Grimke calls attention to the harm inflicted by the burden of this scapegoated public image. Although the NAACP may have commissioned Grimke to write race propaganda and to portray a respectable “loving” middle-­class family, tellingly named the Lovings, Grimke reveals that Rachel’s self-­destruction results from her striving to fit into this model of sanitary motherhood. Thus, at the end of the play, Rachel laughs “hysterically” and rages against a system, a God, that treats the family like “puppets—­He pulls the wires,” while all the time “the little children are weeping” (91). Although indeed there are numerous reasons for Black children to be weeping, Rachel goes mad in her inability to heal, to cure, and to sanitize what she repeatedly refers to as the “blight” (62) that sooner or later “descends” and “debilitates” all Black and brown children. That Rachel cannot specifically name the blight, or blights, but can only speak in a vague language of encroaching germs, contagion, and disease

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reveals the experiential register of the working-­class sanitary mother confronted with a post-­Reconstruction ill-­defined racial politics.70 Critics have often focused on the troubling scenes of “comic relief ” in Grimke’s play, especially those interludes in which Rachel teaches proper domestic habits to her adopted ward, the orphan boy Jimmy, that seem to mimic the education of Topsy by the New Englander Miss Ophelia in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.71 But in these scenes between Rachel and Jimmy that are all too reminiscent of minstrel depictions of the white benefactor’s education of the Black child, Grimke discloses her own uneasiness with the biomedicalized politics of racial uplift, even as she recognizes the need for such educational work to improve community health. At the beginning of act 2, for example, Grimke offers an extended hyperbolic minstrel interlude when Rachel inspects Jimmy’s cleanliness before his departure for school. Even though throughout the play Rachel corrects seven-­year-­old Jimmy’s grammar and manners, as well as other mischievous behavior, she also instills a fervor for hygiene: examining his nails, checking to see if he has taken a bath, and correcting him when he puts his shoes on incorrectly. At the beginning of act 2, Rachel, moreover, affirms that Jimmy has “grown up” and become “almost a man” when he runs the water and takes a bath by himself (34). Such an intersection of class, gender, and racial hygiene reveals Grimke’s desire, like other National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, to spread a gospel of racially uplifting cleanliness. But Jimmy’s repeated boastings of having “bathed himself ” and his impish delight at his sanitary inspection before “ma Rachel,” Uncle Tom, and Grandma Mary Loving to receive a “penny” reward both depicts race propaganda and—­at the same time—­its farcical undoing. The play’s medical sentimentalism borders on a cartoonish public health placement that seems less cloyingly saccharine than absurdly, purposively, exaggerated, as if Grimke wanted to express the parody that already preexisted within a literal embodiment of a class-­based sanitary motherhood. Such a hygienic outreach and policing of behavior always runs the risk of infantilizing the Black working class it sought to rehabilitate (the dark-­skinned orphan Jimmy). At the end of the scene Rachel calls Jimmy a “case,” thus invoking an emergent slang to refer to someone who is crazy, insane, or weird, but a slang still laden with the residual psycho-­ medical weight of its etymology in the classification of the disordered. In Rachel, then, Grimke witnesses Black women’s affective experience and cultural perception of widely circulated risk narratives coded within a biomedical language about disease, sanitation, and risk. If Rachel seems an

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aesthetically flawed play lacking in dramatic force, it is because Grimke fashions less a problem play in which the heroine undergoes an awakening to gender or racial oppression than a play of failure dramatizing a heroine who breaks down under the stress, fear, and shame placed on Black women to sanitize and save the lives of all the Black and brown children. Grimke’s Rachel offers the dramatic externalization of the modern Black women’s unruly divided unconscious. We can see this shift in emphasis in the key exchanges between Rachel and Strong. When Strong attempts a therapeutic intervention, expressing his concern about Rachel’s agitated behavior, Rachel retorts that she finds the “domineering man” “detestable” (51). However, in this exchange, Rachel repudiates not just a patriarchal coupling convention by insisting that “you’re trying to master me” (51); she rejects his dictation of her emotions and perception of life’s possibilities and risks. Insisting that “mine [referring to his outlook] is the only sane one,” Strong attempts to coerce and “strong-­arm” Rachel into adopting his optimistic path to middle-­class security and well-­being: marriage, an apartment home, and normative family life. To go against the “Strong” laws of well-­being—­as dictated in Rawlins columns addressed to Harlem women—­is not just “foolish” in some economic, social, or practical sense. It is, as the race man Strong diagnoses, “morbid” (51), or, as indicated by the word’s Latin roots, “diseased.” In the face of this compulsory rehabilitation demanded of the modern woman tempted by independence, Rachel embraces the disruption of negative emotions and chooses against “health,” or at least its moralistic ideology. Although Rachel’s range of emotions—­from panic, to sadness, to frenetic laughter—­lead to no clear trajectory toward liberation, such an incoherence and improper development (both from a dramatic and medical standpoint) register Rachel’s upsetting of Strong’s engendering of life politics. In the face of the race man Strong’s insistence on sanitary motherhood, Rachel can assert herself only through a queer crip failure that refuses to enact a “healthy” rehabilitation of the “blight.” Yet, at the same time, Rachel never stops caring for others. Rachel enacts a radical pessimism, a melancholic nervousness that refuses to take comfort in bright-­ sided thinking, material complacency, and well monitored self-­care under the patriarchal authority and sanitary citizenship that Strong offers. Instead, Rachel embraces what Sara Ahmed has called a non-­happy praxis of “caring,” in which she rejects the banal conviviality and commodified self-­interested comfort that Strong offers her in his marriage proposal, but still insists on looking after all the tenement children.72 In Rachel’s “anti-­

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domestic” and “anti-­sane” self-­destructive choices, as Strong evaluates her actions, Rachel unsettles the biopower exercised within the rehabilitative politics of racial uplift. Trying both to become a good mother—­but to unbecome a sanitary motherhood—­Rachel enacts a different kind of caring as she gives herself over to something larger than her own personal well-­being and even her immediate family. Even though Rachel maintains her witness against the dying of Black children, she repudiates the dutiful role of the sanitary mother which she had earlier internalized with excessive zeal. In doing so, Rachel insists on a yet unimagined future subjectivity for Black women that not only does not yet exist, but cannot be understood within the sanitized respectable logic of race men such as John Strong, or it might be added, of Rawlins, or Roman, or even Waring. When confronted with toxic racist environments that kill not all at once, but as Jimmy says about the children who pelt him with racial slurs at school, by “a little bit and a little bit” (61), Rachel knows that it may be more efficacious to be a “mad” and “morbid” disorderly woman than to be a sane optimistic race woman who fails to address, as we saw in chapter three, a larger racist ecology. In the last scene of the play Rachel exercises a radical melancholia and nervousness—­refusing in her depressed state to be always doing, scrubbing, inspecting, disinfecting when such behaviors offer little more than a “self-­immunity” that precludes more socially and politically transformative action.73 Whereas Rachel’s brother Tom decides to take Strong’s manly advice and get over his own despair by resigning himself to the racial injustices that will allow him, despite his college education, only to find employment as a waiter, Rachel acts out a vacillating morbid nervousness and then passive dissent that borders on, as contemporary reviewers noted, the “suicidal.” If Rachel’s active inaction failed to appease the NAACP audience’s expectations for heroic uplifting motherhood, it is precisely because her melancholia troubles this compulsory performance of optimistic sanitized motherhood. In her “madness” Rachel enacts an alternative improper life that defamiliarizes a widely circulated discourse about a woman’s proper sanitary life and prods audiences to re-­examine the identification of the “Negro problem” with the “Negro woman.” Rachel’s dis-­ease disrupts the ways of knowing, feeling and “loving” placed on “sane,” and not “morbid” Black women. Despite the promise of NACW club women, such as Waring, of “acquired immunity,” Rachel knows that the blight cannot be treated through privatized behavioral modifications, but only through addressing the antiblackness and its slow violence that is

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structured into the fabric of American democracy. To kill that “blight” will take more than a broom, a bathtub, or a bleach-­scented self-­care and hygienic housekeeping. Coda: Imagining Otherwise

At the end of Pauline Hopkins’ short tale of speculative fiction, “The Mystery within Us,” published in the first 1900 edition of The Colored American Magazine, the physician bachelor, Tom Wilkerson, who is a specialist in the “preservation of life,” relates to the unnamed narrator over after-­dinner cigars, how he had discovered the treatments to cure a number of chronic diseases. A poor physician who devoted himself to treating the indigent who could not pay him, Wilkerson relates that he was on the verge of suicide after his beloved rejects him because of his impecunity, when, at that moment, he had a ghostly visitation. The spiritual presence of Dr. Thora, who died while experimenting with blood transfusions, promises to dictate to Tom the discoveries he had learned from his experiment, and which he had been promised by Divinity that he would be allowed to pass on, despite his premature accidental death. Periodically, thereafter, Wilkerson informs the narrator, he finds the transcribed cures for chronic diseases on his bedside table when he wakes up in the morning.74 Critics of Hopkins’ fiction have often noted her invocation of alternative spiritual practices, those practices that leading African American physicians such as Roman, Rawlins, and even Waring dismissed as signs of a feminized savage past to be replaced by patriarchal professional authority.75 But Hopkins’ utopian tale of the discovered cure for chronic diseases amidst an early-­twentieth-­century health crisis does more than promise its readers a fantastic happy ending. It foreshadows an early twentieth-­century history of African American women’s “unsanitized” storytelling that I have started to trace out in this chapter. These ambivalent, queer, and fantastic stories sought to disrupt, if never completely reject, the disciplinary power of emerging scientific narratives about risk, prevention, and health that functioned to regulate women’s behavior, and particularly the actions of the sanitary mother. Despite the fact that Hopkins’ speculative fiction features no women characters, her turn to the “mystery within us,” and to the ancestral voices of the past, hints at a different, seemingly impossible relation, between health and male authority, even as she recognizes the urgency of ending the ill-­defined assault and slow violence on African American

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lives. The mystery, Hopkins’ story seems to suggest, is how both to end chronic violence, yet also how to question an emergent male-­biased scientific authority, one that is, as the narrator underscores, so smugly ensconced in its luxurious bachelor paradise. Although Hopkins penned “The Mystery within Us” nearly two decades before Grimke’s Rachel, her turn to speculative fiction to imagine a different relation among health, risk, and biomedical authority is repeated at the ending of Grimke’s play. Like Hopkins, Grimke in the final scenes of the play interrupts her story of melodramatic racial uplift propaganda with a fantasy of alternative worlds as if to create a new imaginary for thinking about a just society for African Americans that does not depend on the patriarchal biomedicalized control of the sanitary mother. Before Rachel’s descent into “madness” at the play’s end, she relates a lengthy bedtime story to Jimmy that offers a speculative alternative politics to a disciplinary sanitary citizenship. In this fairy tale story, two children escape their cruel guardians to journey toward the Land of Laughter. Along the way, however, they must resist, as Rachel tells herself as much as her ward, the “worldly temptations” that, in contrast, the risk narrative about sanitary motherhood had promised would bring Black women health, happiness, and security: first, material success, then, influence and status, and finally, a self-­abnegating maternal immolation (186). By overturning the normalizing link among a woman’s health, happiness, bourgeois success, and motherly self-­loss, Grimke in Rachel talks back to the medicalized discourse of racial uplift. Unlike the path to sane and healthy living that John Strong promises, Rachel, as reflected in her bedtime story to Jimmy, dreams of an escape to a land of laughter that does not arise necessarily through a Black woman’s aspiration toward wealth, status, and respectable domestic bliss. Yet Rachel’s imagined alternative “escape” remains only a fairy tale, one that like Hopkins’ earlier story, seems far, far away. To reach such a land of laughter, Grimke implies, it just may be necessary to listen to the “mad” mystery within of women like Rachel, who refuse the draconian choice of sanitary motherhood or race suicide.

5 | “Dis-­integrating Sanity” The Harlem Renaissance’s “Transforming Psychology” and Black Mental Distress

In the review essay that he wrote with W. E. B. Du Bois for The Crisis in 1924 on “The Younger Literary Movement,” Alain Locke famously praised Jessie Fauset’s first novel There Is Confusion (1924) as “the novel that the Negro Intelligentsia has been clamoring for” because it “throbs with some of the latest reactions of the race situation in this country upon the psychology and relations of colored and white Americans.”1 In summation, Locke noted, “[t]he book has what I maintain is the prime essential for novels on such subject matter—­social perspective and social sanity” (my italics).2 If during the post-­Reconstruction era, as we have seen in the previous chapters, the material management and discursive invocation of Black debility served as the focus of post-­Reconstruction racial politics about African American fitness for modern life and full citizenship, the period between World War I and World War II witnessed the emergence of a new interest in—­and politicization of—­Black mental pain and distress as a means to organize and “adjust” African Americans for social and cultural integration. Even though it is often noted that Kenneth Clark’s work on the “damaged Negro psyche” provided the arguments to sway the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case that ruled against school segregation,3 questions about Black mental debility and the “healthy,” “sane,” or “integrated” (on the individual and social level) Black psyche circulated widely in the 1920s during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. When Locke announced in his 1925 “The New Negro” essay that a younger generation of Black artists must replace an older sentimentalism with the new “scientific interests” of a “transforming psychology,”4 he called for more than a collective proud Black identity. Locke and, in

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particular his fellow Old Philadelphian, Jessie Fauset, tapped into, appropriated, and troubled the political as well as scientific interests in a new “adjusted,” well-­ social psychology about what was called the well-­ “integrated” sane racial personality—­one that replaced older notions of hereditary racial character and sought to therapeutically rehabilitate antiracist discourses for the modern liberal multicultural state. In the chapter that follows I want to offer a reading of one particular antiblack modernity by recovering the relation of key Harlem Renaissance writers, particularly Alain Locke and Jessie Fauset, to an emergent intersection of social psychology, mental distress, and modern liberal multiculturalism. In “‘My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience’: Afro-­ Modernist Critiques of Eugenics and Medical Segregation,” Jess Waggoner argues for the need to place the “state of Black health and access to care” within accounts of U.S. Afro-­modernisms.5 Expanding on Waggoner’s insights, I situate the rise of mental public health discourse, and specifically post–­World War I social psychology, as central to the rise of modern liberal multiculturalism. Social psychology emerged after World War I not just to pathologize dissent or social resistance—­or, as Jonathan Metzl has persuasively shown, to turn protest into a psychosis—­but to allow certain nonconforming attitudes and feelings while trying to therapeutically heal others said to be harmful to the self and a civil society.6 As Nikolas Rose notes in Inventing Ourselves, this new behavior-­oriented social psychology arose in the post–­World War I era as a disciplinary expertise aligning itself with the interests of governments, organizations, and community leaders seeking to acculturate and govern individuals in a manner compatible with modern liberal pluralism.7 This new social-­psychological language of the integrated personality, and its proper and “mal” adjusted attitudes, affects, and behaviors, would be adopted by both nativists, who wanted to use it to exclude “unintegratable” others, and by progressives such as John Dewey, who in his 1917 essay for Psychological Review on “The Need for Social Psychology” would name it as a necessary “control” for a more inclusive and democratic order.8 Although a later twentieth-­century naturalization of social psychology’s language of the integrated psyche disguises its historical and political value in governing a nation of diverse hybrid identities, sanist metaphors of “integration” and “well adjustment” need to be recovered as highly strategic fusions of political and social science thinking, similar, as Ed Cohen has argued, to the way a biomedical language of immunology materialized fears about the unpatrolled national borders at the turn of the twentieth century.9

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A recovery of the rehabilitative politics of Black mental pain and distress in Harlem Renaissance cultural production, moreover, I will trace out, pushes us to reassess the legacy of the movement itself. In African American literary histories, the artistic ferment of the Harlem Renaissance has traditionally been read as an inaugural moment giving voice to a “New Negro” who foreshadowed the self-­determined cultural nationalism and solidarity of the 1960s Black Arts Movement and its distinctive Black aesthetics.10 Yet, Alain Locke and Jessie Fauset, whom Langston Hughes famously christened in his autobiographical The Big Sea as the “midwives” of the Harlem Renaissance,11 also helped birth—­and also disrupt—­ the strategies, tropes, and formulations for the “postracial” through their imagining of an integrated “New Negro,” or a sane-­tary multicultural citizen, who has cast an equally long shadow into a twenty-­ first century allegedly postrace moment of neoliberal multiculturalism. Even though much has been written about an after-­Obama era postracialism, the narrative forms, images, and logic that define postracialism have a longer history, a history that should not just be dated as originating with the first Black president or, as in most accounts, a post–­civil rights Reagan era backlash.12 By retrieving social psychology as a point of reference for reexamining Locke’s and Fauset’s writing, I contend that the Harlem Renaissance represents a key crystallizing moment in a complex genealogy of the postracial—­one that has always depended on the reconceptualizations of racial empowerment as fundamentally psychological and that reframed economic, political, and social obstacles as biologically mediated stresses and risks that the newly imagined “well-­integrated racial personality” ought to manage to optimize her/his own self-­realization, proud cultural identity, and entrepreneurial “vitality.” At the same time, in looking at the integration of African Americans into an imagined multicultural state through a discourse of mental health that stigmatized “bad” Black affects, I do not want simply to offer a reductive negative critique. Certainly, racial discriminations structured theories of mental health and served to pathologize dissent.13 However, as La Marr Jurelle Bruce insists, we should not detach “race psychology” from its situatedness in an antiblack world, and, thereby, trivialize or deny that mental disability, or what I want to call “mental distress,” was the lived phenomenal experience of many Black people in response to systematic terror, brutality, condescension, and hate in the Jim Crow United States.14 In using the term “mental distress and pain” as an alternative to other possible descriptors such as mental illness, psychological disability, mental suf-

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fering, and oppression, or even some diagnostic term such as depression, melancholia, or anxiety, I want to validate individual Black experiences apart from normalizing discourses with cultural baggage.15 At the same time, I also want to situate antiblackness’s decapacitating psychological harm within an expanded model of necropolitics that highlights the role that mental pain and dis-­abling distress served in post-­Reconstruction America to manage Black life, labor, and citizenship.16 During the Harlem Renaissance, key writers such as Jessie Fauset drew on a language of social psychology to describe and name how an inescapable “weathering” of societal and systematic racism created ongoing psychological stresses that neurologically, and not just metaphorically, wore on the nerves to deteriorate and diminish Black health and well-­being.17 In referring to Black mental distress and pain to trace out the intersections of an antiblack modernity and psychological maiming, I am bringing together disability theory, social models of mental health, and cultural histories of the politics of Black pain. The term “mental distress” restores different psychological states and moods as part of a continuum of everyday lived experiences and as not fundamentally different alien pathologies. At the same time, the use of a language of “mental distress” also recognizes that mental disabilities have their etiology, as disability theory contends, within disabling, or dis-­stressing, as it were, environments, and that the resulting mental pain (what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual might refer to as a disorder) involves the internalization or acting out of stressful social experiences that cannot be resolved, especially by disenfranchised minorities, in satisfying ways (from discrimination, racial violence, injustices, to abuse). Moods and behaviors that in the medical model would have been seen as symptoms indicative of various mental illnesses, social models of distress understand as often arising within meaningful coping responses to ongoing and horrendous life circumstances.18 The origins of mental distresses are, therefore, not just individual, but result from social relations in which inequalities of power (gendered, racial, classist) play a determining role, as we will see in Fauset’s fiction.19 But this mental distress and pain, as Keith Wailoo notes, has also historically performed ideological work within progressive politics.20 “Proper” pain responses confer subjectivity and membership in designated communities, and the notion of racism’s psychological damage to African Americans particularly became useful between the two world wars for African Americans to claim political recognition. Just as earlier writers such as Du Bois and Chesnutt insisted that physical vulnerabilities and

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health risks were not distributed equally, Harlem Renaissance writers such as Alain Locke, Walter White, and Jessie Fauset depict the disparate experiences of mental distress and pain. In their turn to the “fuller psychology” that Locke called for, Harlem Renaissance writers sought to expand definitions of racial violence to include the attritional and accumulative assaults on Black mental as well as physical health, and they recognized that the biopolitics of the U.S’s so-­called “colorblind” democracy permitted and used a repetitive psychological maiming over time that worked to further the subjugation of Black lives, while denying any direct physical racial violence.21 This collective mental health governance implemented through an emergent social psychology between World War I and World War II sought both to manage Black mental health and, at the same time, to refigure African Americans’ lack of social progress as a “developmental” crisis of their own “dis-­integrated” (angry, morbidly obsessed, paranoid) race personality.22 In the sections that follow I will first recover how during the 1920s the manner in which psychology sought to understand the “race problem” shifted dramatically from a race psychology that defined inherent biological difference—­and thus reinforced eugenic ideas of inferiority and inherent racial antipathies—­to a social psychology that investigated the source of irrational prejudices within the intrapsychic conflicts allegedly common to all humans.23 As Emory Bogardus, the founder of the first American sociology department at the University of Southern California, succinctly summarized the paradigm shift in his influential 1928 study Immigration and Race Attitudes, “race problems are personality problems.”24 After this historical/cultural contextualization, I will then reexamine Locke and Fauset as Harlem Renaissance writers whose works both embed and enable, but also trouble and unsettle, this politics of postrace multicultural citizenship organized around the integrated personality. In his promoting of a new race psychology, Locke figured a new proud, but at-­risk, subjectivity for African Americans to pursue, internalize, and self-­ monitor as part of the transition to the prognostic self-­monitoring time of a psychologized liberal pluralism. But he also offered one of the first sustained cultural analysis of Black mental distress and pain and its function in racial governance. In her medicalized sentimental novels, There Is Confusion (1924) and The Chinaberry Tree (1931), Jessie Fauset, as I will demonstrate in the last section, discloses as well her conflicted and at times dis-­integrating feelings about the dual role of this fuller psychology that

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afforded her a language to represent Black mental distress and pain heretofore sanitized in earlier racial uplift fiction, but that also functioned to demonize and marginalize the angry, maladjusted, and restless Black woman frequently cited as the abjected outside to the social sanity of liberal pluralism. Although critical assessments have often faulted Fauset’s fiction as too Victorian, too sentimental, and too bloodless an expression of an authentic Black art or Black lives, her neurodiverse fiction often foregrounds the “nerve-­wrecking” weathering of institutionalized stresses that take a toll on Black women’s health even as they are encouraged to be strong, silent, soul-­surviving superwomen for the race. Despite the seeming lack of “protest,” Fauset’s novels of manners depict risky behaviors and improper psychologies that undermine the very language of social sanity that they rely on to render visible African Americans’ mental pain.25 Sometimes, Fauset shows, Black women have to go mad in order not to lose their minds. Risky Feelings: The Rehabilitation of Mental Distress

When Alain Locke asked Walter White to consider revising his 1924 article “The Color Line” in light of recent anthropological work for the 1925 anthology The New Negro, White rejected such a suggestion since he had “never yet,” he wrote his mentor, “met a white person who thoroughly understood the psychology of race prejudice within the Negro race.”26 At the heart of White’s revised essay “The Paradox of Color” that appeared in The New Negro is, thus, as he states directly, the question: “What does race prejudice do to the inner man of him who is the victim of that prejudice?”27 This question Walter White asserts was a key stimulus motivating much of the New Negro art movement, although this struggle to identify a language of Black mental distress and pain has often been eclipsed by cultural readings of the Harlem Renaissance as an attempt, as David Levering Lewis famously noted, to gain civil rights by copyright.28 As White attests, however, after citing the example of Paul Robeson, who could contradictorily be both acclaimed on the Broadway stage but denied seating at adjacent restaurants, even racial liberals who patronize Black arts rarely listen to the “inner conflict of the Black man in America,” or understand his lived experience of daily psychological assaults, and their accumulative function within a post-­Reconstruction necropolitics. As White goes on to elaborate:

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Of wounds to the flesh it is easy to speak. It is not difficult to tell of lynchings and injustices and race prescription. Of wounds to the spirit which are a thousand times more deadly and cruel it is impossible to tell in entirety. On the one hand lies the Scylla of bathos (sentimental tradition) and on the other the Charybdis of insensitivity to subtle shadings of the spirit. (360) In “Paradox of Color,” White calls attention to a gap in modern discussions of the “race problem” and to the omissions of those “subtle shadings of ” the spirt and mind that lie outside the latest credible sociological and anthropological theories on the so-­called race problem. What is needed, White argues, is an experientially based structural analysis of Black mental pain, or that daily “wounding” hidden behind headline-­grabbing spectacular stories of lynching and Jim Crow violence. As White concludes his essay, the Negro artist has a duty to capture the many “comedies” and “tragedies” that result from this “strange mixture of reactions not only to prejudice from without, but to equally potent prejudices from within” (367). In “The Paradox of Color,” White testifies to the conceptual shift that lies behind key works of the Harlem Renaissance: a broadening and reframing of racial conflict as an internalized psychological conflict. This transforming of the race conversation to one about the trauma and suffering of disintegrated personalities who struggle to understand, to overcome, and finally to find political utility in their mental pain and confusion would guide much of the movement’s cultural production. Since Warren Susman’s influential study of the culture of personality, historians have long noted that the early twentieth-­century United States saw a shift from older Victorian ideas of moral character to “personality” as part of the rise of a new therapeutic culture in which the middle class now concerned themselves with psychological well-­being and self-­realization.29 Accompanying this emphasis on personality, however, was also an expansion in the gradations of—­and a lowering of the threshold about—­what counted as mental “disorders” (itself a new conceptualization replacing older notions of “madness”). Driven by reformist and humanitarian impulses, early twentieth-­century psychologists moved from a concern with extreme, broadly understood cases of insanity and dementia, ones generally treated within asylums, to a focus on “mental conflicts” and “complexes,” now understood as conditions that all individuals might develop and for which they might need treatment.30 Since many social scientists believed as well that culture and environment shaped personal-

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ity, psychologists in turn used these studies of mental complexes as the basis for critiquing U.S. society. In arguing that it was now the duty of the “New Negro” artist to depict the “strange mixture of reactions” to the “contradictions” of prejudice within the individual psyche, Walter White captures the refocused lens of the new psychology toward understanding Black mental distress and also toward demanding an expanded notion of social justice that recognizes the “nerve shattering” microaggressions and stresses that debilitate both physical health and mental well-­being.31 To understand the reappropriation of social psychology as part of the Harlem Renaissance’s rehabilitation politics, we need to situate it within the coproduction of this critical change in U.S. psychological thought and practices and a perceived national crisis about racial migration and immigration. Social psychology came into being at the same time as progressive thinkers began to imagine a pluralistic democracy composed of hybrid Americans.32 One of the earliest proponents of the democratic uses of social psychology was the pragmatist John Dewey, who as Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth have noted, had a profound influence on Alain Locke and other key Harlem Renaissance thinkers.33 In a speech, “The Uses of Social Psychology,” delivered at the twenty-­fifth anniversary celebration of the American Psychological Association on December 28, 1916 (and republished the following year in Psychological Review), Dewey urged his audience to no longer remain merely “passive spectators” explaining, recording, and classifying things, but to take “control” in order to effect the “retail reorganization” of society. For far too long, Dewey noted, there has existed within psychological thought a false dichotomy between self and society, but recent research has shown that the “mind” is actually a “social phenomenon” that is formed through the attitudes, beliefs, and values within society. Since social psychologists took to heart the fact that the mind is “social,” they should come to see, Dewey concluded, that they have a responsibility to investigate how society might be “organized and directed with reference to the ends of attention, esteem and endeavor” of democratic progress, especially in light of current complicated “industrial and political problems.”34 Just as in Dewey’s “The Uses of Social Psychology,” we detect the alignment of the new personality studies with social and political reform, leading social psychologist Floyd Henry Allport also makes clear in his foundational study, Social Psychology (1924), the way that ideas about the “integrated (racial/ethnic) personality” coincided and collaborated with the constituting of a postwar pluralistic social order. In his 1924 study

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Social Psychology, which appeared the same year as Fauset’s first novel There Is Confusion, the Harvard-­trained Allport clearly identifies how the crisis language of maladjustments arose as an artifact of national debates over immigration, urbanization, and feared interracial conflict. In chapter 14, on “social adjustments,” Allport distinguishes between what he calls overt and covert social conflicts, and he directs social psychologists’ attention to those “covert” conflicts that develop from an internalization of the individual’s conflict with the other (what he refers to several times as contact with the “alien” other) on the level of the psyche. Racial, class, and nationalistic antagonisms, Allport contends, arise when social conflicts became internalized and repressed. To ensure a harmonious democratic life, Allport insists that reformers should apply the laws of social behavior and consciousness for “the real nature of the phenomenon is an attitude in individuals and not an objective social fact.”35 For Allport, class distinctions and racial inequalities are in part inevitable, and the social psychologist cannot alter the migration, urbanization, and contacts among groups. But the social psychologist can modify and control these racial attitudes, feelings, and reactions caused by the “alien” within the fragmented psyche to ensure the health of the individual and the nation. Progress depends on adjusting this “alien-­ated” and “damaged” psyche and incorporating it into an integrated personal and collective identity. At the end of his chapter, Allport warns that left untreated these historically specific psychological reactions and defense mechanisms within the racial or ethnic minority might easily become radicalized and turn into anger, rebellion, or violence, which would injure both the individual and the democratic life of the nation. As Allport’s Social Psychology illustrates, the growth of the practical technologies of psychology were intrinsically linked with transformations in post–­World War I culture and the discipline’s exercise of political power to ensure the sane social unity of diverse individuals in an imagined tolerant (if not necessary equal) pluralistic order. The inventing of the modern self, and equally the so-­called New Negro, thus, was never segregated from questions of individual and collective social management within the specific historical context of a perceived national crisis resulting from an emerging racially and ethnically heterogeneous society. In his 1954 retrospective on the history of social psychology for the Handbook of Social Psychology, Allport would assert that its roots lay in a “philosophy and ethics of democracy.”36 Although certainly race leaders such as Alain Locke differed markedly in their vision from leading social psychologists

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such as Allport, they too sought to reframe and rationalize the race question around a nascent language of social psychology and its terminology of attitudes, reactions, and maladjustments, which had for the first time, they felt, conferred recognition on Black mental distress and pain. With the rise of social psychology, as a consequence, experts on the “race question” increasingly recognized that “sick societies produce sick people,” giving new visibility to how racial oppression inflicted psychological distress and caused Black mental pain.37 But leading social scientists like Allport rarely turned this social psychological insight into moral or political outrage against racism. More commonly, they identified the marginal man’s (and woman’s) mental problems as resulting from their failure to adjust their self-­destructive attitudes and emotions. This tendency to focus on the need for the “adjustment” of the African American’s own complexes, defense mechanisms, and sensitivities can be seen most clearly in Robert Lee Sutherland’s Color, Class and Personality (1942) prepared for the American Youth Council. A professor of sociology at Bucknell, the Iowa-­born, theologically trained Sutherland became in 1938 director of the American Youth Council’s “Negro Project,” an African American–­focused research initiative that resulted from the advocacy of leaders such as Alain Locke. In his summary volume Color, Class and Personality, which drew on previously produced volumes for the Council by leading African American social scientists such as Charles Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, Sutherland sought to identify the “patterns of personality adjustment to racial status.”38 I want to look for a moment at one of the many evidentiary cases that Sutherland relates as part of his research—­ that of Harry X—­because its narrative structures and tropes parallel the specific scripts African American writers such as Locke and Fauset repurposed—­and in turn sought to unsettle—­in order to understand and care for Black mental distress. According to Sutherland, Harry X was an African American youth from a small northern community who knew many of the leading members of the town. He graduated with honors from high school only to discover that he could not attain white-­collar employment. The only opportunities open to him were the “economic roles of bootblack or janitor” (32), and thus he turned to illegal activities that were out of character with his previous behavior. But even as Sutherland shows the social psychologist’s obsession with a feared Black criminality (and with identifying causes for preventive social policies), he as importantly focuses on the “compensatory personality traits” that are equally injurious to Harry him-

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self and to a sane multicultural society. Harry becomes “bitter and distrustful,” isolating himself from his former white friends and excusing himself from responsibility by always shifting blame to white prejudices. Although Harry experiences many of the same frustrations that other white youths do in their upward progress toward the American dream (33), Sutherland avers, Harry X’s need to preserve his self-­respect takes on the “proportions of a personal crisis” (40). Behind Sutherland’s assessment of Harry X, thus, is a need to police and pathologize supposedly nonnormative Black affects—­anger, bitterness, rage—­to prevent the radicalization of Harry X so that he does not develop into some revolutionary future Malcolm X. However, if Harry X’s defense mechanisms, blame-­shifting, hypersensitivity, and avoidance of integration are all “maladjustments” that Sutherland elucidates for public policy intervention, he also recognized that racial disparities can cause Black disability—­and it was this language of mental distress and pain that overwhelming influenced African American writers in the interwar period. To speak about psychology as social was not just to name a different etiology, but to point toward new understandings of racial violence and the strategic role of daily psychological maimings as a part of racial governance. As Hubert Harrison, the socialist founder of the African American magazine The Voice, noted in a 1922 article for the New Republic entitled “At the Back of the Black Man’s Mind,” for many of the Harlem Renaissance’s artists and race leaders (often with a divergent politics) racism was now understood as a “psychic reality,” not because of, as Harrison notes, some inherent racial temperament (there is no Negro or Anglo-­Saxon mind), but because “social environments shape psychic characters.”39 The implications of such a psychological refiguring of white supremacism were for Harrison clear, disturbing, yet also fraught with new possibilities: African Americans, especially those in the “cosmopolitan” city, Harrison argues, would have to make “adjustments” and “mis-­adjustments” to survive, but they could, at the same time, take preventive control of their well-­being and future. To be a “New Negro,” Harrison implies, was to live in prognosis: to live in this prognosis time was less to fit oneself into some fixed disciplinary norm than to manage and monitor one’s mental health, outlook, and particularly feelings in relation to diagnosed mental health risks that could lead, it was said, to fragmentation, maladjustment, and individual as well as social dis-­integration.40 Thus, social psychology represented no simple language of resistance or governmentality.41 For some artists, such as Fauset and Locke, it brought

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attention to a fuller psychology that would witness mental distress and pain often omitted from racial uplift’s art and propaganda. Both Locke and Fauset recognized the impossibility of imagining Black liberation and making Black lives matter without accounting for a lived experience of psychic assault that was more than the collateral damage of racial violence, but an end in itself to deteriorate Black vitality. Increasingly, then, during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, inequality, discrimination, and racism came to be seen as originating in troubled personalities, and racism’s harm was measured in terms of its impact on individual self-­ esteem and in healthy emotional reactions. However, African Americans did not just, as Badia Sahar Ahad, Shelley Eversley, and Jay Garcia all argue about a post–­World War II African American response to psychoanalysis, flip the scrip on “psychiatry,” demonstrating that the “neurosis” lay within American culture and not in the Black psyche.42 Instead, in borrowing the lessons of social psychology, Harlem Renaissance artists also recruited the new language of inferiority complexes, defense mechanisms, and maladjustments to name, explain, and care for the unrecognized psychological assault that African Americans receive as a result of a systematic antiblackness. They turned to social psychology to witness a necropolitics of slow, accumulative everyday psychological maiming and decapacitations and, thereby, to expand notions of racial violence to include a Black mental distress and pain that functioned in tandem with Jim Crow segregation laws to isolate, debilitate, and to reduce the quality of Black life. Alain Locke: Self-­Determination, Self-­Prognosis

In the last two decades most readings of Alain Locke’s essays, although recognizing the shifts, and at times contradictions, in the diversity of his output, have tended to place Locke’s thought within a philosophical tradition of American pragmatism and cultural pluralism. Whereas critics such as Ross Posnock and George Hutchinson have read the “cosmopolitanism” of antirace men such as Locke as progressively breaking down an insular and constrictive language of racial authenticity,43 Locke’s “integrated racial personality”—­one that he saw as the basis of a pragmatic cultural pluralism—­also cooperated with liberal multiculturalism’s reframing of demands for racial equality, justice, and social transformation as a matter of sane cultural self-­expression and civility. In his promoting

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of a “new race psychology” of proud self-­expression adjusted toward a cross-­racial civility, Locke built upon the racial rehabilitative ideology that, as we have seen in previous chapters, sanitized and circumscribed the very limits of the freedom and wholeness it sought to confer through Black self-­ awareness. Yet, at the same time, in his conflicted “dis-­ integrating” double voiced text, Locke frequently embraced a bad, even mad, subjectivity that resisted these same compulsory performances of mental well-­being. Beginning with the lecture notes he composed for his 1916 course at Howard University, “Race Contracts and Inter-­Racial Relations: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Race,” Locke noted that “[a] scientific study of race prejudice awaits the further development of social psychology.”44 Even though Locke’s legacy as a racial philosopher is often attributed to his reconception of race as an ethnic or cultural identity as opposed to a biological inheritance, his 1924 essay published in the Howard Review, “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture,” clearly shows as well Locke’s refiguring of racial identity around the categories of social psychology. At the beginning of his essay Locke reiterates the recent insights of sociology and anthropology that there is no “natural connection” between race and culture. But after recognizing this nonessentialist foundation, Locke announces, as a consequence, that the follow-­up question for social scientists is how we “draw on the psychological evidence” to explain the “growth of racial feelings and attitude” and, then once that has been done, how social scientists can alter these attitudes. It is the task of the “newer psychology of race” (as opposed to a previous physiological or eugenic based race psychologies), Locke contends, to identify and progressively manage racial identities, attitudes, and interactions that are a “psychological set of historically specific cultural reactions” (274, 272). This fundamental premise that race is a “psychological set of historically specific cultural reactions” would serve as a premise grounding much of Locke’s thinking at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke was concerned like other social psychologists that racism from traumatic events such as lynching to the everyday microaggressions of being denied seating in a restaurant—­as Paul Robeson was—­would prompt harmful and limiting “reactions,” or more specifically reaction formations, which could in turn motivate a self-­segregating insular politics. In his foreword to Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times, Locke compared the nineteenth-­ century race leader and his “times” to Booker T. Washington and his cultural moment, but what he found were not simply different racial politics,

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but different “psychological reactions” that motivated Washington’s ac­com­mo­dationism in comparison to Douglass’s protest. Washington, Locke wrote in his foreword on Douglass, “reflects the dominant psychology of a whole American generation of materialism and reaction which dimmed, along with Douglass and other crisis heroes, the glory and fervor of much early American idealism” (319). As we have seen in previous chapters, a necropolitics of slow violence sought not just to maim, but to have a demoralizing effect, and just as Ann Petry worried about a “learned resignation” among Harlem residents, Locke also recognized that racist environments are set up to produce specific affective “reactions” of dread and dependence that destroy the will and energy of Black people and prevent them from achieving self (or collective) realization.45 In his famous 1928 essay published in the short-­lived magazine Harlem, “Art or Propaganda?,” Locke, thus, inveighed against propaganda not simply because it straightjacketed artistic freedom, or censored subject matter, but because it represented an “unhealthy” reaction formation that prevented the individual from achieving an integrated self, a self that was both psychologically whole and capable of “sane,” and not just appeasing, integration. After first clarifying that his “chief objection” to propaganda is not its artistic “sin of monotony and disproportion,” Locke diagnoses in “Art or Propaganda?” that “it perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it. For it leaves and speaks under the shadow of a dominant majority whom it harangues, cajoles, threatens or supplicates. It is too extroverted for balance or poise or inner dignity and self-­respect.”46 Despite the fact that in many ways Locke invokes the figure of Uncle Tom and the refrain of slave psychology, Locke’s language of “balance” and “poise” echoes a social-­psychological language of adjustments. In his formulation of Black art, Locke identifies the need to speak to the pain the assimilated “New Negro” feels who grins and lies behind his starched shirt or her deferential speech. But he also uses the prognostic time of a new social psychology to promote a therapeutic management of a proud Black cosmopolitanism that stays “balanced.” For Locke the “New Negro” must live in prognosis. As part of living always under prognosis, African Americans must learn constantly to project themselves into some future (prognostic time) of optimized self, or “social sanity and integrated selfhood,” and at the same time constantly fear and monitor their own debility, maladjustment, or disordered self that cannot, or has failed to, live up to a full capacity of health, of happiness, and of “poised” well-­being. As we have seen in the previous chapters,

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early twentieth-­century Black vitality politics has always been about this dialectic of imbricated governance and freedom—­of striving to optimize some hygienic or healthy self, while always monitoring the self for risks of disease and debility. In all his essays, Locke speaks to the hurt, the rage, the depression, the anxiety, the “inferiority” that racism’s violence and everyday discriminations inflicted. But in using a social-­psychological language of pain so that African Americans could understand themselves and the impact of their environments on their defensive reactions, he also shared his fellow social psychologists’ vision of “social sanity” that sought to diagnose and rehabilitate a damaged Black psyche and its maladjustments in order to secure a place for Black citizens (and their cultural difference) in America’s liberal pluralism. We can see Locke’s fashioning of a modern African American who must live in prognosis in his inaugural essay for the movement, “Enter the New Negro,” published in the March 1925 Survey Graphic, and later retitled “The New Negro” for his 1925 volume by that same name. In his “The New Negro” essay, which is often seen as defining the aesthetics and cultural practices of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke applies the link between social psychology and the making of African American citizens that he worked out on a more abstract level in philosophical essays such as “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Cultures.” Even though most critics see Locke as making a cultural argument in “The New Negro,” his essay equally maps out a program of civil rights (or social equality within the liberal pluralistic state) through an “adjusted personality.” It is an essay about racial pride and solidarity, but we should equally note also racial sanity, or a healthy adjusted well-­being in which “New Negroes” (like Harry X) should embrace both their racial difference and the promise of integration and happiness by letting go of defense mechanisms, maladjustments, and nonnormative emotions such as bitterness and anger. In his “The New Negro,” Locke traces out the conceptual framework of a new prognostic time of racial rehabilitation, one that recurs, though not without alterations, in the psychological novels of Jessie Fauset and one that has persisted even within the postracial thinking of twenty-­first-­century neoliberal multiculturalism. Despite its undisputed status as a touchstone in African American literary history, Locke’s “The New Negro” has seldom invited close critical scrutiny of its historically embedded language, a language too often assumed as expressive of universal truths about developmental psychology. Most commentators on Locke’s essay argue that Locke’s manifesto

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celebrates art as a vehicle for altering deeply ingrained assumptions about Black inferiority and for eliminating prejudice. This art, one that would tap into specific diasporic artistic idioms, moreover, would serve for African Americans as the roots of an intense cultural self-­consciousness and identity, one that would eliminate any lingering self-­doubts and defensiveness about inadequacy.47 Although critics such as George Hutchinson see Locke as also insisting on the centrality of the African American experience in a hybrid U.S. national identity, there is an assumption in most readings of Locke’s seminal “The New Negro” that his logic was “cultural,” and only secondarily psychological, as the new spirit of self-­expression and racial distinctiveness would foster pride and cultural identity.48 But in his recruiting of a specific language of “personality,” of “defense mechanisms,” “complexes,” and “maladjustments,” Locke also reveals a shared belief, like Dewey and Allport (his contemporary in Harvard’s Philosophy Department) in the uses of social psychology for the shaping and managing of a new integrated racial personality that could both express and realize itself in a pluralistic democracy.49 That Locke saw the New Negro as not only a proud Black American but as a Black cosmopolitan American can be seen in the historical contextualization that Locke provides at the beginning of his essay. Like Walter White in his Survey Graphic companion essay, “The Paradox of Color,” Locke identifies his concern for the “new psychology” as arising from—­ and being relevant to—­what he calls the “polyglot” or “multicultural city.” These new multicultural spaces of both formal and intimate racial contact, such as New York City, have created, Locke notes, borrowing the language of social psychology, “new problems of adjustment” (5), and have prompted a “transformed and transforming psychology.” These adjustments and psychological transformations, however, are now, Locke notes, a problem the African American shares in common with other racial groups. As Locke later notes in “The New Negro,” there is a “new democracy in America today,” and while he argues, drawing on the language of social psychology, that “the mind of each racial group has had a bitter weaning, apathy or hatred on one side matching disillusionment or resentment on the other,” “they face each other today with the possibility of entirely new mutual attitudes” (8). For Locke African Americans would not only have racial pride but “new attitudes” beneficial to the “new [multicultural] democracy.” Throughout “The New Negro,” Locke borrows the language of social psychology to expose the risks that the Black cosmopolitan citizen should

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manage for his own well-­adjusted racial feelings and attitudes. In the opening of his essay, Locke notes that for a long time the Negro has been known more as a formula than as a human being, a “shadow more real than his personality,” and in the remainder of the essay he attempts to sketch out this racial personality in order to create a “mutual understanding” that he argues, like Dewey and Allport, can lead to “greater cooperation and adjustments” (10), adjustments more psychological than political. As Locke notes in “The New Negro,” although the political ideals and goals of African Americans are well known, “those of his inner life are yet in process of formation” (10), and he saw the art of the younger generation as well as his own essay as celebrating and inspiring, but also shaping, managing, and rehabilitating, this subjectivity that will “adjust” to the nation’s mind, prejudices, and attitudes. Although in many ways, Locke’s argument about the new racial personality altering the nation’s prejudices can seem reminiscent of earlier racial uplift ideology despite the new psychological language, Locke distinguishes it from past racial protest. Earlier African American activists all “spoke about” “racial pride, racial self-­ consciousness,” and solidarity, but what is new is the “positive self-­ direction” that makes today’s Black citizen a “fundamentally new negro,” for “he must know himself and be known for precisely what he is” (7–­8, my italics). In linking racial pride and positive self-­direction, Locke taps into Dewey’s and Allport’s belief that progress will come through the “directing” of racial personalities both Black and white, and what has been a barrier to this progress and integration into the emerging pluralistic democracy has been, as Locke goes on to elaborate, the African American’s own “non-­positive” complexes and defenses. When Locke shifts in the second half of his essay to focus on what he calls the “program” of the New Negro, we see more clearly his borrowing from social psychology to rehabilitate a Black cosmopolitan citizen of color for liberal multiculturalism. As Locke writes, “for the new psychology at present is more of a consensus of feeling than of opinion, of attitude rather than of program,” but some points, he notes, have “crystallized”: the points of this new psychology that have crystallized are, first, the repairing of a “damaged group psychology,” but, second, the shaping of a “warped social perspective” to create a “new mentality.” In most readings of Locke’s essay, its psychology (and never a disciplinary-­specific one) is reduced to a simple therapeutic call for self-­esteem and racial pride. But Locke’s language, images, and tropes, here and throughout “Enter the New Negro,” are grounded in social psychology’s science of the integrated personality

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that would prognosticate the dangers of a fragmented or maladjusted self and call for the adjustment of these alien, fragmented feelings so as not to impede social advancement and integration into an interwar ideal order of multicultural integration. That which fragments the Negro self is a warped social perspective, Locke argues, as much as a sense of inferiority. Later in the essay, Locke names the Negro’s maladjustments that must be overcome in developing the “new psychology” as the “internalized color line” that has become a “spite wall” and that has segregated him mentally and cramped him within “fetters and counter-­attitudes of prejudice.” To be a “New Negro” in America, Locke implies, thus, is to live at risk of being mentally damaged, and thus African Americans must monitor themselves for possible harms, “woundings,” or maladjustments. In his review essay of The New Negro anthology, entitled “Uncle Tom’s Mansions,” Carl Van Vechten would tellingly single out these lines psychologizing systemic racism as “spite walls” as the most politically relevant insights from the essay.50 By drawing on a language of social psychology, Locke in his essays sought not just to build racial pride but also to tap into a new medicalized discourse circulated among a school of pragmatic reformers about how to manage the affects, behaviors, and attitudes of the New Negro. At the same time, he invoked the ideological value of this narrative of the damaged Black psyche and its mental pain to argue for racial tolerance and integration, making an ethical appeal heard, if not fully understood, by white patrons such as Van Vechten. It is hardly surprising then, I would argue, that Locke was a key mentor to Kenneth Clark and a midwife in a long history of political arguments for civil rights based on the damaged Black psyche. Alain Locke, it needs to be remembered, taught Kenneth Clark at Howard University where Clark enrolled in 1935, and Locke worked with Clark to develop the reasoning presented in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.51 We need, then, I would argue, to set Alain Locke back within this long post–­World War I history of reframing racial progress as a story about the “development” and care of the Black psyche and personality. Locke’s “The New Negro” helped turn the psychological assaults and mental pain of racism into legitimate disabilities that ought to be recognized within public debates about social equality and justice. But for Locke Black mental distress and pain were not just useful as political arguments; they were tools for fostering on an individual therapeutic level a rehabilitated Black cosmopolitan citizen who should always live under prognosis and should adjust his attitudes, behaviors, and, most importantly, his feel-

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ings to avoid maladjusted excesses that might be a barrier to a healthy, sane, balanced life. In many ways, then, Locke cooperated with the conservative co-­optation of antiracist discourses to constitute what Roderick Ferguson has called “minoritized exceptions.”52 In Re-­order of Things, Ferguson argues that a radical ‘70s student movement working toward transformative economic, social, and political goals became co-­opted, domesticated, and managed through a strategy of affirmative minority (cultural) difference within an institutionalized neoliberal multiculturalism.53 Similarly, Locke’s call for a rehabilitated Black citizen used a language of social psychology to replace protests against racism with therapeutic affirmations of cultural difference. Locke’s “The New Negro” thus offers a psychologically focused rehabilitative narrative for Black cosmopolitan citizens, a narrative through which African Americans could learn to understand and move beyond their individual pain and trauma. Although anger, resentment, and counterprejudice are all understandable intrapsychic conflicts, they must finally be expressed within limits so as not to threaten the development of this sane integrated racial personality vital for a modern liberal multiculturalism. Locke’s essay, thus, discloses, even as he sought to reconfigure it, the pathologization of nonnormative affects and attitudes that became an integral part of modernist projects promoting a liberal (and neoliberal) postracial pluralism. In her essay “Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness,” Sara Ahmed examines how contemporary multicultural citizen-­making projects depend on the conversion of the immigrant’s bad feelings of anger or melancholy into “good” feelings or an affective investment in a promise of happiness that comes through letting go of a sense of injury or a longing for the past and, in turn, a refocusing on blissful bourgeois achievement.54 Yet this governing of minority affect as central to national security and assimilation has a long history and, after World War I, became inextricably linked with a biomedicalized language of social psychology and mental health. During the 1920s, in particular, integrationist-­leaning race leaders such as Locke, in promoting an ideology of rehabilitated Black cosmopolitanism, often drew upon and adapted the language of social psychology to strategically manage the bad affects, emotive disorders, and traumatized behavior resulting from the African American’s so-­designated “damage” due to the frustrations, anxieties, and disorientations of migration, urbanization, and Jim Crow segregation. As Locke’s essay “The New Negro” reveals, the “new psychology” behind and embedded within much of the Harlem Renaissance’s discourse worked,

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thus, in complex and contradictory ways both to enable and, yet at the same time, to put limits on the social and political imagination of Black freedom. Jessie Fauset’s Novels of Manners and “Nerve-­Wrecking” Stress

In her essay “Some Notes on Color,” which appeared in the March 1922 edition of the World Tomorrow, Jessie Fauset uses the psychological sketch as a political dissertation both on the intimate harm of racism and on the adjustments needed by the healthy racial personality. Like Audre Lorde in her famous essay “The Uses of Anger,” Fauset starts by addressing a liberal white critic who carps about the counterproductive anger in “Negro Literature” that prevents the nation from moving beyond race. Instead of answering the complaint directly, however, Fauset responds with a mood diary, recounting her everyday perambulations as a so-­designated privileged (no need to complain) African American through the multicultural urban space of New York City. After testifying to how she constantly has to quell her anger after a man on the streetcar refuses to give his seat to her, though not to a white woman, or after being turned away from a restaurant at lunch, or after getting the partial view seat behind a post at the theater, Fauset through accumulated anecdotes rebuts the white liberal’s charge that she has nothing to fear or be angry about: what prompts her bad attitude, she summarizes at the end, are the “reflexes of these things,” or, as she goes onto elaborate, the “puzzling, tangling, nerve-­wrecking consciousness of color [that] envelops and swathes us. Some of us it smothers.”55 Now Fauset’s defense of her anger as the justified “nerve” “reflexes” of racism reveals that she was hardly the polite Jane Austen of the Harlem Renaissance, as critics have often accused her of being.56 Fauset frequently offers us such sketches of unheeded Black female complaint. But, at the same time, we should not fail to note her redefining, like Walter White and Alain Locke, the harm and pain of everyday racial microaggressions and discriminations—­in the subway, at a restaurant, or in the theater—­as not just violations of her social and civil rights, but as injuries to her mental health (literally “nerve-­ wrecking”). Fauset’s choice of terminology—­ “reflexes” and “nerve-­wrecking”—­are more than figurative renderings of a racial violence meant, as we have seen, to debilitate Black will, agency, and hope through an accumulation of everyday assaults. Fauset’s language of

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“nerve wrecking” and traumatic “reflex” tap into a growing body of psychological literature by doctors, psychiatrists, and public health officers published after World War I. In his widely cited 1931 study, “Mental Hygiene and the Negro,” for example, Alan P. Smith argued that the strains of migration and the frustrations of continued discrimination were causing an increase in “nervousness,” one that was physiological as well as psychological.57 Similarly, in a series of articles that he published for the Journal of the National Medical Association on Negro mental health, Alfred Gordon, the neurological instructor at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia (where Fauset grew up), cautioned Black Americans against letting these racial encounters lead them to reflexive obessions and to “morbid impulses” (the title of a 1926 article).58 Thus, although Fauset begins with a defense of Black anger and pain in the face of a colorblind liberalism locked in its own unacknowledged racist practices, she ends with an acknowledgment of her own pain and embodied mental distress as a result of this racism. Although a proponent like Locke of the fuller psychology hidden behind the “reactionary” propaganda of a respectability politics, Fauset repeatedly expresses confusion about a Black anger that has not, as social psychologists argued, integrated and muted as part of a stable (no longer “nerve-­wrecked”) sane racial personality. Fauset’s fiction, likewise, I will argue, discloses its own nerve-­wrecking disruptions that attest to her “disorder”—­her secret desire to embrace the angry morbid impulses and obsessions of a mad subjectivity lest she lose her mind. Like Locke, Fauset in the reviews that she wrote for The Crisis, where she served as literary editor between 1919 and 1927, repeatedly applauded a “fuller psychology” that gave voice to Black mental pain and distress, while yet still channeling this “nerve wrecking” into “balanced” self-­ realization. In her review of Countee Cullen’s Color in March 1926, for example, Fauset praises him for “illuminating the Negro psychology,” and particularly singles out his disclosure of a repressed bitterness.59 Similarly in her 1920 review of Du Bois’s Darkwater, Fauset lauds Du Bois’s depiction of the “[t]he psychology of the hunted, the hurt, the broken, the oppressed; [it is] a hard thing to get at. It is obscured sometimes by fear, sometimes by pride.” Even though Du Bois famously promoted art as propaganda, Fauset’s review discloses that she valued art for its psychological authenticity of a particularly Black reality of mental distress, or its ability to break the silence about the “hurt” and the “brokenness” from racial oppression—­those “weaknesses” or “pathologies” often hidden or mini-

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malized out of fear for, and a pride in, affirming representations.60 She realized, moreover, that such mental distress functioned as part of a larger and calculated necropolitics of psychological maiming. We can see Fauset’s concern for an art capturing the fuller psychology of Black mental distress most clearly, however, in her 1922 essay in The Crisis after the death of the minstrel show comedian Bert Williams, “The Symbolism of Bert Williams,” which she later reworked into a “Gift of Laughter” that appeared in Locke’s The New Negro anthology. The impulse behind her essay, as Fauset explains, was not just to honor one of the first Black actors to appear on Broadway, but to counter Carl Van Vechten’s eulogy attributing the comedian’s “laughter” to the race’s happy primitivism. Refuting Van Vechten’s interpretation of Williams, Fauset asserts that he—­and in turn other white liberals—­do not understand the “complexity of Black interiority.” Much as did Walter White in “The Paradox of Color,” Fauset points out that behind William’s mask that grinned and lied there brooded “frustrations” and a “melancholy” provoked by racial prejudice and limitations. In “The Symbolism of Bert Williams,” Fauset seeks to validate Black mental pain, a “melancholy” that reminds her readers that Black freedom struggles are also psychic ones that unfold slowly over time, as African Americans seek to heal from daily stresses and psychological assaults that can never quite be redeemed, as Bert Williams knew all too well.61 However, even as Fauset witnesses to the psychological maiming of Jim Crow racism, she nevertheless admonishes her Black readers on the necessity, as the social psychologists had argued, for “adjustments”: the “lesson” or “symbolism” finally that Bert Williams’s life teaches African Americans, Fauset feels compelled somewhat incongruously to argue, is “we need to put aside our prejudices and we will all be free.”62 Such a surprise turn in Fauset’s essay to preach social psychology’s rehabilitation gospel of adjustments and overcoming defense mechanisms recurs throughout Fauset’s fictional work as she struggles to adjust her own anger, as we saw in “Some Notes on Color,” out of fear of “nerve-­ wrecking” psychological damage and, as importantly, out of fear that to acknowledge antiblack strategies of psychological violence would make liberal multiculturalism impossible. Fauset’s indebtedness to a language of social psychology yet her skepticism about its preferred therapeutic personality can be seen most clearly in her first novel, There Is Confusion (1924). In this Edith Wharton-­like novel of manners that looks at the clash between the old moneyed Marshall family and the bourgeois aspirant Maggie Ellersley, Fauset testifies to,

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and at the same time disrupts, the biopolitical psychopower over African American behavior and emotional life within social psychology.63 Although feminist critics such as Deborah McDowell, Ann DuCille, and Elizabeth Ammons have admired the novel’s rebellious female protagonists, the bougie but career-­driven Joanna Marshall and her streetwise counterpart Maggie Ellersley,64 they have also lamented Fauset’s narrative containment of these characters’ gender defiance in both women’s final submission to domestic happiness. In a narrative trajectory straight from Tyler Perry’s own melodramatic house of pain, the ambitious professional woman, Joanna Marshall, seems to discover that she can end her unhappiness, as well as her instability and lack of fulfillment, only when she learns a self-­sacrificing love for the good Black man (Peter Bye). But the novel’s plot, which, at first glance, might seem to redirect Black women’s ambition into an old school Victorian-­era true womanhood, has its own split personality that defies rehabilitation. In this story built more around character than incident, Fauset’s protagonists move from psychological confusion and complexes, to crisis moments of mental breakdown, to final readjustments to a “saner” personality that allows them to be both proudly Black and integrated into a multicultural community. Amid this narrative arc from maladjustment and confusion to “sane civility,” as Locke praised in his review of her novel, Fauset, as in her Bert Williams essay, seems, however, far more drawn to the improper and melancholic maladjusted life masked behind the final gift of love and laughter. Fauset’s indebtedness to a language of social psychology to understand Black mental pain and distress appears most clearly in the portrait of Peter Bye in There Is Confusion. The mulatto grandson of the white wealthy Philadelphian Peter Bye and his Black servant Judy, Peter Bye had always, our narrator tells us, something alien inside him, “some aching tiger of resentment and dislike which always crouched . . . ready to spring at the approach of a white man.”65 When Joanna first meets Peter when he transfers to her grade school, she learns that he has received, as part of his “physiological inheritance” from his father, a “deep dislike of white people” that made him believe, like Sutherland’s Harry X, in the “futility of labor and ambition” and caused him to fall into “deep moods of melancholia” (31). In the off-­again, on-­again love trials between Joanna and Peter, the only barrier that keeps the lovers apart, for there are otherwise no external complications shaping the romantic plot, is, as the novel repeatedly underscores, Peter’s “maladjusted attitude”: “a deep dislike,” a “resentment” that made him “unable to rise” and to claim (in the gendered

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language of the novel) his “true manhood” (187). As Joanna’s brother-­in-­ law Brian explains to Joanna’s sister Sylvia in his assessment of the novel’s romantic complications, Peter has the “complex of color” that comes to “every colored man and every colored woman . . . who has any ambition.” “The time comes when he thinks, “I might just as well fall back; there’s no use pushing on.” Brian, then, in echoing the novel’s title, goes on to testify that Black Americans must be some “wonderful people” who can work through this “considerable confusion” and still “keep our sanity” (179). Peter’s character seems, thus, designed in many ways as a case study of social psychology, expressing the pain event that Locke had called in “The New Negro” the “spite walls” in the face of Black social death: a particularly deleterious reaction formation in which a “nerve-­wrecking” racism smothers entrepreneurial drive and fragments a balanced well-­integrated personality. I speak in terms of a “pain event” here to underscore that the experiences of psychological assault only become coherently understood, authenticated, and open to treatment within the scripts that are used to recognize them and to render them meaningful.66 According to the prognostic time advanced within social psychology, such mental pain and affective confusion loomed as a threat to the healthy psyche and, as Locke noted, to an imagined multicultural nation’s social sanity. To Harlem Renaissance writers such as Locke and Fauset, social psychology offered for the first time a way to speak about racism’s wounding, especially when an earlier race psychology had dehumanized and pathologized African Americans in a language of racial instincts and heredity. Over the course of There Is Confusion, we see, however, that Peter’s “color complex” must be remediated to prevent his descent into “madness.” After fighting during World War I in France alongside his white cousin Meriwether Bye (whom he had never met before), Peter learns, as a consequence, to heal his fragmented psyche by seeing “life from an entirely different angle” (282). As Peter confesses to Joanna, not only does he come to realize the injustice of his spite walls, but he now realizes that the more arduous fight for freedom was on the home front as part of the fight against “spiritual and mental obstacles, infinitely more difficult because less tangible” (282). As Joanna explains to Peter, as they both learn to adjust their desires and find happiness and peace in married life: “Now that we have love, Peter, we have a pattern to guide us out of the confusion” (283). In many ways then Fauset’s There Is Confusion seems to borrow its “pattern to guide” African Americans out of the confusion of their mental disability straight from the social psychologist’s diagnostic manual. In

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chronicling the pain and harm to an integrated self and to relationships as a result of reactionary maladjustments, Fauset, like Locke, offers a deterrence narrative that would warn African American readers to monitor and treat their inner confusion lest they fail to realize their whole and healthy Black selves. In Joanna’s final words to Peter, Fauset’s There Is Confusion, like Locke’s “The New Negro,” disseminates a rehabilitation narrative about “Black exceptions” who can embrace their racial cultural difference and still be accepted, welcomed, and successful in the liberal multicultural state. Even though acknowledging the persistence of racial discrimination (“it’s so hard being colored”), the rehabilitated Black cosmopolitan Peter Bye no longer directs his outrage toward white America or his “courage” toward transforming institutional racism. He works on the home front and on his own well-­adjusted self-­actualization. What Peter must learn in order to wed Joanna, to enter into the respectable Black middle class, and to heal his white/Black family divide, is to engage in proper (mental health) risk avoidance and to police himself by eschewing the “aching tiger of bitterness,” that form of negative thinking and feeling that social psychologists argued interferes with health, happiness, and entrepreneurial success. In this rehabilitative narrative of sane-­tary citizenship, Black bourgeois status is recalibrated as not just about propriety or economic self-­sufficiency, but about the “psychological capital” of a personality capable of being integrated into the multicultural order of civil cultural exchanges (one that we see acted out in Joanna’s performance in the “Dance of America” on Broadway). Although There Is Confusion’s sentimentalized sanism reenacts all too dutifully in part the development of an integrated race personality in Peter Bye, Fauset’s novel both confirms and deranges social psychology’s management of the nonnormative affects of the angry Black woman who threatens modernity’s multicultural liberal state. There Is Confusion displays its own improvisational “confusion” and fragmentation about the social and political meaning of healthy Black adjustment. Despite the novel’s neat narrative closure, many of its scenes offer contradictory and repressed fantasy identifications. In speaking of fantasy identifications, I want to suggest that we need to read Fauset’s novel not only in terms of its ideologically driven plot, but in terms of its disjunctions and its disruptive affective and psychological appeals to Black readers’ improper and deranged desires, anger, and anxieties. Although Fauset’s fiction is frequently interpreted as if it were intended for white readers, especially in the way it played upon predominant Anglo-­American genre conventions

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(such as sentimentalism), Fauset’s There Is Confusion also works to represent the fuller psychology for its African American readers experiencing their own nerve-­wrecking confusion. As Elizabeth McHenry has demonstrated, early twentieth-­century African American women’s fiction targeted as a key audience emerging middle-­class Black book club readers, who arose as a new block of consumers circulating, exchanging, and discussing racial novels that expressed their core interests and shared sense of identity.67 In There Is Confusion, Fauset does not just invoke Black and white sympathy to foster racial friendship as part of an official liberal antiracism. Her novel activates through its African American readers’ identification with troubled, and troubling, characters, a fantasy of dis-­ integrating madness and the possibility of an alternative improper life. I want to turn to the description of Maggie Ellersley to trace out the novel’s disrupting confusion, an unhygienic nervousness within the narrative itself. The daughter of a laundress who runs a boarding house on 53rd Street to eke out a meager living, Maggie Ellersley is described from her first introduction as suffering from a “complex,” a complex that is repeatedly described within the specific medicalized language that Alfred Gordon used in his series of articles for the Journal of the National Medical Association as a “morbid obsession.”68 Because Maggie is restless, nervous, and intractably determined to get ahead and to achieve the bourgeois status of the Marshalls, she has become maladjusted, full of anger, envy, spite, and a sense of inferiority. Racial uplift, then, for Maggie, as the social psychologists would recommend, means learning a “new transforming psychology” that takes pride in one’s Black difference, but also lives in prognosis, monitoring her improper behaviors and feelings. As the novel’s invocation of the language of social psychology foreshadows, Maggie must learn to disavow the alien angry Black woman inside her that will impede her path to happiness. As Peter realizes when Maggie decides to turn her designs toward marrying him to gain an “entrance into the best (African American) families in Philadelphia”: “of all the crazy complexes, this was the craziest” (212). It is, however, Maggie’s “crazy complexes” that readers most identify with and that prompts Joanna to repress her own dis-­integrating attitudes and feelings by exiling Maggie. In Fauset’s There Is Confusion gendered class differences within the Harlem community correspond to a hierarchy of well-­adjusted attitudes, behaviors, and sane affects. Whereas initially Maggie idolizes and wants to marry the eldest Marshall son, Philip, her plans are thwarted by the novel’s other key protagonist, the aspiring actress

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Joanna Marshall, who deems Maggie an unsuitable and vulgar match for her brother. In a confidential letter to Maggie to ensure that she ends her friendship with Philip, Joanna informs Maggie that Philip never viewed her as a respectable woman, and hence as a suitable match, since he told his sisters he found Maggie’s behavior uncouth: Philip, Joanna writes Maggie, remarked, “That’s different, Maggie Ellersley can do things that my sisters mustn’t” (87, my emphasis). Now Joanna Marshall’s obsessive reaction to the seamstress’s daughter, whom the rest of the Marshalls invite to their social gatherings, and whom Joanna’s brother Philip does want to marry, is never clearly explained. On one level, Joanna’s prejudice against Maggie reflects the class bias of a respectability-­obsessed Harlem middle -­class that desired to influence and sanitize, as we have seen in the previous chapter, working-­class women’s behavior. But we need to take more literally the psychological disclosure in Joanna’s wording of Maggie’s crime in her letter to her: Maggie is different. She is the woman in the novel who lives out the behavior, attitudes, feelings, and maladjustments that the rest of the Marshall women “must not do.” Maggie displays the improper, morbid, and insane behaviors that social psychology counseled an integrated middle class to adjust into a positive psychology. Maggie represents the fragmenting, emotionally nerve-­wrecking angry Black womanhood that Joanna will not allow herself to acknowledge and insists on denying in herself. As Meriwether Bye says about Peter, “You . . . represented something which might have been a part of myself, as though you . . . were living actively what I was thinking of passively” (244). Joanna hates Maggie because she does “live actively” what Joanna thinks and feels only passively. In Fauset’s blackface makeover of another tenement daughter (Stephen Crane’s Maggie), it is important to note that Fauset’s fallen woman performs not a sentimental story of morality or even naturalistic fatalism, but dramatizes the dangers of the fragmented, maladjusted personality for Black women readers. After Joanna expels Maggie from the world of bourgeois respectability that the Marshalls represent, Maggie, fearful that she has no other means of making a better life for herself, agrees to marry one of her mother’s boarders, the gambler Henderson Neal. When Maggie threatens to leave him after learning about his disreputable livelihood, Henderson stabs her and then later commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train car. These traumas, which prompt an accompanying intensification of Maggie’s morbid obsessions and maladjusted spite and anger, finally cause Maggie to have a nervous breakdown after she learns of her husband’s suicide. Fauset’s language

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during this breakdown scene discloses the novel’s ambivalent complicity with social psychology’s disciplining of sane, well-­adjusted Black citizens for a postwar liberal multiculturalism: It was the first cry of penitence, and as she lay there day after day reviewing her life she came to understand and to analyze for what it was that quality of hers, that tendency to climb to the position she wanted over the needs and claims of others. Now that she had no strength, now that life stretched around her a dreary procession of sullen, useless days, she realized the beauty inherent in life itself, of health and sane nerves, of the ability to make a living, of being helpful to others. (256, my italics) After her breakdown, and under her doctor’s orders, Maggie agrees to serve as a nurse to the Black soldiers in Chambery, France, and later (like a Black Jane Eyre) she finally reunites with the upper-­class hero, Philip Marshall, once he has been wounded and permanently disabled, and, therefore, needs a caretaker who will selfishly devote herself to his comfort. Although such conversions to womanly racial duty were a staple in Black women’s sentimental fiction, such as Frances Harper’s earlier 1892 Iola Leroy, we should not fail to note the specific framing language of Maggie’s rehabilitation narrative: Maggie reviews her life through the language of social psychology, and she learns the important lesson that “sane nerves” and integrated healthy personalities renounce morbid impulses. In many ways, thus, it might seem as if Maggie’s story dramatizes social psychology’s therapeutic care for Black women’s book club readers. Yet, this sudden conversion of Maggie toward a life of social sanity hardly resolves the novel’s chronic narrative confusion. Like the ending of Fauset’s essay on “The Symbolism of Bert Williams,” Maggie’s surrender to social psychology’s scientific authority about sane behavior seems its own reaction formation—­one that fails to contain the improper feelings and ambitions of the restless, spiteful, nervous, and angry Black woman. In Maggie’s bad behavior, Fauset’s There Is Confusion lifts the veil on an equivocal agency when women exercise practices of freely expressed nerve-­wrecking emotions. In her history of interpreting pain, Joanna Bourke has argued that the language that sufferers seize hold of to understand their experience says a lot about them and about their community.69 That Fauset would adapt a language of social psychology to diagnose Black women’s anger, melancholia, and undomesticated ambitions as “morbid

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impulses” and “maladjustments” reveals a middle-­class African American community’s faith in the possibilities of a liberal multiculturalism in which they might become one of the many hybrid Americans who could keep their ethnic/racial difference and yet also participate in the civil, political, and social life of the nation. Yet There Is Confusion continually strains under the dis-­integrating weight of maintaining that optimistic faith. The novel’s schizophrenic logic and its own narrative disruptions and contradictions finally depict and incite female “dis-­order,” even madness, and in the process reveal that an emergent modern liberal multiculturalism depends on the governance of just this structurally necessary outlawed anger and morbidity within Black women. In the contrasting story of Joanna Marshall, Fauset’s There Is Confusion, at first glance, seems to represent the properly adjusted integrated racial personality for a “sane society,” a modern Black personality of assertive self-­expression and racial pride that eschews any resentment that might disrupt “civil” and “tolerant” cultural exchanges. Yet this subjectification of the Black cosmopolitan citizen through Joanna’s proper life undergoes its own dis-­integration. Just as Maggie is continually described in the novel through the language of social psychology as “morbidly obsessed,” the old-­moneyed Joanna Marshall is similarly characterized as having a “single-­minded” focus on becoming a stage actor and dancer. Although Joanna in her quest for Broadway stardom is continually rebuffed, she does not let these barriers become a source of her own “mental confusion,” or let them erect, in the novel’s language of social psychology, mental barriers that would keep her from still believing that she will be able to express who she is and be recognized for who she wants to be. But, like Maggie, Joanna has her own nervous breakdown. When all the Broadway agents refuse to let Joanna audition for shows, momentarily, Fauset’s narrator notes, Joanna fell into a “morbid introspection” in which her “mind was shocked out of its normal complacence” (204). In this “unhealthy” and “unbalanced” anger and disillusionment in which the “tiger of resentment” threatens to fragment Joanna’s personality (as it had wrecked Peter’s and Maggie’s sane civility), Joanna, however, finds not her virtue, but her well-­adjusted affects and attitudes, rewarded. When the lead dancer in a Broadway production of “The Dance of the Nations” falls ill, Joanna takes over the role, first substituting for the part of Negro folk culture, which the previous star had done in blackface, but then later representing America itself. In the racial allegory of this scene, one scripted within the language of social psychology, Joanna, unlike Maggie, can

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become the whitened Black exception within a new multicultural state (this “Dance of the Nations”) because she maintained her integrated personality, never letting her feelings, attitudes, and behaviors veer too far from “normal complacence” and into “morbid introspection.” Unlike Maggie, who can find only a limited independence and success behind the color line as a hairdresser to the Black community, Joanna becomes an honorary “white” American, and the token Black girl, as she literally wears a white face mask when she dances the part of “Lady Liberty” in this Broadway spectacle of hyphenated liberal pluralism.70 Even as the novel invites us to think that Joanna has become the Black exception for a postrace America, Joanna’s “nerve-­wrecking” pain does not go away, nor does her morbid introspection ever find the gift of laughter. In fact, in the novel’s seemingly compromised ending in which Joanna retreats into domesticity with Peter Bye, we see not womanly self-­sacrifice but Joanna’s embrace of her anger, melancholia, and her repressed morbid spite. She retreats less into married complacence than she denounces the cruel optimistic fantasy of liberal multiculturalism, and her role as the sane and civil Black exception. That Joanna’s anger and confusion drive her decision can be seen in her fragmented acceptance of Peter’s marriage proposal: “Of course, I’ll marry you, Peter. Dear, don’t think I don’t understand how hard things have been for you. I was such a stupid, before, when we were young. . . . Why, nothing in the world is so hard to face as this problem of being colored in America. See what it does to us—­sends Vera Manning South and Harley overseas, away from everybody they’ve ever known, so that they can live in—­ in a sort of bitter peace; forces you to consider giving up your wonderful gift as a surgeon to drift into any kind of work; drives me, and the critics call me a really great artist, Peter, to consider ordinary vaudeville. Oh, it takes courage to fight against it, Peter, to keep it from choking us, submerging us. But now that we have love, Peter, we have a pattern to guide us out of the confusion.” (283, my italics). Although, over the course of There Is Confusion, Joanna had chided Peter for being a “blessed pessimist” and not understanding that it would be “equality or perhaps even superiority on the part of the colored people in the arts” that would overturn this “stupid prejudice” (97), Joanna’s redemptive turn in the novel comes when she accedes to Peter’s pessimism,

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his “aching tiger of bitterness.” Amid this feeble sentimental paean to love—­a love more for Blackness and a Black community than marriage—­ Joanna cannot contain her anger, her melancholia, her maladjusted nervousness. She embraces not the multicultural meritocratic fantasy but an oxymoronic “bitter peace.” This “bitter peace” drives her to confusion even as she claims to see her way out of it, as is evident in the disjointed syntactic breakdown of her sentences. Her anger about the critics calling her a “great artist,” yet their willingness to permit her only a token representation on “vaudeville,” disorients her usual affective and linguistic self-­ control. Despite Joanna’s professions to the contrary, her marriage and achievement of racial uplift’s respectability indicates her “drowning” and “submergence” within morbid obsessions: the anger, envy, and debilitating emotions that Maggie had expressed and which a younger, “stupid[er]” Joanna had disdained. By embracing her Black self and the Black community and refusing to become the Black exception within the spectacle of liberal multiculturalism, Joanna goes mad—­at least according to social psychology’s prognostic time—­in order not to lose herself. Rescripting a dominant scientific narrative of Black mental disability, she embraces the confused possibilities within an “improper” life and its “paradox of color,” a “bitter peace,” and it is through this “creative maladjustment” that Fauset opens up the possibility for an unimagined and dis-­integrated future of Black freedom. Weathering Black Mental Distress

In all her fiction Fauset raises questions of which stories of Black women’s mental distress and suffering get told, and which get ignored, and for what reasons? Her novels, which many early critics dismissed as sentimental novels of manners with an “uncritical bourgeois perspective,”71 represent how these seemingly private, personal, and commonly gendered problems of mental distress actually have social and political causes. Even though, in There Is Confusion, Fauset focuses on social psychology’s managing of “bad affects” to recover and rehabilitate “deviant” Black subjects into multicultural citizens for a promised “postrace” society, in her later novel The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) she emphasizes more directly the specific racial, gender, and sexual governance behind Black women’s psychological maiming. Specifically, The Chinaberry Tree witnesses to a postwar biopolitics centered around Black women’s depression.

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I want to end this chapter with a brief discussion of Fauset’s largely ignored, and as frequently negatively reviewed, 1931 novel The Chinaberry Tree because this seemingly thin and fairly plotless middle-­class novel of manners registers and provides insights into how racism was a psychologically killing practice for post-­Reconstruction African Americans. Through its story of one restless, soul-­ sick, and hopeless “tragic mulatta,” Laurentine Strange, Fauset traces out what social scientists have increasingly come to refer to as the “weathering effects” of daily racism that place psychological burdens of stress, anxiety, and depression on many African Americans, particularly women, so as to deteriorate their health and their well-­being: and often with deadly consequences. In The Chinaberry Tree, Fauset reveals that Black women’s experience of mental pain and distress—­of despair, desperation, and anger, as we see in Laurentine Strange—­works to defend and maintain both a white supremacist social order and, at the same time, a supposedly “sane” Black patriarchal political alternative dependent on Black superwomen embracing the “homelife.” As her name indicates, Laurentine Strange is “strange,” a “disorderly” aberration from the normal behavioral and emotional life, or in the language of the novel, the “aliveness” that the contrasting strong, and working-­class, Black women such as Judy and Melissa Paul possess to assert their own desires and needs.72 Even though, as we have seen in previous chapters, the debilitation of the Black body was a biopolitical end point to realize and justify Black exclusion from liberal meritocratic citizenship, The Chinaberry Tree suggests that managing psychological health became equally a critical technology of control in the slow debilitation and “wearing out” of Black life.73 Yet even as Fauset identifies Laurentine as “sick” (61), Fauset plots out a recovery narrative in which the cure—­the protection of the strong Black man who will “order their [the women’s] well-­being” (336, 339, emphasis added)—­may be worse than the “disease.” Most of the action in The Chinaberry Tree occurs in the past time of the novel and is over when the story opens as the characters struggle to move beyond its traumatic consequences. The novel’s recovery plot, thus, builds its suspense on the question of the “redemption,” or, in the medicalized terms of the novel, “healing” and rehabilitation, of the two main protagonists: Laurentine Strange and her cousin Melissa Paul. In the backstory of the novel Sal Strange, Laurentine’s mother, had a scandalous affair with a white man, Colonel Halloway, who moved her from Alabama to set her up in a beautiful house with a chinaberry tree in Red Brook, New Jersey. Although Sal and Colonel Halloway’s sexual union

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recalls the familiar story of the plantation master’s sexual exploitation of his kept slave mistress, Aunt Sal insists that her relation with the now deceased Colonel Halloway was a “love story” and “she to this day still loves him” (2). After the birth of Laurentine, “Aunt Sal,” as she is generally called, remains a “maladjusted,” overly sensitive, tragic mulatta, ostracized from both the white and Black communities of the town who condemn her as having “vicious” or “bad blood,” thus seeing her moral impropriety as resulting, as an earlier race psychology maintained, from hereditary character defects. When Laurentine was a young girl, however, her mother’s sister Judy came to stay in Red Brook and temporarily relieved the family’s isolation. During Judy’s visit to Red Brook, she has an affair with the husband of one of her friends, Sylvester Forten, which results in the birth of another “illegitimate” daughter, Melissa Paul, who later, in the present time of the novel, falls in love and plans to wed unwittingly her half brother Malory Forten. Like Maggie in There Is Confusion, Melissa is a class outsider who has a “morbid” and restless ambition to be part of “larger and more brilliant settings” within the exclusive circles of the town’s Black bourgeois elite (71), and, as a consequence, she initially declines marriage with the “essentially sound” southerner Asshur Lane because she insists on wedding a wealthy and socially prominent man, Malory Forten (337). In the novel’s denouement, the “secrets” of the past are finally revealed, including that Maggie and Malory are half brothers and sisters. But if such a tragic disclosure of possible incest might have permanently broken the “strange” women, both Laurentine and Melissa are “adjusted” to a “healthy well-­ being” (medical language that Fauset herself uses) by the men in their lives (120): first, Dr. Denleigh, a former head of the National Medical Association, who heals Laurentine of her “melancholy” (113), and, second, Asshur Lane, whose “fine, sweet sanity, a strength,” in the novel’s final tableau under the chinaberry tree ensures Melissa’s recovery from her own feverish “morbid” desires that nearly caused her to break unwittingly one of the most fundamental taboos (336). Although Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree follows once again the medicalized recovery narrative of social psychology that we saw in There Is Confusion, in which the restless, angry Black woman (Melissa) must be cured by the good Black man’s “sweet sanity,” I want to focus on the rehabilitation storyline of the novel’s other main female protagonist, Laurentine Strange, for what it reveals about the complex biopolitics of Black women’s depression in the Jim Crow United States. Throughout the novel Laurentine is

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depicted variously as “melancholy” (113), as having an “irregular” life (69), as highly sensitive and “withdrawn to herself ” (19), as full of “restlessness” and “hopeless brooding” (98), and “sick” with “hopelessness.” Although the plot traces out how she learns to become “more normal” (98) once she is taken under the wing of Dr. and Mrs. Ismay (herself a trained nurse from Boston) and is courted by Dr. Denleigh, once again Fauset creates a contradictory novel in which there is more meaning in the “disorder” than in the cure, and indeed the novel blurs the boundaries between social psychology’s distinctions between maladjustment and integration, disorder and rehabilitation. Laurentine’s cure, Fauset implies, is forced, artificial, and silencing of the way that Black women like Laurentine speak and witness through their mental distress and pain. As Fauset demonstrates, Black women’s depression, whatever biochemical (or blood) roots may be behind it, is embedded within the unequal gendered and racial relations that Black women daily “weather” and which define their proper, “good” feminine identity. I want to look for a moment at Fauset’s description of Laurentine’s “bitter and futile life” before she is rescued by Dr. Denleigh for what it says about Laurentine’s “strange” character, and for what it says about Black women’s “strange” or “mad politics” of mental distress: But she [Laurentine] was sick. Sick not only with wounded pride and bewilderment, but with something far worse than that—­ hopelessness. For what could she expect? She would live like this always, seeing herself ripen, ripen—­she was twenty-­four, there were many years of cruel, burning, unsatisfied life still before her. Yes, she would ripen—­some poet had said it—­“ripen, fall and cease.” It would be exactly as though she had never been; like a leaf that had fallen too early; like a flower that someone had picked and deliberately thrown away,—­no worse, had carelessly dropped to be trampled on, withered. So had her mother and Colonel Halloway dropped her and she was being trampled on, withered. (61–­62) In the language describing Laurentine’s depression, Fauset indicates that her “pathology” is her body’s way of speaking, doubting, and trying to repress feelings and thoughts that are at odds with the “healthy” “sane” forms of respectable Black womanhood. Although Laurentine does not acknowledge the source of the poetic refrain that organizes her meditation, the line “ripen, fall, and cease” comes from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters” and refers to the temptation of the sailors to renounce

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the hard life of the sea to remain in the seductive tranquility of the home of the “lotus.” The irony here is that Fauset/Laurentine correlates the futile “numbing” life to the domestic scene (not the sea) and to the respectability expected of “good” race women. In contrast to this “good” and “unsensational/unfelt” life, however, is the “unsatisfied burning” (willed, angry, sexual) that Laurentine cannot act on due to codes of gender, race, and class imposed on Black women. Instead, she feels as if she can only ripen unfulfilled and “cease.” Thus, Laurentine’s depression, social withdrawal, and fatigue are, Fauset implies, both a sign of mental distress and a complex expression of insight: an anxiety and hopelessness voicing her frustration and inability to act in the face of systematic oppressions (whether those oppression are the everyday nerve-­wrecking psychological maimings imposed by white supremacism, or the codes of respectability placed on Black women). As a result, Laurentine turns her anger inward. In this scene, Fauset traces out a new language of Black women’s depression that identifies it not as emptiness within, but as a violence imposed from without on Black women’s vitality, or their flowering into themselves. Critics of Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree have frequently faulted the novel’s lack of racial protest as the narrative emphasizes domestic scenes of family conflict and romance.74 Fauset seeks, however, to reframe her readers’ understanding of racial violence, identifying it not just as occurring in the Jim Crow car, in the segregated school, or in the streets. For Black women, in particular, there is often an inescapable everyday atmosphere of toxic psychological stresses that take their slow attritional toll both on physiological health and mental well-­being. What is so telling about Fauset’s description of Laurentine’s “futile days” is the way in which the ordinary turns violent and lethal. Laurentine compares herself to a flower that had been tossed away and trampled upon, not by some spectacular traumatic event, but by an everyday diffuse atmosphere of race consciousness, ongoing discriminations, and quotidian injustices prompted by the whole business surrounding her mother and Colonel Halloway’s tabooed cross-­ racial contact. What has seemed so frustrating and so problematic about the aesthetic design of Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree, thus, actually points us toward its most significant insights: if Fauset gives us few scenes of racism, of the daily “nerve-­shattering” discrimination that she described so clearly in her World Tomorrow essay, it is because she wants to avoid such a melodramatic naming of events. Racism is for Laurentine, like the unspoken gender codes that structure her life, part of the atmosphere, like the culti-

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vating soil and weather for the flower: something that will allow her only to ripen, fall, and cease. Laurentine does not, indeed cannot, name specific trauma events because it is simply growing up in the racist climate of Red Brook—­one in which the rape of Black women is turned into a sentimental story—­that thwarts her thriving. For Laurentine, the affair between Colonel Halloway and her mother Sal serves as the symbolic shorthand to express all the systematic and interlocking oppressions that she experiences. She does not need to enumerate details: her mother’s story in itself names the complex history of white supremacism and the sexual exploitation of Black women’s bodies, but what adds to this ongoing stress is that daily experiences and assaults are mystified within modernity’s stories of postracial tolerance and “love.” At the same time, since social psychology names an “integrated” psyche as the only “sane” path for healthy psychological development, Laurentine cannot name clearly, even to herself, her anger at the reality of the political and social arrangements that continue to deny Black women security and an ability to achieve self-­realization. She can only turn inward to monitor, as social psychology advised, her own maladjusted “sickness.” Just as Fauset depicts a “fuller psychology” of Black women’s depression and stunted “ripening” under white supremacism, Fauset also underscores the work that this depression does in maintaining the status quo. Laurentine turns her anger and melancholy inward to mourn a lost self and to starve herself rather than speak out. And indeed many of the novel’s conflicts result from Laurentine’s failures to speak and to act out (and up): for example, to tell Maggie why she is freezing her out, or to explain to Maggie the family’s past history with the Fortens. Laurentine’s resignation to her soul sickness keeps her silent and compliant. Thus, when confronted by the daily microaggressions of racism, she continually accepts them like the weather, refusing to become angry, to think “insane” thoughts, and to do more than despair. As a consequence, for example, when a New York City restaurant’s wait staff are rude to Dr. Denleigh and Laurentine, and refuse to serve them dessert, Laurentine counsels Stephen, “it would have been sheer folly to do anything but go” (312). Although The Chinaberry Tree seems a “failed” novel with a “failed” protest narrative, and with passive and “depressed” women characters who seem to need rescue by a “sane” Black male authenticity, it is ultimately a novel about failure itself—­about the failure of well-­being that seeps into the blood, and damages the nerves through the daily atmospheric microaggressions of racism. Throughout the novel, Fauset plays

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on the familiar language of “blood” in U.S. race history, one that was particularly used at the end of the nineteenth century in famous cases like Plessy v. Ferguson to erect scientific biological barriers against the ambiguity of racial difference and to legitimate segregation. But the irony in Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree is that if blood is shown not to determine racial character, racism, on the other hand, does seem to slow drip into the blood, into the body, into the cells and neurons so that the daily psychological assaults do become a stress-­induced somatic reality. In explaining herself to Dr. Denleigh, Laurentine repeatedly reminds him of a determining moment from her childhood. When Laurentine started school, one of her former childhood friends, Lucy Stone, suddenly shunned her because her mother warned her to steer clear of the Strange family and their “bad blood.” Lucy, however, wanting to restore her friendship with Laurentine, takes a tiny dull knife to her friend’s hand and asks her, “Don’ you want me to cut yo arm and let it out?” Even though this scene at first glance seems to point out the cruel social prejudices that keep the “Strange” women pariahs in the Red Brook community, and to highlight the naïveté of those who think it is biology and not social conventions that create racial, class, and gender hierarchies, Laurentine’s constant repetition of this scene about “blood” suggests that she felt, sensed, and recognized the hurt of its partial truth. The constant stressful weathering of racism and “nerve-­shattering psychological assaults” did get into her blood, or the physiological, neurological body—­literally causing anxiety, social withdrawal, nervousness, obsessions, and depression. Racism’s psychological assaults do get in—­and not just on—­her nerves and blood. Despite the fact that Laurentine in the novel’s conclusion is putatively saved by the good Black man, Dr. Denleigh, who makes her “ready for living” and “adjusted,” it is finally, Fauset implies, sisterhood, not male protection, or a stable homelife, that cures her. In the final tableau of the couples underneath the chinaberry tree, it can appear, as if the women have been redeemed by love and marriage. But although invoking a salvific image of a united Black community in the face of white supremacism, Fauset ends with an image of the women’s resistant interiority: “Caught up in an immense tide of feeling, they [Laurentine and Melissa] were unable to focus their minds on home, children, their men. . . . Rather like spent swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel of the solid ground beneath their feet” (340). In part, as we have seen, Laurentine’s depression had resulted from imposed normative gendered restrictions,

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so it is telling that in the closing “happy ending” neither Laurentine nor Melissa is thinking of their womanly duty to others. What Fauset highlights is Laurentine’s reclaiming of her own body, allowing herself to feel, “sense with all her being” for the first time and to care for herself. This closing tableau might seem sentimental, overly domestic, or incongruous, but in a racist order that depends on the psychological maiming of Black women—­and patriarchal-­imposed myths of strong Black womanhood—­ such self-­care has political ramifications. For Fauset the transformation of a patriarchal and white supremacist social order will begin when Black women enact their own radical self-­care and creative maladjustments that allow them to claim the “solid ground beneath their feet.” Coda

In his 1967 speech before the American Psychological Association, Martin Luther King argued that the civil rights movement needed the help of social scientists. The focus, he argued, however, should not be on “destructive maladjustments,” but on “creative maladjustments,” and, punning on the name of the NACCP, King argued there needed to be a new race organization called the “International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.”75 Whereas King argued that there should be things to “which we must never adjust ourselves,” despite psychology’s evaluations of mental health, such as segregation, economic inequality, militarism, and racial violence, the social-­psychological language of maladjustments and integrated personalities during the Harlem Renaissance functioned to shape the crystallization of a Black citizenship for the liberal multicultural state. In Joanna’s self-­recognition within a contradictory “dis-­integrating” logic of “bitter peace” and within Laurentine’s radical act of Black women’s self-­care, however, Fauset’s There Is Confusion and The Chinaberry Tree fracture social psychology’s prognosis for what will bring African Americans, and the nation, “social sanity.” Enacting her own creative maladjustment, the artist Joanna rejects the promise of upward mobility as the Black exception, for she realizes that this practice of liberal multiculturalism serves as a system of minority governance and perpetuates inequalities to which she must never adjust herself. Amid the novel’s seemingly harmonious sentimental ending of racial reconciliation and domestic bliss, Fauset leaves her readers with the “creative maladjustment” of a “Black bitter peace” that will not forget and that will not re-

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nounce “nerve-­wrecking” anger and its dis-­integrating potential for alternative Black futures. Despite the therapeutic management of the character’s nonnormative feelings and behaviors according to the scripts of social psychology, similarly, The Chinaberry Tree ends with the confusing excess of that which is untreated—­and seemingly untreatable—­the melancholic recognition of a delayed emancipation that will only start when Black women claim their own self-­care. Even though the new scientific social psychology offered Locke and Fauset a language in which to witness and work through a Black mental distress and pain that had remained invisible behind myths about African Americans’ “gifts of laughter,” or about strong Black superwomen, they also struggled with the epistemological and political dilemmas that emerged in writing this pain within narratives of liberal rehabilitation. Never fully adjusted, Fauset’s novels leave us with an untreatable and unrehabilitated “complex of color” (as Walter White defined it): if both Locke and Fauset raise questions about what is the proper response to racial injustice, inequality, and discrimination, the answer, they imply, just may be that there is no “sane” response, or at least not one that can be articulated within the sane-­tary language of a liberal multiculturalism’s citizenship-­making projects.

Epilogue The Futures Past of Black Debility

In February 2010 First Lady Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign to end an “epidemic of childhood obesity” within a generation. Working in conjunction with the simultaneously commissioned Presidential Task Force on Childhood Obesity as well as the Departments of Education, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, in April of that same year the First Lady convened a Childhood Obesity Summit that identified five key steps to address the crisis in childhood health, from improving school lunch programs and eradicating food deserts to teaching families responsible eating habits modeled on revised “myplate” nutritional guidelines.1 While many public health officials praised Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign as an environmentally focused alternative to fat stigmatization and victim-­blaming because of its emphasis on active lifestyles and fresh food availability in underserved neighborhood, critics on the right railed against the First Lady’s antiobesity campaign as the social engineering of a granola-­crunching nanny state cultural elite. On her short-­lived reality TV show Alaska (December 2010), for example, former vice-­presidential candidate Sarah Palin proudly flaunted her children’s right to dessert by making s’mores and delivering Girl Scout cookies to a Pennsylvania school.2 At the same time Republican supporters of “Let’s Move” such as Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss hijacked the First Lady’s campaign to revive persistent stereotypes about dysfunctional minority families and to renew calls for personal responsibility: “We need to call on parents first and foremost to take an active part. . . . While steps can and should be taken to improve . . . access to healthy foods . . . nothing can replace the direct involvement of caregivers at home.”3 Obama’s antiobesity campaign, as this study of the post-­Reconstruction 219

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biopolitics of African American citizenship has shown, however, carries on the legacy of Lugenia Hope and the women of Atlanta’s Neighborhood Union, and, in turn, it reveals the emancipatory and disciplinary tension we have seen throughout the long—­and continued—­history of a racialized vitality politics. On the one hand, it calls much-­needed and urgent attention to the slow violence that continues to debilitate and decapacitate Black life to secure white supremacism and racial hierarchies amid a twenty-­first-­century insistence on a supposed post-­Obama era/postrace meritocracy. On the other hand, the “Let’s Move” campaign’s health politics and its corporate-­driven moralism about “fat panic” based on unreliable Body Mass Indexes (BMIs)4 reveals how a language of debility (obesity) still functions as part of a neoliberal politics of poverty governance and the racial incorporation of “black exceptions” (as we saw in the last chapter) into the multicultural state. In framing her antiobesity health campaign before the Congressional Black Caucus on September 16, 2010, Obama makes clear the links we have seen between health and a slow racial violence: “And it’s a lot harder to really feel what those statistics mean, because the truth is that in too many of our communities, childhood obesity has become that kind of slow, quiet, everyday threat that doesn’t always appear to warrant the headline urgency of some of the other issues that we face” (my italics).5 In 1937, NAACP President Louis Wright delivered before delegates to the twenty-­eighth convention an identical resonant warning: “There is no use saving the Negro from being lynched, or educating for sound citizenship if he is to die prematurely as a result of murderous neglect by America’s health agencies solely on account of his race or color.”6 Unlike other neoliberal humanitarian health campaigns that, as Didier Fassin has argued, often replace a demand for political and social justice and equality with a moralistic protection of populations at risk,7 the “Let’s Move” campaign points out a long intertwined history of Black freedom struggles, a right to health, and practices of antiblack debility. Thus, on July 13, 2010, just five months after launching her “Let’s Move” campaign, to take another example, Michelle Obama addressed the NAACP’s annual convention in Kansas City. Situating the “Let’s Move” antiobesity campaign as a continuation of civil rights struggles, Obama asserted that the battles of the past that prompted lunch counter sit-­ins, bus boycotts, and marches on the Washington are pyrrhic victories unless civil rights leaders also assure the health of Black citizens. Although Obama acknowledges the pressing problems still facing the community from “crumbling schools” to the “economic downturn,” she urged

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the NAACP delegates to highlight a hidden crisis that must be taken “as seriously as improving under-­achieving schools, as seriously as eliminating youth violence, of stopping the spread of HIV/AIDs or any of the other issues the we know are devastating our communities.”8 In seeking to render a violence that is gradual and out of sight, whose effects are often delayed and dispersed over time, as visible and as imperative as police shootings and mass incarceration, Obama stands on the shoulder of her ancestors—­of earlier race leaders who linked a more complete emancipation to a Black vitality politics. Like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, like Lugenia Hope and Mary Fitzbutler Waring, Michelle Obama does not just advocate for policies to end health inequalities and the medical racism that often precipitates it. She insists on expanded understandings of racial violence to include the slow accumulative debilitation of African American health, the not just letting die, but the letting maim (to neither live nor die) that, as we have seen, in the previous chapters on early twentieth-­century Black cultural production, has often been overshadowed by the more headline-­grabbing, spectacular, and immediate harms of lynching, police shootings, or mass incarceration.9 In the “Let’s Move” campaign, Obama pinpoints the devaluating and depletion of Black lives that has been often ignored because this logic of disposability operates according to a different temporality and through differentiated risks and vulnerabilities. As Nirmala Erevelles has argued, citizenship—­and its accompanying political and civil rights—­only become meaningful when the corporeal, material, and psychological conditions of democracy are realizable,10 and the story of race and health has long been about a biopolitical governing of who should—­and how they should and to what extent—­have the proper life and the environmental preconditions (as we saw early twentieth-­century African American women described) for this democratic citizenship. Despite its campaign to realize a more complete emancipation for African Americans, the “Let’s Move” campaign, however, at the same time, also discloses how an African American tradition of vitality politics can also cooperate with a “benevolent neoliberalism.”11 As Jonathan Metzl has written, “healthism” today has acquired a moralizing, normalizing, and colonizing function within our global capitalist culture, and the “Let’s Move” campaign mines this “healthism” to exert a supposedly therapeutic and racially uplifting discipline on a Black underclass. The “Let’s Move” campaign’s “health” and “obesity” discourse, in its targeting of minority communities, as we saw in the long history of African Amer-

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ican vitality politics, saves lives, but simultaneously can function to retrain, redistribute, and allocate African Americans within a “white-­ like,” if not white, neoliberal culture. As part of this racial incorporation, the “Let’s Move” campaign “en-­whitens” certain bodies of color, as Theo Goldberg terms it, while simultaneously reracializing or blackening other poor bodies of color as twentieth-­ first-­ century “un-­ sanitary” or “unhealthy” citizens. Even as it combats a racialized slow violence, the “Let’s Move” antiobesity campaign reveals how neoliberalism has rehabilitated and repurposed the linked practices of antiblackness and debility to implement a social agenda of market solutions and entrepreneurial self-­care as the key to racial progress. In contrast to public health officials who invoke an epidemic language about obesity in the “Let’s Move” campaign, working-­class African Americans, when surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control about the health concerns they have for their children, list as their top three fears teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and smoking, in that order.12 Only upper-­middle-­class parents, regardless of race, list childhood obesity as among their top health concerns. Thus, panic-­driven public health campaigns around obesity may say more about advocates’ economic status than they do about health. Although weight gain among white men has been occurring steadily since the 1950s, moreover, it is significant that obesity only became an “epidemic” worthy of moral and political panic in the post 9/11 Bush era when it became disproportionately associated with women, the poor, and people of color.13 Obesity, thus, circulates among more affluent Americans as a physical marker of a feared decline in status they believe they can prevent, even in a time of economic recession, by a proper healthy lifestyle, self-­control, and risk management, and it stands in as the embodied antithesis of the values of a disciplined entrepreneurial self-­care that supposedly merits success in the privatized neoliberal nation state. In contrast, for many working-­class African Americans “weight” is less a problem, not only because they face greater immediate risks, from unemployment to police violence to poor education, but because they don’t fear fat as the affectively charged sign of falling status, or as a sign of an undisciplined female body, nor do they always share its associative meaning and values among a new mobile, multicultural elite of color. Instead, as the Centers for Disease Control surveys indicate, working-­ class African Americans recognize a broader sociopolitical inequitable distribution of risks, vulnerabilities, and “ill-­ defined” inequalities, of which food deserts may only be one “symptom.”

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In my original plan for this book, I had intended to say much more about the legacy of vitality politics in Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” antiobesity campaign, and to unpack its continued practice in Flint, Michigan’s lead-­poisoned water crisis. While I was completing this book and meditating on the afterlife of these historical intersections of slow violence, Black debility, and fugitive justice, however, the 2016 presidential election occurred, and all seemed changed, changed utterly. I began to suspect that concluding with these stories of historical recurrence may not fully address the questions we need to ask about the long history of antiblackness and African American debility: what are the stories worth telling in our current twenty-­ first-­ century cultural moment and, as importantly, what are the questions we need to ask in telling these stories to intervene and to imagine alternative social, economic, and political possibilities? During and now after the 2016 election, as it has been frequently noted, the United States witnessed a resurgence of white nationalism (or at least its unabashed expression) and intensified antiblackness. But what interested me was how the material-­semiotic sign of Black debility functioned as a key relationality within a less overt conservative white racism, which reconstituted white citizenship for a supposedly postrace multicultural America. However, this time questions of Black debility had a different valence. Although, as in an earlier post-­Reconstruction period, Black debility was once again being invoked as part of a white backlash against racial progress, it had morphed. No longer was white America defining itself against a strategically constituted or permitted Black debility: it was both reappropriating this positionality as a sign of its own victimization while reauthenticating a decontextualized maiming of Black lives as a comparative sign of their inherent and implacable “noncompliant” debility. We can see this story of white America’s “rehabilitation” and the utility of Black debility most clearly in the current narratives about the opioid crisis that has caused political commentators on the right and the left to question white America’s decline and possible future, and also Black America’s intractability. In the remainder of this epilogue I will, therefore, offer a discursive reading of what I call “the gentrification of the drug crisis” narrative in public debates about white America’s needed rehabilitation in the face of the opioid crisis in order to trace out some final thoughts about Black America’s structurally necessary debility in U.S. citizenship-­making stories. Then, as a way of demonstrating how this narrative has entrenched

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itself in Hollywood’s popular overcoming narratives, I will offer a brief analysis of the 2015 film Southpaw that, even though seemingly offering a typical sentimentalized story about cross-­racial friendship in the boxing world, reveals the new logic of a white identity politics that, like the drug crisis itself, gentrifies a Black positionality and displaces its devaluation of Black life in order to circulate a dominant narrative about America’s “great (white) hope.” Specifically, in the 2015 film Southpaw, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and is directed by the African American Antoine Fuqua, we see how the main character, Billy Hope, referred to as the boxing world’s “great white hope,” discloses how a liberal white antiracist narrative of America’s comeback story and contemporary prison reform still depend on the drug-­addicted pain and suffering of an inherently different Black debility. Rehabilitating Whiteness: Prison Reform and Black Debility in the Opioid Crisis

During the 2016 presidential campaign there was a lot of talk about America’s—­or at least white rural and suburban America’s—­drug epidemic. As the candidates noted, citing the most recent available statistics, 37,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2013, but what captured headlines, as Vice News noted, was the fact that drug overdoses “killed white people more than anyone else,”14 or, as the New York Times reported on February, 2, 2016, “Addiction [Now] Has a White Face.”15 A study published in JAMA Psychiatry in July 2014 reported that nearly 90 percent of recent heroin users were white, and about 75 percent of these new users came from rural or suburban areas, many in states that are GOP strongholds.16 While campaigning in key primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, as a consequence, traditionally conservative law and order Republican candidates broke silences and confessed their own family histories with drug abuse. Jeb Bush shared his daughter’s struggle with addiction and the felony charges she had faced for “illegally possessing prescription drugs”;17 Carly Fiorina admitted her daughter’s struggle with alcohol and opiate addiction before her death from an overdose; and Ted Cruz disclosed his older half-­sister Miriam’s similar overdose death, explaining, “[t]hese tragedies are happening in human lives all over this country—­it’s the human journey” (emphasis added).18 Although not sharing personal family histories, Ohio governor John

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Kasich also addressed what he called (repeating the language of news stories in the New York Times as well as on NPR) the “gentrification of the drug crisis.” In 2014 Governor Kasich had passed in Ohio the first legislation to make naloxone available without a prescription because, at the time, the state had the second highest number of overdose deaths. I want for a moment to quote Governor Kasich’s comments before a Drug Addiction Forum in New Hampshire because they point out the troubling racialization, structuring antiblack debility and emergent white identity politics within various survivalist narratives about America’s drug epidemic and the push toward more humane responses, replacing incarceration with treatment. Speaking to a largely white audience in New Hampshire, a state still 96 percent white, according to the government census data, Kasich noted, This disease knows no bounds, knows no income, knows no neighborhood; it’s everywhere. . . . And sometimes I wonder how African-­ Americans must have felt when drugs were awash in their community and nobody watched. Now it’s in our communities, and now all of a sudden, we’ve got forums, and God bless us, but think about the struggles that other people had.19 As Kasich’s comments attest, drug addiction should be reframed as a colorblind disease, and five months later, in July 2016, Congress passed a landmark piece of legislation referred to as the Opioid Bill, or more officially as the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), that shifted low-­level drug violations from the criminal justice system to treatment programs. The promotion of such a public health response represented a significant reframing and overturning of the nation’s response to addiction during the Reagan era “war on drugs,” and we should not minimize the importance of this shift toward rehabilitation. But such a therapeutic rethinking of policy also depends on a new race transcending and seemingly more civilized disability (or addiction) narrative that taps into a structuring antiblackness to rehumanize innocent white users, just as Black debility had functioned to legitimate white labor privileges and enfranchisement during the post-­Reconstruction period. This “gentrification of the drug crisis narrative,” as we might call it, discloses not just a racist disparity between an earlier zero tolerance of Black crack users in the 1980s and 90s and a contemporary public health response to sympathetic white heroin users. It also offers insights more generally into an

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emergent dynamic of a Black debility within an unmarked white identity politics that often comes to stand in for contemporary liberal antiracist multicultural discourse. To begin to unpack how antiblackness structures the white identity politics of this seemingly more civilized “gentrification of the drug crisis” narrative, we need only look at the legacy of a long history of antiblackness and health that I have tried to recover throughout the previous chapters. As I have argued throughout this book, drawing on the work of Black Studies scholars such as Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, and Alexander Weheliye, antiblackness encompasses more than racial bias, discrimination, white privilege, and even violence. Antiblackness refers to a foundational structuring differentiation that continues to govern Black lives in the afterlife of slavery. Not only, thus, have white supremacists invoked antiblackness as a self-­identifying racial difference, but U.S. liberal notions of personhood, citizenship, and agency have also depended on figurations of antiblackness, or of Black disposability and worthlessness and indifference to Black suffering and pain as a structuring force. In his comments before the Drug Addiction Forum, Kasich, on one hand, calls for empathy, but he also invokes the larger shaping logic of a post–­civil rights white liberal identity politics (one that goes unmarked as “color-­blind” amid the alarm over a more clearly vocal white supremacism): this white identity politics depends on, to borrow the language of the drug epidemic narratives, a white gentrification and appropriation of a Black positionality in the call for a universalizing empathy.20 As Kasich’s comments before the drug forum’s white audience note, whites are the new Blacks, for whites now share the suffering and pain historically associated with an abstracted Black experience, and as a consequence, the United Stated can now move beyond identity politics to embrace, as Ted Cruz indicated, a universal “human story.” But this supposed postrace, postidentity politics is its own white identity politics, one that although seemingly antiracist (built as it is around a common pain of addiction), obscures the structuring position of a differential Black debility. To recover the specific tropes, imagery, and plots that structured these user-­centered gentrifications of the drug epidemic narratives I want to look at a long journalism piece that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine on August 3, 2014 written by David Amsden and entitled the “New Face of Heroin.”21 There are, it should be noted, glaring omissions in this user-­ centered story. As Sam Quinones notes in Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (2015), public discussions of the drug epidemic

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tend to avoid analyzing larger global macroeconomic forces, growing inequality, and the U.S.’s quick fix culture.22 Even though most coverage does address the role that Big Pharma played in burying for years studies that warned of the addictive side effects of OxyContin and other slow-­ release pain killers, this larger contextualization of America’s drug problem works largely to garner additional sympathy for the profiled white users whose addictions are scripted as the result of illness, accident, or mental disabilities and not criminal intent. Such a focus on innocent white users in pain both individualizes the drug epidemic and, at the same time, absolves the fallen white American from culpability, or at least full culpability, that normally would have accrued as part of neoliberal personal responsibility narrative, as it did in relation to Black users during the crack epidemic. As the title of David Amsden’s Rolling Stone article suggests, “The New Face of Heroin,” the framing of the drug gentrification narrative depends on a foundational contrast between white and Black “faced” America, and what makes the current drug crisis so “monstrous” is not just its quantitative death toll, but its disruption of a presumed racial ordering that linked Blackness and criminality, and in particular tied the drug criminality of welfare queens and dope pushers to Black people. Throughout his article Amsden repeatedly underscores the “syringe out of water,” or urban walkup, peculiarity of the epidemic. As the initial subheading under­ scores—­“How Did Idyllic Vermont Become America’s Heroin Capital”—­ Vermont is an “idyllic,” or “bucolic” place of “horse farms,” “quaint hamlets,” and “yoga studios,” and thus it is shocking to see “an urban scourge freakishly resurfacing in the least likely of rural sanctuaries.” Such a language of disease contagion overlaid with racial invasion underscores whiteness’s innocence as a property—­both geographic and corporeal—­ under threat due not to its own intrinsic immorality or worthlessness but from something alien invading and seemingly beyond its control or volition. Although Amsden does not scapegoat predatory Mexican or Afghani drug lords crossing the borders to infect innocent Americans, it is worth noting that many conservative news sources such as the Weekly Standard (December 14, 2016) accused the Obama administration of hampering Drug Enforcement Administration operations to shut down “distribution networks” based in Mexico and Afghanistan,23 and presidential candidate Donald Trump’s less euphemistic rallying cries to “build the wall” and deport “Mexican criminals” was often invoked during the presidential primaries to conjure up this racialized invasion in order to reweaponize the war on drugs.

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As I have shown throughout Vitality Politics, opposing the innocence and immunity of rights worthy (or here treatment-­worthy) white citizens against an imbricated criminal and debilitated Blackness has a long history dating back to slavery and recurring throughout the post-­ Reconstruction era. The deserving innocence of the white user in drug gentrification narratives such as Amsden’s Rolling Stone article depends on just this shadow presence of a criminalized Black, and largely male, debility, which if not attached to specific predators, stands as the sign of a disposable class of addicts contrastingly unworthy of compassion. Nowhere is this constitutive function of antiblackness more apparent than in the user profiles that lie at the center of white America’s drug epidemic narratives. Like almost all drug gentrification narratives—­and I do not have space here to enumerate just how pervasive this framing is—­Amsden’s “The New Face of Heroin” begins with a twentieth-­first-­century story of fallen white womanhood—­one all too histrionically reminiscent of earlier nineteenth and twentieth-­century yellow journalistic exposes to end prostitution or curb immigration. The “new face of heroin” is frequently gendered female and rifts on some incarnation of the American sweetheart disabled by depression and the trauma of parental divorce, or of the good suburban mom gatewayed into addiction through the overprescribing of painkillers while in recovery from surgery. Thus, Amsden’s report begins with a lengthy account of Eve Rivait, a seemingly typical teen who loves horses and rescues abused animals from racetracks. This tender-­hearted Eve’s stable life, however, goes downhill when the “disintegration of her parents’ marriage” creates a “toxic” home environment, and her grandfather dies from cancer, leaving behind a “medicine cabinet full of OxyContin” that she hoped “would drive the pain away.” One night after her boyfriend walks out on her, she in desperation decides to inject herself with heroin, having learned how to use a syringe from her volunteer work with horses. As Eve explains, she never thought of herself as a junkie because junkies were only in places such as “Baltimore and the Bronx,” but suddenly she found herself in “this very harsh world” of “slum lords, crack shacks and Puerto Rican gangs” as she runs heroin from New York City to Vermont to pay for her habit. As Eve’s language indicates, and Amsden’s story recapitulates as foundational to the drug gentrification narrative, junkies and drug lords are Black, and although Amsden’s story recounts Eve’s descent into the rabbit hole of a racialized criminality, it is still understood that she is different, that she is not like the people of “Baltimore and the Bronx” living in “crack

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shacks.” Fortunately, Amsden notes, concluding Eve’s story, she was arrested for “illegal possession of prescription drugs” (like Jeb Bush’s own daughter) and not caught while transporting drugs, which would have been a major felony. As a result, her case was referred to the drug courts and Eve was recommended for treatment. Such a happy ending, however, Amsden fails to note is far less common for African Americans arrested for similar drug possession. As Nancy Nicosia, John M. MacDonald, and Jeremy Arkes note in the American Journal of Public Health, there is a persistent disparity in the diversion of Black and Hispanics relative to whites to drug courts due to racial biases and much lower graduation rates since the treatment programs fail to address the obstacles that Blacks face in successfully “complying” with the rules of the program: a lack of employment, of support networks, of access to education, and poverty.24 Thus, in what we might call Amsden’s narrative of rehabilitated white citizenship amid the opioid crisis, white American decline is signified by its fall into a “Black world,” and its proximity to people of color. In these drug crisis narratives, innocent white Americans are “gentrifying” or entering into a Black world, but though they are a part of this stereotypical Blackness, they are still apart from its criminalized debility: their redemption, their merit of treatment and compassion, is premised on their difference from a constitutively necessary decontextualized Black debility that is said to remain “noncompliant” to treatment because the drug court’s individualized therapy programs ignore the larger structural problems that might cause African Americans to self-­medicate by using drugs. The white addict’s story—­a largely feminized fallen woman’s story—­is one of disease and disability receptive to treatment (Eve, after all, was depressed) in contrast to the dehumanized and criminalized Black addict whose pain, suffering, and debility are abstracted from a long history of the devaluation of Black life and from the structural inequalities, lack of educational opportunities, and unemployment that decrease their chances of recovery. Just as post-­Reconstruction America had differentiated an “incorrigibly sick and dying Negro” from a vigorous and vital white laboring stock, the narrative of the opioid crisis similarly abstracts and re-­ essentializes a comparative untreatable Black addict to decriminalize the redeemable white opioid victim. In recent years political commentators have focused on an alt right’s self-­fashioning within a victimization narrative under the threat of a U.S. third-­worlding. Such a victimization narrative, it has been argued, has fueled Donald Trump’s appeal. But in highlighting the white identity poli-

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tics within a liberal antiracist drug gentrification narrative, I want to distinguish it from this obvious racist discourse despite the family resemblance. In liberal white identity politics, white Americans are less victimized by people of color than they are said to share their colorblind human fate of being dis-­abled, or addicted, and thus they lay claim to a gentrified (and supposedly empathy-­producing) space of Blackness: literally here by a turn of fate that takes them from the suburban or rural oases to the “crack house.” But, as I have tried to show throughout Vitality Politics, “disabilities” have never been race neutral or universal, as the intentional or negligent maiming of Black lives within toxic environments, unsafe workplaces, or disparate health care access indicates. Instead of a resurgent white nationalism, this drug gentrification narrative co-­opts and recycles liberal narratives of coalition building across racial lines around a shared precarity in a gig economy in the wake of postindustrialization. But, as Judith Butler has noted, such notions of shared vulnerability or fate in the new global marketplace economy ignore the disproportionately higher risks and vulnerabilities that poor people of color face.25 The drug gentrification narrative is scaffolded on just this false equivalency as well as, I would add, a historical amnesia about the function of Black debility within U.S. projects of citizenship making. To couch heroin addiction as a disease that brings white people down to a level of Black suffering depends not only on a number of reductive fallacies (including that Blackness is a sign of dysfunctionality and not its own stable identity), but it also leaves in place an antiblackness that links African Americans to disposability and death. For Black drug users to become part of this (white) recovery narrative, there would need, first, as a consequence, to be assistance programs to help them find employment, support networks, secure housing, and education. But there would also need to be, second, a transformation of the relationality of Black debility, as we have seen, in the constituting of white citizenship. To tell the story of the opioid crisis requires more than a sentimental account of fallen white innocence, but a new speculative unruly narrative that captures the slow violence and unspectacular quasi-­events of systematic racism that over time debilitate Black bodies and minds, invite addiction, and make African Americans less receptive to a therapeutic treatment designed for middle-­class white Americans looking for a second chance. As Amsden’s account indicates, to solve the nation’s crisis of addiction for all, we need to trouble the recentering of white normativity within accounts of the opioid crisis.

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Beyond the Great White Hope

The white identity politics of neoliberal antiracism that is revealed in the drug gentrification narrative and the decriminalization of addiction as a public health problem, however, also circulates within contemporary popular culture as well. To tease out the future morphing of a politics of Black debility, I want to turn in my concluding example to the 2015 boxing film Southpaw to expose the seductive power, but also troubling constitutive antiblackness, that continues to structure U.S. citizenship-­making projects. As I indicated earlier, Southpaw tells the story of the boxer Billy Hope (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who, hailed as the “great white hope,” invokes without subtlety the history of Jim Jeffries and his famous 1910 bout with the Black boxer Jack Johnson. In the film’s opening scene, when Billy Hope wins the lightweight championship of the world, he tellingly defeats a Black boxer named Jones, as if to further alliteratively trace out the parallels. Although the opening images of Billy’s distorted, pulverized, and roaring face underscore that Billy is the “beast” renowned for standing tall amid a pummeling, while coming back to win with his southpaw punch, Billy is also, in contrast to his Black and Hispanic opponents, marked as a family man: Billy still fervently adores his sweetheart wife whom he met over 10 years earlier as a teenager in a group home, and he is equally doting on his precocious nine-­year-­old daughter. When Billy’s wife, Maureen, is shot by the bodyguard of his rival, the Colombian boxer Escobar, during a public brawl, Billy, however, spirals downward from being the “great white hope” to being the “great white dope,” as the newspaper headlines heartlessly pun. The long arc of the movie’s plot traces rather predictably Billy’s comeback to reclaim his title, but only after Billy, as a result of his wife’s death, becomes addicted to pills and alcohol to heal his pain and wrecks his car, thus hospitalizing him and causing him to lose custody of his daughter. Despite Billy’s spiral downward due to his drug addiction in the first half of the movie, he only hits rock bottom when he loses his home, his cars, and all his bank accounts so that, jobless and destitute, he is forced to rent a 300-­square-­foot room in a run-­down, inner-­city apartment building seemingly tenanted only by Blacks and Hispanics and to take a janitorial job at a neighborhood gym that was formerly held by a Black man.26 Even though Southpaw depicts a familiar fall and redemption story, this supercrip heroic overcoming overlaps with and perpetuates an emerg-

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ing white rehabilitation narrative defined through a contrasting disposable Black debility. In going from the great white hope to the great white dope, Billy assumes the position of ‘Blackness,” as Governor Kasich argued. Not only does Billy dwell in a Black/colored neighborhood full of bad mothers strung out on “crack,” while their multiple young children scream with neglect, but he stages his comeback by asking to be trained by Tick Wills, the retired coach of the Black boxer Jones whom he defeated for the lightweight title. Wills, however, now runs a neighborhood gym that seeks to uplift at-­risk African American boys by teaching them the discipline of sports along with other life lessons. In the friendship that develops between Tick and Billy, Southpaw in many ways reverses familiar racial narratives within Hollywood cinema. As Ed Guerrero has noted, in the traditional interracial buddy film, the white partner typically assumes the more rational, paternalistic role to the undisciplined Black other,27 but here, in seemingly plagiarized Karate Kid scenes, Tick teaches Billy the discipline, the anger management, and the hope he needs to get his life back on track. As his name “Wills” implies, Tick represents the personal responsibility (the sheer will) that is part of the neoliberal narrative of upward mobility as well as recovery. Thus, at one of Billy’s lowest points, after his daughter says she never wants to see him again, Tick motivates Billy by reminding him, “You define yourself.” Although it is a Black man that shows Billy Hope that he is worthy of rehabilitation and restores his optimism in white America’s comeback and survival from its drug crisis, Southpaw taps into and repeats the gentrification narrative’s constitutive logic that Blackness still stands as the contrasting validating image of a disposable and unworthy debility. Paralleling Billy’s growing friendship with Tick is also Billy’s mentoring of one of Tick’s boxing students, Hoppy. Even though Hoppy explains to a surprised Billy that his name comes from his “hopping” like a bunny as a child, even Billy recognizes that hop/hops is urban slang for heroin. Thus, Southpaw invokes a white rehabilitation story in which the sympathetic white user—­a user like Billy driven to drugs only because of personal misfortune and a disabling depression and pain—­stands in contrast to the always present Black other. As Billy makes his climb back to the top of the boxing world, Hoppy, in contrast, is shot by his drug addicted father when Hoppy tries to protect his mother from her partner’s violence. In a tender moment in the film, a disillusioned Tick confesses to Billy that he feels as if he has failed: he has misled the teens he tries to coach out of the hood because, as Tick laments to Billy, “I tell them they can control their destiny, but what kind of shit is this?”

Epilogue | 233

Indeed, what kind of story is this in which whiteness can “will” itself back to the top because white users suffer from a mental disability, or addiction, that can be given a second chance, whereas, in contrast, Black lives—­those of Hoppy and his family—­remain resistant and noncompliant to the rehabilitative intervention of life coaches like Tick Wills. Unlike Billy, Hoppy cannot be saved, cannot be made to matter within a neoliberal rhetoric that foregrounds personal solutions of will power without larger transformations of the structural inequalities and toxic environments that shape Black debilities. Although Southpaw suggests as part of the gentrification narrative that white Americans can now feel the pain of historically oppressed African Americans (and Billy sheds tears at the news of Hoppy’s death), the film fails to challenge the antiblack relationality that since postemancipation has oppositionally defined the worthy, hardworking, upwardly-­mobile citizen within a liberal white identity politics. During Billy’s final victorious bout, the sports announcers cheer that “Hope is back” and “We still have Hope,” against visual images of an American flag-­waving crowd of fans. But we never learn Hoppy’s father’s story: he remains the contrasting facelessness of an intertwined Black debility and criminality that reaffirms the hope of a white recovery narrative. Hoppy’s father remains in the shadow as a measure of how far the white user can climb back and as a reason why the white user can have comparative hope: because in the end white users like Billy Hope may share a stereotypical Black dysfunctionality and pathology (as seen in the Republican presidential debate), but they are in the end not like the crack-­ addicted Black other. Even though Southpaw through the voice of Tick Wills mourns this loss of Black lives, at the same time, Tick never understands that he fails to save kids like Hoppy not because he did not try hard enough, or because he and they had insufficient will power, but because these Black lives cannot be made visible and made to matter within the epistemological framing of the white neoliberal rehabilitation narrative that he promotes. The long history of Black debility will always remain noncompliant with a vitality politics of self-­care and risk management that refuses to acknowledge a larger macroeconomic story of Black unemployment, poverty, underfunded education, police surveillance and violence, and, more fundamentally, the structuring power of antiblackness materialized in Black debility. What stories, then, do we need to tell and what questions do we need to ask about the long history of Black debility? What new stories and questions should we raise when an apparent humanitarian retrenchment from a Reagan-­era law and order mass incarceration that created a “New Jim

234 | Vitality Politics

(and Jane) Crow” actually discloses the continued constitutive role of antiblackness within contemporary prison reform?28 If antiblack debility, as I have shown throughout this book, refers to a foundational structuring differentiation and devaluation of Black lives that has since Reconstruction served to constitute U.S. liberal notions of personhood, citizenship, and valued productivity within racial capitalism, it now works to rehumanize the treatment-­worthy dis-­abled white heroin user. Although Christopher Bell in his groundbreaking work on Black disability critiqued the white bias within disability studies,29 we need to theorize more fully not just white biases and assumptions, but the role of antiblackness as part of the new normal of a white disability—­a supercrip white disability, that has been co-­opted to rehabilitate racial hierarchies around an innocent white opioid addict contrasted to a criminalized noncompliant Black disabled user. This noncompliance of a permanently disabled Black underclass resistant to treatment, however, depends, once again, on evacuating the materiality of Black lives, whose disability as a result of a delayed, attritional slow violence remains invisible within neoliberal, antiracist, narratives of personal responsibility and uplift. In Tomorrow’s Parties, Peter Coviello speaks about the “ghosts of futures past” that literary and cultural historians might encounter by reexamining those “periods of coming to be,” in which contemporary identities and political consciousnesses had not yet crystallized, or yet been authorized as the commonly accepted language in which to think about, understand, and discuss issues regarding race, sex, or other identitarian forms.30 In looking at the contradictions, innovations, and ambiguities within Black cultural production in response to an “ill-­defined” vitality politics in post-­Reconstruction America, I have argued that we can recover just such ghosts of futures past. These ghosts have not only anticipated what is happening in our own present moment, but also what is to come: not only has a material-­semiotic Black disability oppositionally defined the “normal” white citizen, but it has morphed as that relationality that marks a white “abled disabled”—­the addict, the criminal—­who can be rehabilitated. If an earlier improper archive of Black literary and cultural production troubled a constitutive dialectic around Black vitality and debility, we need now, more than ever, these futures past, these improper, mad, and unsanitary narratives that began the work of imagining the possibilities of a more complete emancipation for African Americans in the afterlife of slavery. Only then will we be able to imagine an end to a “great white hope” premised on a Black debility.

Notes

INTRODUCTION Epigraph note: “Minutes of the Negro Health Week Conference Held at the Butler Building, No. 3 B St., S.E., Washington, DC.” November 1, 1926, National Negro Health Week File, Miscellaneous Printed Matter, Library of Congress. 1. Hattie Rutherford Watson, “Work of the Neighborhood Union,” Spelman Messenger, November, 1916, p. 5, Box 5, Folder 8, Neighborhood Union Collection, Archives Resource Center, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library. For a similar story of the founding of the Neighborhood Union, see Louise Davis Shivery and Hugh H. Smythe, “The Neighborhood Union: A Survey of the Beginnings of Social Welfare Movements among Negroes in Atlanta,” Phylon 3, no. 2 (1942): 149–­62. 2. Edward Beardsley, A History of Neglect: Health Care for Blacks and Mill Workers in the Twentieth-­Century South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 16. 3. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” Black Scholar: The Journal of Black Studies and Research 42, no. 2 (2014): 17. 4. “The Minutes of the Neighborhood Union,” October 1, 1908, Box 4, Neighborhood Union Collection, Archives Research Center, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library. 5. For a discussion of the altered direction of the Neighborhood Union, see Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), especially 71–­72. 6. L. C. Allen, “The Negro Health Problem,” American Journal of Public Health 5, no. 3 (1915): 194–­203. 7. I borrow the term “quasi-­events” from Elizabeth Povinelli, The Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4. Povinelli uses the term “quasi-­events” to describe quotidian and ordinary forms of suffering or attrition that are chronic and unremarkable in their singularity, but can be “catastrophic” collectively over time. 8. For a discussion of the reframing of the citizen as a patient in contemporary rehabilitative narratives, see Julie Passanante Elman, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 9. Throughout this book, I try to avoid the stigmatizing, ableist term “colorblind” because of its implications that a lack of, or limited, sight equates to a lack of knowing. 235

236 | Notes to Pages 4–6 However, since so much of political theory widely uses the term, rather than some alternative such as color-­averse, I invoke it here as a point of reference for readers. For a discussion of the problems with the term “colorblind,” see Subini Ancy Annamma, Darrell D. Jackson, and Deb Morrison, “Conceptualizing Color-­Evasiveness: Using Dis/ability Critical Race Theory to Expand a Color-­Blind Racial Ideology in Education and Society,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 202, no. 2 (2017): 147–­62. 10. Sami Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night,’” African American Review 50, no. 2 (2017): 140; and Theri Pickens, “Blue Blackness, Black Blueness: Making Sense of Blackness and Disability,” African American Review 50, no. 2 (2017): 96. 11. Robert McRuer, “Disability Nationalism in Crip Time,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 2 (2010): 163–­178; Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 171; Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility/Capacity/Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), xxi. In speaking of the vitality politics central to modern liberal racial capitalism in the chapters to follow, I will be particularly drawing on Jasbir Puar’s reconceptualization of disability theory within modernity’s broader shift toward biopolitical management around debility. As part of the modern liberal (and neoliberal) state, all individuals are evaluated in terms of their health, wealth, productivity, and upward mobility, Puar contends, or their capacity. Yet at the same time people are made, as they monitor themselves under a medical-­industrial complex’s prognosis about potential risks and necessary preventions, to feel lacking, or as if they have some sort of mental or physical deficiency that should spur further optimization. As we will see in African American racial uplift, the crisis-­ridden twinned figurations of debility/ vitality had a strategic value in a post-­Reconstruction racial governance. 12. Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 15. 13. Lucas Crawford, “Slender Trouble: From Berlant’s Cruel Figuring of Figure to Sedgwick’s Fat Presence,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no. 4 (2017): 449. 14. My discussion of this politics and morality of health is indebted particularly to the recent work on “healthism” by Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York: New York University Press, 2010). For theories of medicalization and biomedicalization, see Adele Clarke et al., Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health and Illness in the U.S, ed. Adele Clarke et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). For a discussion of how a neoliberal marketplace logic depends on technologies of subjectivity, see Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 15. My choice of the phrase “vitality politics” and sanitary citizenship also references theories of “biological citizenship” by Nikolas Rose, Adriana Petryna, and particularly Charles Briggs, who as part of his medical anthropological investigation into the Venezuelan government’s response to the Warao Amerindians during devastating cholera epidemics, argues that by classifying these indigenous people as too primitive or backwards to understand modern scientific ideas of hygiene, health, and illness, public officials sought to regulate their access to social and civil rights. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of

Notes to Pages 7–8  |  237 Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-­First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 132; Adriana Petryna, “Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-­Exposed Populations,” History of Science Society 19, no.1 (2004): 250–­65; and Charles Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10. 16. For a story of medical racism and abuse, see Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black American from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006). There have been a number of wonderful studies of the racial framing of various diseases such as sickle cell, tuberculosis, and cancer, such as Melbourne Tapper, Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Anne Pollock, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), and Keith Wailoo, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Among the studies of health movements within the African American community, I would single out the field-­defining studies of Vanessa Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920–­1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Todd Savitt, Race and Medicine in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007). For a specific focus on African American physician and nursing professionalization, see Thomas J. Ward Jr, Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), and Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–­1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). For the story of black women’s role in the health care movement, see Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890–­1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), and Sarah Judson, “Civil Rights and Civic Health: African American Women’s Public Health Work in Early Twentieth Century Atlanta,” NWSA Journal 11, no. 3 (1999). 17. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 24 18. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13. 19. Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-­Pessimism and Black Optimism,” In/Tensions 5, no. 0 (Fall/Winter 2011): 1–­47; Frank B. Wilderson III. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structures of US Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 20. This, of course, is one of the key insights of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), which influenced a critical school of whiteness studies. 21. Ta-­Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), makes a similar point about African Americans not being able to own their own bodies due to a constant vulnerability to police violence and death. 22. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London:

238 | Notes to Pages 8–12 Verso, 2004), 68, and Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” Emory Law Journal 60, no. 10 (2010): online. 23. M. O. Bousfield, “Reaching the Negro Community,” American Journal of Public Health 24 (March 1934): 209. 24. Vanessa Northington Gamble and Deborah Stone, “U.S. Policy on Health Inequities: The Interplay of Politics and Research,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 31 no. 1 (February 2006): 102. 25. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 26. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 27. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38. 28. I borrow the term “biopolitical delinquent” from Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 251–­52. 29. This is the argument of Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 4. 30. I borrow the term “surplus life” from Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 45, and Craig Willse, The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 12. 31. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xii. 32. Stacy Simplican, Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 23. Douglass Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33–­58. 33. In my reading of the slow violence of a post-­Reconstruction health politics, I am adapting Rob Nixon’s insightful analysis of the temporality of environmental racism in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 34. For a discussion of the origins of National Negro Health Week, see Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired, 33–­39, and Hine, Black Women in White, 25. 35. Anonymous, “Negroes Stage ‘Clean-­Up Week’ Parade,” Atlanta Constitution, April 13, 1929, 6. 36. The song is from “The Report of Prairie View Texas Program,” Box 2, Records of the National Negro Health Week, Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics Archives, Tuskegee University. 37. Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 71. 38. Robert Shufeldt, America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro (Philadelphia: FA Davis, 1915), 249.

Notes to Pages 12–17  |  239 39. Algernon B. Jackson, “The Need of Health Education among Negroes,” Opportunity 2 (August 1924): 235. 40. For this historical distinction between different forms of biopolitics, see Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 25. 41. Charles Victor Roman, “A Preventable Death Rate,” Journal of the National Medical Association 7, no. 2 (April-­June, 1915): 90. 42. For one of the few extended discussions of Charles Victor Roman’s life, see Lily Hardy Hammond, In the Vanguard of a Race (New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movements, 1922), 40–­45. 43. Charles Victor Roman, “The Negro’s Psychology and His Health,” Opportunity 2 (August 1924): 237. 44. Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 174–­81. 45. Irving Fisher, Report on National Vitality: Its Wastes and Conservation, prepared for the National Conservation Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 723. 46. Rose, Politics of Life, 82. 47. Elizabeth Fee and Dorothy Porter, “Public Health, Preventive Medicine and Professionalization: England and America in the Nineteenth Century,” in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249–­76. 48. For an overview of these typical readings of Washington’s accommodationism, see Robert J. Norrell, “Understanding the Wizard: Another Look at the Age of Booker T Washington,” in Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 58–­80. 49. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, 1907 [1901]). All citations will be from this edition and listed in the text. 50. In his retrospective history of the National Negro Health Campaign in the Journal of Negro Education (1937), Dr. Roscoe Brown, a special consultant to the U.S. Public Health Service, makes a similar argument about the discursive knotting of African American health, labor ideology, and a Washingtonian accommodationism. See Roscoe C. Brown, “The National Negro Health Week Movement,” Journal of Negro Education, 6, no. 3 (1937): 561. 51. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007 [1991]). 52. See Patricia Clough’s introduction to Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), and Willse, Value of Homelessness, 24 53. My discussion of the dialectical regime of vitality/debility is based on Jasbir Puar’s similar analysis of the capacity/debility dialectic in “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 1 (2012): 154. 54. Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer, 1992): 738–­55.

240 | Notes to Pages 18–25 55. Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-­Bodiness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 88–­99. 56. “Some Suggestions for a Sermon on Health Subjects: Sin in Relation to Health,” Box 1, File 11, Records of the National Negro Health Week, Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics Archives, Tuskegee University. 57. “Negro Health—­Our 1927 Challenge,” National Negro Health Week, April 3 to 10, 1927,” issued by the United States Public Health Service, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927. Government Documents, Library of Congress. All additional citations will be from this edition and will be cited in the text. In examining the 1927 National Negro Health Week campaign for its evidence of a specific black cultural logic and political thought, I need to begin with a caveat. Certainly by 1927 the National Negro Health Week was no longer simply a black owned and operated event. Although started in 1915 by Booker T. Washington and officially operating out of Tuskegee until 1930, by the early 1920s National Negro Health Week had come under the direction of the U.S. Public Health Service, and its organizers worked closely with 28 cooperating agencies, such as the National Tuberculosis Association, the American Red Cross, the American Social Hygiene Association, and businesses such as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Corporation, which provided much of the information distributed during the campaign. 58. National Negro Health Week Bulletin, 1927, 14. 59. Adele Clarke, “From the Rise of Medicine to Biomedicine,” Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health and Illness in the U.S, ed. Adele Clarke et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 124. 60. Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4. 61. John A. Kenney, The Negro in Medicine (Tuskegee: Tuskegee Institute Press, 1912), 50. 62. Booker T. Washington, “Training Colored Nurses at Tuskegee,” American Journal of Nursing 11, no. 3 (December 1910): 171. 63. In her discussion of the biomedicalization of class in contemporary genetics, Antoinette Rouvroy uses the term “poor naturals” for a reimagined “unhealthy” disenfranchised poor. Human Genes and Neoliberal Governance: A Foucauldian Critique (New York: Routledge, 2008), 109. 64. Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Poetics and the Politics of Emotion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 209. 65. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 12–­13. 66. Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Relation of the Trained Nurse to the Negro Home,” Southern Workman 30, no.9 (September 1901): 482. All other references from this essay will be cited in the text. 67. David McBride, From TB to AIDS: Epidemics among Urban Blacks since 1900 (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1991), 11. 68. Craddock, City of Plagues, 10. 69. For further studies examining the use of medical and public health language to

Notes to Pages 26–30  |  241 frame and define social and racial problems during the Progressive Era, see Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003); Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 70. Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined, 17. 71. Jayna Brown, “A Wilder Sort of Empiricism,” in “Speculative Life,” Social Text, Periscope. Online. http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/speculative_life/ (accessed 15 July 2015). 72. Carla Peterson, “Subject to Speculation: Assessing the Lives of African American Women in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women’s Studies in Transition: The Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity, ed. Kate Conway-­Turner, Suzanne Cherrin, and Jessica Schiffman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 115. 73. See, for example, Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 3. 74. Ana Louise Keating. “Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet-­ Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldua—­and Beyond,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 3–­4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 64. 75. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 113. 76. Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 22. 77. In my reading of “respectability ecology” I am drawing on the new materialist theories of Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): 67–­94; Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 23, no. 3 (2003): 801–­31. 78. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112. 79. I am indebted to Donna Haraway for the term “response-­ability” to describe Barrier Williams’ ecological perspective. See “Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin@ in Multispecies Response-­ability,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 1–­2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 311. 80. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” 738–­55. 81. Jane Edna Hunter, A Nickel and a Prayer, ed. Rhondda Robinson Thomas (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2011), 122. All other references from Hunter’s autobiography will be cited in the text. 82. As Todd Savitt notes, the Hospital Herald, which McClennan began publishing in 1899, was one of the first African American medical journals. In starting the journal McClennan sought less to create a national medical journal that would publish research on surgery or disease etiology for black physicians than to create a bulletin promoting his efforts to form a statewide physicians association, a hospital and nurse training school in Charleston, and, most importantly, to advise the general public on hygiene and health to fight against higher African American mortality due to contagious unsanitary

242 | Notes to Pages 32–50 environments. See Savitt, Race and Medicine, 317, and Todd L. Savitt, “Walking the Color Line: Alonzo McClennan, the Hospital Herald, and Segregated Medicine in Turn-­of-­the-­ Twentieth-­Century Charleston, South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 104, no. 4 (October 2003): 228–­57. 83. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 214. 84. Andrea Stone, “The Black Atlantic Revisited, the Body Reconsidered: On Lingering, Liminality, Lies, and Disability,” American Literary History 24, no. 4 (2012): 824. Stone elaborates on this genealogy of African American noncompliance with health discourse to articulate alternative stories of well-­being in Black Well-­Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016). 85. Meredith Goldsmith, “The Wages of Weight: Dorothy West’s Corporeal Politics,” Mosaic 40, no. 3 (December 2007): 35. 86. Dorothy West, The Living Is Easy, ed. Adelaide M. Cromwell (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1995), 211. All other references are from this edition and will be cited in the text. 87. Kenneth Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 9. See particularly Gene Andrew Jarrett’s discussion of the debate over the role that African American literature can and did play in social, cultural, and political change, in Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 73–­74. 88. Dana Luciano, Unsettled States: Nineteenth-­Century American Literary Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 13. 89. Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 144. 90. H. T. Kealing, How to Live Longer: The Gospel of Good Health for the School, the Home and the General Reader: A Simple Treatise Designed to Correct the Large Death Rate, among the People both in City and Country, 2nd ed. (N.p.: Printed for the Author, 1908), 12. 91. Deborah Lupton, “Foucault and the Medicalization Critique,” in Foucault, Health and Medicine, ed. Alan Petersen and Robin Bunton (London: Routledge, 1997), 101. 92. Wright, Physics of Blackness,144. 93. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 133. CHAPTER 1 1. Heather Munro Prescott, Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 3. During the first decade of the twentieth century, as Heather Munro Prescott notes, a number of colleges began to shift from a concern with “manly” physical education and athletics (often in response to nationalist fears about degeneration) to more comprehensive health programs. 2. John Kenney to Booker T. Washington, n.d. (1914?), Reel 529, Booker T. Washington Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Notes to Pages 51–54  |  243 3. In their advertising in The Crisis, HBCUs typically emphasized their “healthful location” and sanitary conditions, such as this 1920 ad for Knoxville College: KNOXVILLE COLLEGE Beautiful Situation. Healthful Location. Best Moral and Spiritual Environment. Splendid Intellectual Atmosphere. Noted for Honest and Thorough Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Good water, steam heat, electric lights, natural drainage, splendid dormitories. Expenses very reasonable. Spring term opens March 4, 1920 4. Alyson Patsavas, “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014): 203–­18. 5. Leigh Gilmore, “Agency without Mastery: Chronic Pain and Posthuman Life Writing,” Biography 35, no.1 (Winter 2012): 83–­98. 6. Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 9. 7. The term “prosthetic narratives” comes from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 7–­9 to identify the way that stories about disability are framed to erase and normalize difference. 8. I am indebted to Cassander L. Smith’s analysis of how indigenous people might speak through the contradictions and disruptions in colonial texts for my reading about how the disabled might “speak” in Du Bois’s The Soul of Black Folks. See Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 22. 9. See Donald B. Gibson, “Strategies and Revisions of Self-­Representation in Booker T. Washington’s Autobiography,” American Quarterly 45, no. 3 (September 1993), 378, for a discussion of how The Story of My Life and Work was written for a largely working-­ class black audience and how Washington struggled to take control of his story from his ghost writer Edgar Webber and his publisher. 10. Booker T. Washington, The Story of My Life and Work (Naperville, IL: J. L. Nichols & Company, 1901), 378. 11. For an overview of these typical readings of Washington’s accommodationism, see Norrell, “Understanding the Wizard,” 58–­80. 12. Booker T. Washington, “Fifty Years of Negro Progress,” Forum 55 (March 1916): 274. 13. Throughout this chapter I draw upon Dan Goodley, Dis/Ability: Theorising Disablism and Ablism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 92–­94, and his discussion of what he calls the “capitalisation of the body,” or the way bodies are produced to bring profit for the forces that are using/buying their labor.

244 | Notes to Pages 55–58 14. Michael W. Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race, Beginnings to 1900 (New York: Routledge Press, 2000), 350–­51. 15. Dorothy Roberts makes a similar argument about the political relation between health discourse and the shift from the state to the private realm of personal responsibility in “The Social Immorality of Health in the Gene Age,” in Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 61–­7 1. 16. Byrd and Clayton, American Health Dilemma, 352. 17. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 33–­58. 18. Dan Bouk, “The Science of Difference: Developing the Tools for Discrimination in the American Insurance Industry, 1830–­1930,” Enterprise and Society 12, no. 4 (December 2011): 718. See also Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 11. As Dan Bouk argues, the post-­ Reconstruction insurance industry was full of statistical distinctions, many of them insidious—­as the desire for security, control, and profit drove an increase in the statistical surveillance of bodies of color, from immigrants to African Americans. 19. Monica Casper and Lisa Jean Moore, Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (New York: New York University, 2009), 17. 20. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 16. 21. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (Xenia, OH: Aldine Publishing, 1892), 229, 249. 22. Megan J. Wolff, “The Myth of the Actuary: Life Insurance and Frederick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Public Health Reports 121, no. 1 (January-­February, 2006): 84–­91. 23. Frederick Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: MacMillan Company, 1886), 328. 24. For a discussion of southern physicians’ beliefs in the surgical peculiarities of the Negro, see John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–­1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 50. 25. See Michael Rudolph West, The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 11, 237. 26. Todd Carmody, “In Spite of Handicaps: The Disability History of Racial Uplift,” American History 27, no. 1 (2015): 59. 27. William Hannibal Thomas, The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (New York: Macmillan, 1901), x. 28. Thomas, American Negro, 138. 29. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2013), 27, argues that disability has often stood in for a chronic and dystopian future. 30. Davi Johnson Thornton, “Race, Risk, and Pathology in Psychiatric Culture: Disease Awareness Campaigns as Governmental Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 4 (October 2010): 312. 31. The term “pathologies of power” is from Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 16.

Notes to Pages 58–69  |  245 32. Norrell, “Understanding the Wizard,” 58–­80. 33. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 33. 34. Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan, ed. Raymond M. Smock (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 39. 35. Phillip J. Kowalski, “No Excuses for Our Dirt: Booker T. Washington and a ‘New Negro’ Middle Class,” in Post-­Bellum, Pre-­Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, ed.  Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard (New York: New York  University Press, 2006), 183. 36. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, 1907 [1901]), 26. All citations will be from this edition and listed in the text. 37. Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 201l), 53. Anderson contends that a complex disciplinary performance is created in marginalized communities through a combination of physical debility and affective states of dread and despair that “dis-­able” or destroy the will of the liberal subject. 38. Eugene Harris, “The Physical Conditions of the Race, Whether Dependent Upon Social Conditions or Environment,” in Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities: Proceedings of the Second Conference for the Study of Problems Concerning Negro City Life Held at Atlanta University, May 25–­26, 1897 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1897), 20. 39. Ibid., 21. 40. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 9. 41. For a discussion of how the news media turned Washington’s death in November 1915 from hypertension into evidence of African American’s greater propensity to heart disease, see Pollock, Medicating Race, 46. 42. Robert J. Norrell, The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 75. 43. See Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–­1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 216, for a discussion about how representations of women’s illness at the turn of the twentieth century reflected patriarchal ideologies about femininity. 44. Paul Lawrie, Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 23. 45. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-­ Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 117. 46. For a discussion of disability troubles, see McRuer, “Compulsory Able-­Bodiness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” 88–­99. 47. Adolph Reed, W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 124. 48. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-talented-tenth/ 49. In his 1905 “Declaration of Principles” for the Niagara Movement, Du Bois also listed “health” as one of the key planks of the organization’s platform: “We plead for health—­for an opportunity to live in decent houses and localities, for a chance to rear our children in physical and moral cleanliness.” Even though the Niagara Movement’s

246 | Notes to Pages 69–78 founders met to protest a Washingtonian accommodationism, its leaders shared the Tuskegee president’s prioritizing of a right to “physical and moral cleanliness.” See the Niagara Movement, “Declaration of Principles, 1905,” 1–­3, http://scua.library.umass.edu/ collections/etext/dubois/niagara.pdf 50. See Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 21. 51. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–­1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 278. 52. See also Cornel West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 98, 112, who argues that Du Bois caved into a “temptation toward despair,” failing to find an emancipatory poetics celebrating African American uniqueness, pride, beauty, strength, and dignity. 53. Both Christopher Bell and Jennifer James have noted the repressed representation of African American disability as part of a racial uplift ideology attempting to rehabilitate the image of African Americans in the public sphere. See Jennifer James, “Gwendolyn Brooks, World War II, and the Politics of Rehabilitation,” in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Hall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 136–­58, and Christopher Bell, “Introducing White Disabilities: A Modest Proposal,” in The Disabilities Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 275–­82. 54. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1903), 93. All other references are from this edition and will be cited in the text. 55. Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night,’” 141. 56. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 10. 57. See Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 85. 58. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 388. 59. Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 19. 60. Saidiya Hartman, “The Dead Book Revisited,” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 214. 61. Such a contrast between a progress figured in able-­bodied full manhood and a crooked effeminizing debility recurs throughout The Souls of Black Folk. In “Of the Training of Black Men,” the absence of Black (male) self-­realization, for example, is once again pictured as a “creeping, crooked present” (106). In the seventh chapter, “Of the Black Belt,” Du Bois also describes Black Belt men as “hollow cheeked” or “sunken cheeked” and thus deprived of racial vigor and hardiness. The Du Boisian narrator even projects into the future that a “lad (Luke Black) of twenty two” will be “twenty years yonder [a] sunken-­cheeked, old black man” (128). Racial progress, Du Bois fears, will remain chronically “deformed.” 62. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 228. 63. Teri Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Bill Bennett, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-­Government in the Newly United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Notes to Pages 79–86  |  247 64. See Margrit Shildrick’s discussion in “living on, not getting better,” Feminist Review 111, no. 1 (2015): 21. 65. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 75. CHAPTER 2 Epigraph note: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (Boston: Ginn & Co., published for the University of Pennsylvania, 1899), 387. 1. Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death: (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754. 2. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 24. 3. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey, ed. Mario Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 247. 4. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–­40. See also Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 5. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 116. 6. Ryan Jay Friedman, “Between Absorption and Extinction: Charles Chesnutt and Biopolitical Racism,” Arizona Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2007): 46. 7. As Elizabeth Anker notes, leftist political cultures have often resorted to melodramatic forms that can undercut the critical emergence of other alternative narratives to challenge the inequalities, injustices, and, I would argue, slow violence of racial capitalism. See “Left Melodrama,” Contemporary Political Theory 11, no 2 (2012): 130–­52. 8. Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2010); Luciano, Arranging Grief. 9. For an overview of the scholarship on medical racism and abuse, see the introductory chapter, “Ill-­Defined Emancipations.” My reading is indebted to the expertise of Harriet Washington, Melbourne Tapper, Keith Wailoo, Anne Pollock, Vanessa Northington Gamble, Alondra Nelson, Todd Savitt, Thomas J. Ward Jr, Darlene Clark Hine, Susan L. Smith, and Sarah Judson who have done important recovery work in the history of race and medicine. 10. Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera, 10. 11. In Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 147, Samuel Kelton Roberts refers to this medicalized defective black body as the “incorrigible consumptive.” 12. See Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired, 33–­40. For the story of Lugenia Hope’s work as part of the Atlanta Neighborhood Union, see Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, especially 66–­68. 13. Discussions of Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition have particularly centered around its groundbreaking realism, but also its explicitly antiracism theme that soured Chesnutt’s relationship with the dean of American realism, William Dean Howells. See, for example, Joseph R. McElrath Jr. “W. D. Howells and Race: Charles W. Chesnutt’s

248 | Notes to Pages 86–95 Disappointment of the Dean,” Nineteenth Century Literature 51, no. 4 (March 1997): 474–­ 99. 14. Schalk, BodyMinds Reimagined, 3. 15. Peterson, “Subject to Speculation,” 115. 16. Jayna Brown, “A Wilder Sort of Empiricism,” in “Speculative Life,” Social Text, Periscope, http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/speculative_life/ (accessed July 15, 2015). 17. See, for example, Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” 3. 18. Ana Louise Keating, “Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet-­ Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldua—­and Beyond,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 3–­4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 64. 19. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 127. 20. Anonymous, “Opinion: The Terrorists,” The Crisis 3, no. 5 (March 1912): 195. 21. Lisa Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 7. Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva in his study of the new racism within the “post-­race” neoliberal order also singles out liberal abstraction as a framing strategy for colorblind ideologies. See Racism without Racists (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013 [2003]), 3. 22. Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty-­First Century (New York: New Press, 2011), 27. 23. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, intro. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 124. 24. Kirstie M. McClure, “Figuring Authority: Statistics, Liberal Narrative, and the Vanishing Subject,” Theory and Event 3, no. 1 (1999); n.p. Project Muse. 25. I borrow the term “biochronology” from Luciano, Arranging Grief, 10. 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Health and Physique of the Negro American, ed. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1906), 90. 27. H. L. Sutherland, “The Destiny of the American Negro,” Memphis Medical Monthly 25, no. 12 (1905): 618–­19. 28. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xii. 29. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. 30. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Dusk of Dawn,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), 751. 31. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 38. 32. For a discussion of the case, see Tim Armstrong, The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 51. 33. Pratt, Archives of American Time, 164. 34. Maurice Lee, “Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit and the Quest for the Golden Fleece,” African American Review 33, no. 3 (1999): 389–­400; Gina Rossetti, “Turning the Corner: Romance as Economic Critique in Norris’s Trilogy of Wheat

Notes to Pages 95–101  |  249 and Du Bois’s The Quest for the Silver Fleece,” Studies in American Naturalism 7, no. 1 (2012): 39–­49; Lawrence Oliver, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Contract Realism,” American Literary Realism 38, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 32–­46. 35. Daylanne English, “Being Black There: Racial Subjectivity and Temporality in Walter Mosley’s Detective Novels,” Novel 42, no. 3 (2009): 363. 36. I borrow the term “entanglement” from Graham Harman, “Entanglement and Relation: A Response to Bruno Latour and Ian Hodder,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 40. 37. Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 11. 38. Maria Farland, “W.E.B. Du Bois, Anthropometric Science, and the Limits of Racial Uplift,” American Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2006): 1022. 39. For a specific reading of the sentimental ending of Chesnutt’s novel around a shared mortality, see Joanne van der Woude, “Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality: W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt,” in Representations of Death in Nineteenth-­ Century US Writing and Culture, ed. Lucy Frank (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 97. 40. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, xxi. 41. Janet Watson, “Butler’s Biopolitics: Precarious Community,” Theory & Event 15, no. 2 (2012): n.p. Project Muse. 42. Although I do not have space in this chapter to elaborate on the connections, it is worth noting, however, that Chesnutt was probably highly influenced by Alonzo McClennan and the Charleston early black medical journal The Hospital Herald in his representation of Dr. Miller and the health crisis facing the Wellington African American community. See Savitt, Race and Medicine, 317, and Savitt, “Walking the Color Line,” 228–­57. 43. Most readings of this scene erase the specific function of the hospital, seeing its modern architecture as only one more sign of an emerging black middle class that threatens white supremacy. See Bryan Wagner, “Charles Chesnutt and the Epistemology of Racial Violence,” American Literature 73, no. 2 (2001): 314. 44. See also Friedman, “Between Absorption and Extinction,” 47–­48, who also highlights the moribund imagery in Chesnutt’s novel. 45. Chesnutt also includes specific references to the higher incidences of tuberculosis among African Americans in crowded city slums in the backstory of Janet Miller’s mother. When Polly Ochiltree evicts the light-­skinned mulatta Julia Merkell from the family mansion (after concealing the papers that proved her marriage to Captain Merkell), her expulsion precipitates not the tragic mulatta’s or fallen woman’s social degradation but a less sensational slow death by the Negro disease “consumption” (36). 46. Although I focus in this chapter on how the image of slow violence disrupts the liberal protest narrative of Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, such a return of the repressed spectacle of the debilitated black body as a result of southern necropolitics also recurs in Chesnutt’s 1905 novel, The Colonel’s Dream. When Colonel Henry French, a wealthy New York businessman, returns to his southern birthplace of Clarendon, he finds that “freedom” has destroyed the health of his boyhood companion Peter. After the end of slavery Peter had gone to work for a railroad contractor, but, as a result of exposure and overwork, he caught a fever that laid him up and caused him to lose his job.

250 | Notes to Pages 101–6 Later, after his recovery, Peter goes to work on a turpentine farm, but is injured by an axe and unable to do heavy manual labor. Although Peter is injured by hazardous working conditions, the town argues that he is a sign that the former slaves cannot take care of themselves and had better health before emancipation. Charles Chesnutt, The Colonel’s Dream (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1905). 47. For a discussion of racial uplift ideology, see Kevin Gaines, “Black Americans Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission,’” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 433–­56, and also Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 48. John A. Kenney, The Negro in Medicine (Tuskegee: Tuskegee Institute Press, 1912), 50 49. Rob Nixon speaks about “unimagined communities” in Slow Violence, 152. 50. Neill Matheson, “History and Survival: Charles Chesnutt and the Time of Conjure,” American Literary Realism 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–­22; Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 294. 51. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Superstitions and Folk-­Lore of the South,” Modern Culture 13 (1901): 231–­35. 52. See John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 53. For a discussion of folklore’s queer “chronotropic disruptions,” see Kay Turner, “At Home in the Realm of Enchantment: The Queer Enticements of the Grimms’ ‘Frau Holle,’” Marvels and Tales 29, no. 1 (2015): 42–­63. 54. Nixon, Slow Violence, 10. 55. Ibid., 19. 56. See, for example, Heather Tirado Gilligan, “Reading, Race, and Charles Chesnutt’s ‘Uncle Julius’ Tale,” ELH 74, no. 1 (2007): 206. 57. Although the figure of John gives “form” to the dispersed social forces of New South racial capitalism and to the rhetorical and affective strategies that silence the dissenter’s witness to its slow violence, Annie is as important an audience to Julius’s conjure tales as her spouse. As the opening line of “The Goophered Grapevine” announces, Annie is a woman in “poor health,” and by such a preface to the tales, Chesnutt calls attention to the different racial, class, and gender meanings attached to suffering. Despite the fact that the white woman’s heath becomes a matter of great solicitude and is read as a sign of her greater spiritual purity, when Teenie in the tale “Po’Sandy,” by contrast, cries out against the murderous damage done to her husband Sandy’s body (an accidental, collateral fallout of progress) she is dismissed as “crazy” (55). When Teenie, moreover, tries to witness to the “sweeking’, en moanin’, en groanin” that she hears haunting the modern buildings being erected in the New South, no one hears her, or accredits her voice of pain. 58. Ramon Saldivar, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction,” American Literary History 23, no. 3 (2011): 574–­ 99. In “Gothic Sociology: Charles Chesnutt and the Gothic Mode,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7, no. 1 (1974): 101–­19, Robert Hemenway similarly discusses Chesnutt turning in his folk tales to gothic tropes to render visible racial violence.

Notes to Pages 106–14  |  251 59. I borrow the term “unnatural narrative” from R. B. Gill, “The Uses of Genre and the Classification of Speculative Fiction.” Mosaic 46, no. 2 (2013): 73. 60. In referring to this dialectical cycle of capacity and debility, I am drawing on Jasbir Puar’s analysis of health and the contemporary industrial-­medical complex in “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 1 (2012): 153. 61. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112 62. Joel Chandler Harris, Dearest Chums and Partners: Joel Chandler Harris’ Letters to His Children, ed. Hugh T. Keenan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 432. CHAPTER 3 1. Ann Petry, The Street (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998 [1946]), 2. All other references to the novel will be from this edition and will be cited in the text. 2. Although recent critics such as Heather Hicks have argued for Petry’s critique of a realist/naturalist tradition, they have largely focused on the multiple minority subjective experiences and perceptions that challenge an objective realist’s material landscape rather than raising questions about how the material objects themselves might have shaped minority consciousness, mood, and identity. See Hicks’s discussion of Lutie’s “street knowledge” in “Rethinking Realism in Ann Petry’s The Street,” MELUS 27, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 96. 3. I borrow the term “exposure” from Stacey Alaimo who calls for an ethical-­political engagement with the way societies allow for or create particular states of unprotectedness, or exposure, for minoritized peoples. See Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 5. 4. John Dudley, “Introduction: Naturalism and African American Culture,” Studies in American Naturalism 7, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 1–­6. 5. The term “transcorporeality” comes from Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 6. See Keith Clark, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2013), 99–­103; Evie Shockley, “Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black Women’s Sexuality, and (Living) Death in Ann Petry’s The Street,” African American Review 40, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 439–­60; and Elizabeth Boyle Machlin, “Diseased Properties and Broken Homes,” in Representing Segregation: Towards an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow and Other Forms of Racial Division, ed. Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 2010), 155. 7. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 35. 8. See Mitchell and Snyder, “Precarity and Cross-­Species Identification,” 570. 9. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 279; Alaimo, Exposed, 170; and Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33. 10. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 803. 11. In The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 59, Bruno Latour imagines a new understanding of the democratic collective that breaks down the distinction between the human and nonhuman world in terms of (political) representation.

252 | Notes to Pages 115–21 12. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 113. 13. Literary and cultural historians often fault these African American club women as “Victorian” holdovers in their beliefs and values since they tied their social work to the mother’s moral duty and linked empowerment with respectability. See Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, 8. 14. For a discussion of the ecological aesthetic, see Kate Rigby, “Gernot Bohme’s Ecological Aesthetic of Atmosphere,” in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 262–­91. 15. Ben Highmore, “Bitter after Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics,” in Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 119. 16. In my analysis of the habit body I am indebted to Frank Trentmann’s reading of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s theories in “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (2009): 290. 17. For a discussion of the limitation of liberal narratives of antirace fictions, I am again drawing on the work of Jodi Melamed, Elizabeth Anker, and Robert Ferguson. 18. Sallie Stewart, “‘Better Homes,’ ‘Better Health,’ ‘More Happiness,’” NACW National Notes 32, no. 1 (October 1929): 3. 19. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852), 204. See also Linda Kerber’s discussion of maternal influence in “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—­an American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 187–­205. 20. Stephen A. Germic, American Green: Class, Crisis, and the Deployment of Nature in Central Park, Yosemite, and Yellowstone (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 43. 21. Susan Mann, “Pioneers of U.S. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice,” Feminist Formations 23, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 9. 22. Rayford Whittingham Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 1867–­ 1967 (New York: New York University Press, 1969). 23. Stephanie J. Shaw, “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women,” Journal of Women’s History 3, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 10. 24. For a discussion of African American women’s clubs that affiliated under the NACWC, see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–­1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 24–­26. 25. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 190. 26. G. S. Ferguson, “The Cultivation of the Aesthetic,” National Association Notes 15, no. 1 (January 1912): 5–­7. 27. Jad Smith, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode: Locke’s Early Theory of Cultural Reproduction,” ELH 73, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 831–­53. 28. Anonymous, “Women’s Work, Where Does It Begin?,” National Association Notes 3, no. 7 (January 1900): 1. 29. Bill Brown makes this distinction between the politics of taste as cultural capital and object theory in A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 229. 30. Anonymous, “The Fly Brigade: New Clean-­Up and Swat-­the-­Fly Song,” Chicago Defender (June 19, 1915), 5. Proquest Historical Newspapers.

Notes to Pages 122–27  |  253 31. Bernstein, “Dances with Things,” 69. 32. Anonymous, “Fly Brigade, 5. 33. Anonymous, “Atlanta Thanks College Women for Community Service Center: Neighborhood Union, under Leadership of Mrs. John Hope, Covers Wide Field,” Chicago Defender, Oct 31, 1925, A3. Proquest Historical Newspapers. 34. See Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, for an overview of Hope and the Neighborhood Union. 35. For the term “viscous porosity,” see Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 188–­213. 36. Margaret Garb, “Health, Morality, and Housing: The ‘Tenement Problem’ in Chicago,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 9 (September 2003): 1420–­30. 37. “Survey of Colored Public Schools: 1913–­14,” Box 7, Neighborhood Union Collection, Woodruff Library, Archives Research Center, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library. 38. As Rebecca Schneider notes, there is a tendency to reify a racialized labor and racialized precarity in new left materialism that does not recognize, as the NACW did, that porcelain sinks may have taught a Victorian middle class certain habits of self-­ discipline, cleanliness, and self-­care, but such objects in-­habited the sensuous life and muscle memories of black bodies differently, as African American domestic works stooped and bent over bathtubs to scrub them to their pristine brilliance. See Rebecca Schneider, “New Materialisms and Performance Studies,” TDR: The Drama Review 59, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 13. 39. Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations, 15. 40. Nannie Burroughs, “Women’s Convention Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention: An Appeal,” in The United Negro: His Problems and His Progress. (Atlanta: D. E. Luther Publishing, 1902), 324. 41. In her study of African American migration to Detroit in the early twentieth century, Victoria Wolcott contends that we need to see the “respectability politics” central to a pre–­civil rights era African American uplift as a contested, malleable, and locally adapted ideology. Although it is frequently argued this respectability politics regulated and controlled African American women’s behavior and sexuality, Wolcott argues that there were often various, particularly working-­class, adaptations that foregrounded economic survival and racial pride rather than moral probity, sexual purity, and proper mannerisms. See Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6; and Jay Winston Driskell, Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 108. 42. Marita Bonner, Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner, ed. and intro. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 137. All other references to Bonner’s stories are from this edition and are cited in the text. 43. For a discussion of “abstract liberalism,” see Eduardo Bonilla Silva and Austin Ashe, “The End of Racism? Colorblind Racism and Popular Media,” in The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-­Racial America, ed. Sarah Nilsen and Sarah E. Turner (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 58.

254 | Notes to Pages 128–44 44. Anker, “Left Melodrama,” 130–­52. 45. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 24. 46. Judith Musser, “African American Women and Education: Marita Bonner’s Response to the Talented Tenth,” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 1 (1997): 73–­85. 47. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 817. 48. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 113. 49. For a discussion of Nold’s biomapping project, see Alex Loftus, Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xxiii. 50. Kimberly Ruffin, Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (Champaign-­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 90. 51. For a gender reading of Bonner’s fiction, see Jennifer Wilks, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 52. Quoted in Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II (New York: Basic Civitas, 2013), 107. 53. Bernstein, “Dances with Things,” 70. 54. Clark, Radical Fiction of Ann Petry, 109. 55. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, “Introduction,” Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), n.p. E-­book. 56. William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 35. 57. Clare Hemmings raises a similar question about the relation between the affective management of mood and radical political change in “In the Mood for Revolution: Emma Goldman’s Passion,” New Literary History 43, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 527–­45. 58. Bill Mullen, “Fetishization and Class Consciousness in Ann Petry’s The Street,” in Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left, ed. Alex Lubin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 40. 59. Griffin, Harlem Nocturne, 100. 60. See, for example, Richard Yarborough, “The Quest for the American Dream in Three Afro-­American Novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Street, and Invisible Man,” MELUS 8, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 33–­59. 61. Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics: (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 86. 62. Dana Luciano and Mel Chen, “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–­3 (2015): 185. 63. See Carol Henderson, “‘The Walking Wounded’: Rethinking Black Women’s Identity in Ann Petry’s The Street,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 860–­ 61; Henderson also identifies the body as a “battleground” in Petry’s text that is shaped by structural violence and notes that Mrs. Hedge has a “palimpsest of scars” written on by experience. In my reading I want to push Henderson’s insights to address how the black woman’s body has been written on by the everyday objects of a toxic racist environment. 64. Puar, Right to Maim, xxi. 65. Here I am thinking of Lauren Berlant’s influential critique of women’s sentimen-

Notes to Pages 145–53  |  255 tal fiction in The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 6. 66. William E. Connolly, “Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism,” Theory and Event 15, no. 1 (2012): n.p. Online. Project Muse. 67. “Twenty Five Years Old Today: Women of West Side Have Done Much to Aid Children; Laud Mrs. Hope,” Atlanta World, 8 July, 1933, and “Pageant to Celebrate 25th Anniversary,” Box 8, Folder 22, Neighborhood Union Collection, Archives Research Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library. CHAPTER 4 1. Mary Fitzbutler Waring, Prophylactic Topics: A Brief Arrangement or Common Sense Subjects for the Use of the People, Especially the Homemakers (Chicago: Chicago Fraternal Press, 1916), i. Waring’s self-­help guide carried a forward by NACW president Margaret Murray Washington (1912–­16), and shared many of the conservative views of its leadership about racial uplift through self-­help and matriarchal values. For a discussion of the origins of the NACW, see McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 221–­23, and White, Too Heavy a Load, 27–­33. 2. In using the term “republican mother,” I am invoking Linda Kerber’s term for the role the mother was to play through her moral influence in cultivating citizen-­subjects for the nation. Kerber, “Republican Mother,” 187–­205. 3. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired, 30. 4. Sally W. Stewart, “Better Homes, Better Health, More Happiness: A Call,” National Notes 32, no. 1 (October 1929): 8. 5. For an overview of these differences in disease and mortality rates, see David McBride, From TB to AIDS: Epidemics among Urban Blacks since 1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 86. As Henry Louis Gates has noted, in the cultural memory work of Harlem, there has always been a tension between the Harlem that served as a “state of mind” and a “cultural metaphor” for blackness and the actual place of Harlem where “[t]he death rate was 42 percent higher than in other parts of the city. The infant mortality rate in 1928 was twice as high as in the rest of New York. Four times as many people died from tuberculosis as in the white population.” “Harlem on Our Minds,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 11. I borrow the term “health apartheid” from Michael W. Byrd and Linda A. Clayton’s excellent overview of African American medical history after the Civil War, An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 367. 6. Darlene Clark Hine, “The Corporeal and Ocular Veil: Dr. Matilda A. Evans (1872–­1935) and the Complexity of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 70, no. 1 (February 2004): 34. But Hine makes a similar point on African American women’s health care activism in Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–­1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 7. For studies of these aspects of African American medical history, see Ward, Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South; Vanessa Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920–­1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,

256 | Notes to Pages 153–54 1995); and Melbourne Tapper, In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 8. For this historical distinction regarding different forms of biopolitics, see Lemke, Biopolitics, 25. 9. Adele Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine,” in Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., ed. Adele Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 50. 10. My study of medical and public health language as framing and defining race problems during the Progressive Era is deeply indebted to the following works: Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003); Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 11. For a discussion of medicine as an emergent “subpolitical” arena unbinding public debates over rights, equality, and work from the traditional public sphere, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 209. 12. See Tera Hunter, “To Joy My Freedom”: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), especially chapter 9; Andrea Patterson, “Germs and Jim Crow: The Impact of Microbiology on Public Health Policies in Progressive-­Era American South,” Journal of the History of Biology 42, no. 3 (2009): 541; and Sarah Judson, “Civil Rights and Civic Health: African American Women’s Public Health Work in Early Twentieth Century Atlanta,” NWSA Journal 11, no. 3 (1999): 98. 13. My essay builds on Hazel Carby’s key study of the social control (policing) of the behavior and sexuality of black women during the northern migration: “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 738–­55. Candace Jenkins expands upon Carby’s ideas and, particularly, their connection to the ideology of racial uplift—­one she calls the “salvific wish”—­in Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 12. 14. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 16. 15. Ange-­Maria Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 150. In “Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics,” Ben Highmore offers a reading of George Orwell’s class representations in terms of affects of “disgust” that similarly mirrors my own reading of the working class unsanitary mother within racial uplift ideology; in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 130. 16. In invoking the idea of unsanitary citizenship, I am adapting Charles Briggs’s

Notes to Pages 155–59  |  257 biopolitical investigation into the Venezuelan government’s response to cholera epidemics. By classifying the Warao Amerindian minority as lacking—­and ultimately incapable of—­modern scientific understandings of hygiene, health, and illness, public officials sought to regulate their access to social and civil rights. Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10. 17. Hine, Black Women in White, 14. 18. McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 190. 19. In Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6, Claudia Tate reread post-­ Reconstruction African American women novelist’s works in terms of the historically specific racial, gender, and class aspirations of these women for authority over their selves, homes, and world. One key insight of Tate’s study was her attention to the unpredictability and risks that turn-­of-­the-­century black women faced and that motivated them to strive toward what some saw as a troubling “sentimentalized” bourgeois home life. In what follows I will argue we need to take her implication that Progressive Era women’s stories were “risk narratives” on a literal physiological level. 20. This story is recounted in Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves, 37. 21. John A. Kenney, “Some Notes on the History of the National Medical Association,” Journal of the National Medical Association 25, no. 3 (August 1933): 97. 22. In speaking about a “community epidemiology” or disease story within racial uplift, I am adapting Steven Epstein’s discussion of a similar fashioning of a counterdiscourse to medical authority by gay men during the AIDS crisis. See Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 13. 23. The use of the diseased and disabled African American as a symbol of the failure of emancipation parallels the tactical use of the disabled veteran’s body within stories about a loss of national identity after the Vietnam War; see Emily Russell in Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 100. 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: Published for the University, 1899), 163. See also Du Bois’s chapter on the “Sick and Defective” in The Health and Physique of the Negro American (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1906). 25. John S. Haller Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–­1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 44–­46. 26. Edward Eggleston, The Ultimate Solution of the American Negro Problem (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1913), 280. 27. This passage is quoted in Todd Savitt’s “In the Journal of the National Medical Association a 100 Years Ago: The JNMA Fights Back,” Journal of the National Medical Association 102, no. 9 (2010): 840. 28. Charles Victor Roman, “The Negro Woman and the Health Problem,” Journal of the National Medical Association 7, no. 3 (July-­September 1915): 188, 189. 29. My discussion of the early history of public health is drawn from Elizabeth Fee and Dorothy Porter’s “Public Health, Preventive Medicine and Professionalization: England and American in the Nineteenth Century,” in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249–­76.

258 | Notes to Pages 159–65 30. Susan Craddock makes a similar point about the qualitative shift enacted by scapegoating the minority body as not simply inferior but also contagious. See City of Plagues, 7. 31. Susan Mizruchi, “Risk Theory and the Contemporary American Novel,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (2010): 112. 32. Ann Jurecic, “Life Narratives in the Risk Society,” presented to the Modern Language Association Annual Conference, January 7, 2011. 33. Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Poetics and the Politics of Emotion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 24. 34. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981). 35. For a sample of Rawlins’s columns that link medical risk with the “excess,” as he calls it, of the fast Harlem life, see “The Love of Health” (April 11, 1928); “Old Age” (October 7, 1925); and “How to Avoid Pneumonia” (October 3, 1923). Proquest Historical Newspapers. Online. 36. E. Elliott Rawlins, “Father Time and Our Bodies,” Amsterdam News, January 18, 1928. 37. E. Elliott Rawlins, “The Woman’s Physical Status,” Amsterdam News, June 10, 1925; “Morality and Health,” Amsterdam News, June 23, 1926; and “The Peril of Venereal Diseases,” Amsterdam News, April 14, 1926. 38. For a discussion of how the sentimentalized figure of the child has been used to teach and enforce cultural and national ideals, see Caroline Levander and Carol Singley, The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 39. Savitt, Race and Medicine, 272. 40. For a discussion of how women were often the primary agents and targets of early health activism, see Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired, especially 25–­26, which looks at the involvement of the Colored Women’s Clubs. 41. Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 23. 42. Gray White, Too Heavy a Load, 27. 43. Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 22. 44. Tate, Domestic Allegories, 14. 45. Mary Waring, “Degenerative Diseases,” NACW National Notes, April 1928, 6. 46. Jamie J. Wilson, Building a Healthy Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New York from the Jazz Age to the Great Depression (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009), 11. 47. Waring, “Preventive Medicine,” NACW National Notes, February 1929, 16. 48. McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 222. 49. Deborah Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 72. 50. George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 91. 51. See “Convention Report, National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses,” Public Health Nurse 21 (1929): 529.

Notes to Pages 165–72  |  259 52. Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 100; Cherene Sherrard-­Johnson, “‘A Plea for Color’: Nella Larsen’s Iconography of the Mulatta,” American Literature 76, no. 4 (2004): 838; Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations, 29; and Deborah McDowell, “Introduction,” Quicksand and Passing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), xvi. 53. Booker T. Washington, “Training Colored Nurses at Tuskegee,” American Journal of Nursing 11, no. 3 (Decembers 1910): 171. 54. Layne Parish Craig, “That Means Children to Me’: The Birth Control Movement in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” in Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative, ed. Marcelline Block and Angela Laflen (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 159. 55. Nella Larsen, The Nella Larsen Collection (Somerville, TN: Bottom of the Hill Publishing, 2010), 80. E-­book. All subsequent quotations from Larsen’s novel will be from this edition and cited in the text. 56. Arnold Weinstein, “The Unruly Text and the Rule of Literature,” Literature and Medicine 16, no. 1 (1997): 4. 57. Meredith Goldsmith. “Shopping to Pass, Passing to Shop: Bodily Self-­Fashioning in the Fiction of Nella Larsen,” in Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-­Representations by Black Women, ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 109. 58. I borrow the term “bioculture” from Lennard Davis to complicate critical race studies that tend to emphasize the distinction between the materiality of bodies—­ including its diseases and disabilities—­and the discursive formation of identities. See Lennard Davis and David Morris, “Biocultures Manifesto,” New Literary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 411–­18. 59. Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 103. 60. Emily Martin makes a similar point about the constant monitoring of moods as part of the internalization of the modern medical gaze. See Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 195. 61. In my reading of how Helga filters her relation to the Harlem community through a language of contagion, I am drawing on Priscilla Wald’s analysis of the language of contagion in the shaping of early twentieth-­century ethnic and national belonging in Contagious, especially chapter 3. 62. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 114. 63. Angelina Weld Grimke, Rachel: A Play in Three Acts (College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing, 1969 [1920]), 149. All other references are from this edition and will be cited in the text. For a discussion of Grimke’s play as advocating “race suicide,” see Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 23. 64. Daylanne English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 136–­37; Anne Stavney, “Mothers of Tomorrow: The Negro Renaissance and the Politics of Maternal Representation,” African American Review 32, no. 4 (1988): 534. 65. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 88.

260 | Notes to Pages 173–81 66. Joyce Meier, “The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women’s Theater,” MELUS 25, nos. 3–­4 (Fall/ Winter 200): 120. 67. Carol Allen, Peculiar Passages: Black Women Playwrights 1875–­2000 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 58. 68. Kathy A. Perkins, Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 8. 69. Brian Massumi, “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–­37. 70. Rachel’s trauma is often explained as her “dramatic awakening” to the racial violence and discrimination facing black children, as Michael Cotsell points out in The Theater of Trauma: American Modernist Drama and the Psychological Struggle for the American Mind, 1900–­1930 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 176. 71. Robin Bernstein, “‘Never Born’: Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel as Ironic Response to Topsy,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 19, no. 2 (2007): 61–­75. 72. Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 186. 73. Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson, “Proliferating Cripistemologies A Virtual Roundtable,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014): 151. 74. Pauline Hopkins, “The Mystery within Us,” Colored American Magazine 1, no. 1 (May 1900): 14–­18. 75. Shawn Salvant, Blood Work: Imagining Race in American Literature, 1870–­1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 132. CHAPTER 5 1. Alain Locke, “The Younger Literary Movement,” in The Works of Alain Locke, ed. and intro. Charles Molesworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 46. 2. Ibid., 47. 3. See Darryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xi, for a discussion of how the image of the damaged black psyche played an instrumental role in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. 4. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke, intro. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997 [1925]), 7. All other references are from this edition and will be cited in the text. 5. Jess Waggoner, “‘My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience’: Afro-­Modernist Critiques of Eugenics and Medical Segregation,” Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 3 (2017): 508. 6. See Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009). 7. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11. 8. For an overview of this history, see Andrew Heinze, “Schizophrenia Americana:

Notes to Pages 181–84  |  261 Aliens, Alienists, and the ‘Personality Shift’ of Twentieth Century Culture,” American Quarterly 55, no. 2 (June 2003): 227–­56. 9. See Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 22. 10. For connection between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, see Jeffrey Stewart, “The New Negro as Citizen,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25. 11. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, intro. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993 [1940]), 218. 12. Sarah Nilsen and Sarah Turner, The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-­Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 3, for a brief history of postrace colorblind ideology. 13. This is the argument of Metzl, Protest Psychosis. 14. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “Mad Is a Place; or, the Slave Ship Tows the Ship of Fools,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 303–­8. 15. Too often within African American cultural histories there has been a reluctance to speak about African American mental disability since psychiatric and psychological theories have cooperated with a broader pathologization of black lives and a victim-­ blaming individualization of structural racism. For many race leaders, as well, a recognition of black mental illness—­such as depression—­diminishes an inspiring history of superwomen and soul survivors. 16. Puar, Right to Maim, also addresses the role of psychological maiming as part of the “ecology of sensations” implemented within racial necropolitics. 17. For a discussion of weathering to describe a toxic atmosphere of ongoing stress that impacts the health of black women, see Linda Villarosa, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a ‘Life-­or-­Death Crisis,’” New York Time Magazine, April, 11, 2018. Online. 18. See Jerry Tew’s introduction to Social Perspectives in Mental Health: Developing Social Models to Understand and Work with Mental Distress (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005), 22. 19. Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17. 20. Keith Wailoo, Pain: A Political History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 17. 21. For a discussion of the problems with the term “colorblind,” see Subini Ancy Annamma, Darrell D. Jackson, and Deb Morrision. “Conceptualizing Color-­Evasiveness: Using Dis/ability Critical Race Theory to Expand a Color-­Blind Racial Ideology in Education and Society,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 202, no. 2 (2017): 147–­62. 22. Throughout this chapter I will not be taking early twentieth-­century social psychology as an analytic methodology, but retrieving social psychology as itself a cultural artifact of the post–­World War I period whose medicalized language helped shape a dramatic reconceptualization of self, inter-­and intraracial contact, and politics. 23. Graham Richards, ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History (London: Routledge, 2012), 75–­77.

262 | Notes to Pages 184–90 24. Emory Bogardus, Immigration and Race Attitudes. (Washington, DC: Health, 1928), 219. 25. I borrow the term “neurodiversity” from Ann Jurecic, “Neurodiversity,” College English 69, no. 5 (May 2007): 423. 26. Quoted in Kenneth Robert Janken, Walter White: Mr. N.A.A.C.P (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 112. 27. Walter White, “The Paradox of Color,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke, intro. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997 [1925]), 362. All other references are from this edition and will be cited in the text. 28. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–­1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 153. 29. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984 [1973]). 30. Darryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity, xiii. 31. See John Duckitt, “Psychology and Prejudice: A Historical Analysis and Integrative Framework,” American Psychologist 47, no. 10 (October 1992): 1186. 32. Heinze, “Schizophrenia Americana,” 236. 33. Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 34. Dewey, “Need for Social Psychology,” 275. 35. Floyd Henry Allport, Social Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924). E-­book. 36. Quoted in Nikolas Rose, “Psychology as a Social Science,” Subjectivity 25, no. 1 (2008): 452. 37. Scott, Contempt and Pity, 20. 38. Robert Lee Sutherland, Color, Class and Personality (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1942), 40. All other passages will be cited directly in the text. 39. Hubert Harrison, A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 279. 40. For a discussion of prognosis time, see Sarah Locklain Jain, “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics,” Representations 98, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 78; and Jasbir Puar, “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility and Capacity,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (July 2009): 163. 41. Not all Harlem Renaissance artists, it is important to note, agreed with the value of this new social psychology. In his 1926 article for the Nation magazine that served as a counterpart to Langston Hughes’s own assessment of “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” George Schuyler, for example, clearly suspects the implications of this new social psychology. Although critics have often noted how Schuyler in “The Negro-­Art Hokum” disputed a culturally distinct black art, Schuyler indicates through his language that he feared less some reaffirmation of constructed biological or cultural differences than the reessentializing of an older race “psychology.” The new art forms of the Harlem Renaissance had unintended political consequences because they often lead, Schuyler notes, to the classifying and claiming of a “peculiar psychology of the Negro.” George Schuyler, “The Negro-­Art Hokum,” in Double-­Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology, ed. Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 36.

Notes to Pages 191–200  |  263 42. Most discussions of “psychology” and twentieth-­century African American literature have largely looked at the influence of psychoanalysis on the post–­World War II period. See Badia Sahar Ahad, Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Shelley Eversley, “The Lunatic’s Fancy and the Work of Art,” American Literary History 13, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 449–­68; Jay Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-­Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); and Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 43. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 185, and George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 79. 44. Alain Locke, The Works of Alain Locke, ed. and intro. Charles Molesworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 257. All additional references to this collection will be cited in the text. 45. Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 201l), 51. 46. Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda,” reprinted in Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1976]). 47. Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971), 57. 48. Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 86. 49. There was a close alliance between philosophy and social psychology in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was not until 1934, we need to remember, that psychology became a department separate from philosophy at Harvard, and the father of social psychology, Floyd Henry Allport, did his graduate studies and had a brief tenure as instructor of “philosophy” at Harvard’s Department of Philosophy (1913–­19 and 1919–­22)—­at the same time that Alain Locke attended. See Blair T. Johnson and Diana R. Nichols, “Social Psychologists’ Expertise in the Public Interest: Civilian Morale Research during World War II,” Journal of Social Issues 54, no. 1 (1998), 57. 50. Carl Van Vechten, “Uncle Tom’s Mansions,” New York Herald Tribune, December 20, 1925, 6. 51. Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 378. 52. Roderick Ferguson, “An American Studies Meant for Interruption,” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 2010): 217. 53. Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 54. Sarah Ahmed, “Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness,” New Formations 63 (Winter 2007–­08): 121–­37. 55. Jessie Fauset, “Some Notes on Color,” World Tomorrow 5, no. 3 (March 1922): 77. 56. For this early assessment, see Joseph Feeney, “Jessie Fauset of The Crisis: Novelist, Feminist, Centenarian,” Crisis 90, no. 6 (June/July1983): 20–­22. 57. Alan P. Smith, “Mental Hygiene and the American Negro,” Journal of the National Medical Association 23, no. 1 (January-­March 1931): 1–­10.

264 | Notes to Pages 200–217 58. Alfred Gordon, “Medicolegal Aspect of Morbid Impulses,” Journal of the National Medical Association 18, no. 2 (April-­June 1926): 65–­70. 59. Jessie Fauset, “Our Book Shelf: Review of Countee Cullen’s Color,” The Crisis 31, no. 5 (March 1926): 238. 60. Jessie Fauset, “The Looking Glass,” The Crisis 19, no. 1 (January 1920): 136. 61. See Soyica Diggs Colbert, “Do You Want to Be Well?,” in The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, ed. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert Patterson, and Aida Levy-­Hussen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 8. 62. Jessie Fauset, “The Symbolism of Bert Williams,” The Crisis 24, no. 1 (May 1922): 15. 63. Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 11. 64. Deborah McDowell, “The Neglected Dimensions of Jessie Redmon Fauset,” Afro-­ Americans in New York Life and History 5, no. 2 (1981): 33–­49; Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Ammons, “New Literary History: Edith Wharton and Jessie Redmon Fauset,” College Literature 14, no. 3 (1987): 207–­18. 65. Jessie Fauset, There Is Confusion (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern Library of Black Literature, 1989), 241. All other references will be from this edition and will be cited in the text. 66. Bourke, Story of Pain, 17. 67. See McHenry, Forgotten Readers. 68. Gordon, “Medicolegal Aspect of Morbid Impulses,” 68. 69. Bourke, Story of Pain, 28. 70. As Jane Kuenz and Susan Levinson have noted, Fauset repeatedly includes such theatrical moments to de-­essentialize authentic identities and to underscore that race (and gender and class) are performances. See Jane Kuenz, “The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset’s There is Confusion,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 89–­111; and Susan Levinson, “Performance and the ‘Strange Place’ of Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There is Confusion,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 825–­48. 71. See Mary Jane Lupton, “Bad Blood in Jersey: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree,” CLA Journal 27, no. 4 (June 1984): 386. 72. In my reading of Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree as critiquing the myth of the Strong Black Woman as obscuring and minimizing Black women’s mental health vulnerabilities and experiences of suffering, I am drawing on Tamara Beauboeuf-­Lafontant’s argument in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). 73. Puar, Maiming, 24. 74. See Teresa Zackodnick, The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 122. 75. Quoted in Malinda Alaine Lindquist, Race, Social Science and the Crisis of Manhood, 1890–­1970: We Are the Supermen (New York: Routledge, 2012), 66–­67.

Notes to Pages 219–22  |  265 EPILOGUE 1. Sheryl Gay Strolberg, “Michelle Obama Leads Campaign against Obesity,” New York Times, February 9, 2010. Online. 2. Nick Wing, “Sarah Palin Mocks Michelle Obama’s Anti-­Obesity Campaign with S’Mores,” Huffington Post, December 20, 2010. Online. 3. Anonymous, “Sen. Chambliss Joins First Lady Michelle Obama to Combat Childhood Obesity: Senate Agriculture Committee News Release,” Congressional Documents and Publications, February 2, 2010. Proquest. 4. As Anna Kirkland points out, the BMI, or Body Mass Index, that defines childhood obesity is measured against statistical averages from the 1960s and ‘70s when poverty and malnutrition often skewed baselines, especially for minority inner-­city children. In 1998, moreover, current BMIs were also lowered, based less on disinterested scientific data than on the prompting of medical and pharmaceutical companies that would profit from the millions of new consumers suddenly reclassified as overweight or obese: Kirkland, “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,” Signs 36, no. 2 (2011): 471. For a discussion of the problems of “anti-­obesity” rhetoric, see also Julie Guthman, Kathleen Lebesco, and J. Eric Oliver, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Kathleen Lebesco, “Fat Panic and the New Morality,” in Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 72–­82; and J. Eric Oliver, “The Politics of Pathology: How Obesity Became an Epidemic Disease,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 611–­27. 5. Michelle Obama, Remarks to the Congressional Black Caucus, September 16, 2010. Proquest. 6. Quoted in P. Preston Reynolds, “Dr. Louis T. Wright and the NAACP: Pioneers in Hospital Racial Integration,” American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 6 (June 2000): 883. 7. Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 8. Lynn Sweet, “Michele Obama in NAACP Speech, Compares Crusade against Obesity to Civil Rights Battles,” White House Press Release Transcript, July 13, 2010. Proquest. 9. Jasbir Puar, “Inhumanist Occupation: Palestine and the ‘Right to Maim,’” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–­3 (June 2015): 218–­21. 10. Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 171. 11. Cedric Johnson and Geoffrey Whitehall, “Making Citizens in Magnaville: Katrina Refugees and Neoliberal Self-­Governance,” in The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 79, use the term “benevolent neoliberalism” in their discussion of the response to Hurricane Katrina. 12. Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

266 | Notes to Pages 222–34 13. See Charlotte Bittekoff, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life,” American Studies 48, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 29–­48. 14. Tess Owen, “Heroin Kills White People More Than Anyone Else—­and Nobody Is Sure Why,” Vice News, January 27, 2016. Online. 15. Ekow N. Yankah, “When Addiction Has a White Face,” New York Times, February 9, 2016, Online. 16. Alfonso Serrano, “Amid Heroin Crisis, GOP Contenders Reframe Addiction as a Health Crisis,” Al Jazeera, February 1, 2016, Online. 17. Ashley Parker, “Jeb Bush Drops Guard to Share Family Account of Addiction,” New York Times, January 5, 2016, Online. 18. Theodore Schleifer, “Cruz Shares Emotional Story of Half-­Sister’s Death after Battling Drug Addiction,” CNN, February 5, 2016, Online. 19. Tamara Keith, “GOP Candidates Address Forum on Addiction in New Hampshire,” NPR News, January 6, 2016. Online. 20. In “People-­of-­Color-­Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 47, Jared Sexton makes a similar point about the “recurrent analogizing of black suffering.” 21. David Amsden, “The New Face of Heroin,” Rolling Stone, April 3, 2014. Online. All references are from this edition. 22. Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015). 23. David W. Murray, Brian Blake, and John P. Walters, “The Opioid Crisis,” Weekly Standard, December 14, 2016. Online. 24. Nancy Nicosia, John M. MacDonald, and Jeremy Arkes, “Disparities in Criminal Court Referrals to Drug Treatment and Prison for Minority Men,” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 6 (June 2013): 77–­84. 25. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 68. 26. Southpaw, directed by Antoine Fuqua (2015, Weinstein Company), DVD. 27. Ed Guerrero, “The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 237. 28. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). 29. Christopher Bell, “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge Press, 2006), 278. 30. Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 15.

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Index

accommodationism: as racial politics, 46, 52–­54; Booker T. Washington, 156, 193, 239n48, 246n49; The Marrow of Tradition, 116 accommodations: black women’s reimagining, 28–­29, 34, 112, 147, 149; disability theory, 10, 23, 26 aesthetic: Black women’s ecology, 20, 27, 32, 46, 115, 117, 119–­22, 126; Bonner’s stories, 131, 134–­35, 138; social aesthetics defined, 115, 121; The Street, 140, 143, 148 affect: bad affects in social psychology, 181–­82, 190, 193, 197–­98, 203–­6, 210; biopolitics of debility, 10, 18, 23–­24, 60–­62, 245n37; fat panic, 222; The Living Is Easy, 36, 39–­42; part of Black women’s ecology, 55, 115, 120–­22, 126, 133, 137–­38, 143–­45; peculiar indifference, 89–­90; public images, 153–­55; risk narratives, 47, 158–­59, 161, 163, 165–­7 1, 173, 175. See also cruel optimism; disgust; mood; risk narrative African American literature: debate over political work, 36–­37 African American mortality: cultural emotions, 61–­62; disparities, 2, 13, 23, 241n82, 255n5; infant mortality, 20, 78; insurance industry discriminations, 56; National Association of Colored Women’s Club, 150, 163; Philadelphia Negro, 89–­90; problem of black women, 158; sign of racial degeneration, 12 agency: Black women’s ecology, 116, 121,

126–­27, 129, 132–­37, 142; Charles Chesnutt, 86; chronic agency without mastery, 52, 64, 76; liberal theory 43, 64, 110, 146; literary naturalism, 113; material things, 26, 28, 36 Ahad, Badia Sahar, 191 Ahmed, Sara, 176, 198 Allen, L. C., 3. See also American Public Health Association Allewaert, Monique, 28, 141 Allport, Floyd Henry, 187, 195–­96; Handbook of Social Psychology, 188; Social Psychology, 187–­88, 189 alternative medicine: diasporic traditions, 23, 101, 178 American Psychological Association, 187, 217 American Public Health Association, 3, 8 American Youth Council, 189 Amsden, David: “New Face of Heroin,” 226–­30 Amsterdam News, 47, 154, 159. See also E. Elliott Rawlins Anker, Elizabeth, 132 antiblack modernity, 8, 38, 44, 181, 183; part of New South, 88, 106 antiblackness: defined, 6–­8; difference from liberal theories of racism, 9, 4–­15; disability theory, 5 Arkes, Jeremy, 229 “Atlanta Cotton States and International Exhibition Address.” See Washington, Booker T. 293

294 | Index Atlanta University: Annual Conferences on Negro Problem, 24, 61, 73, 91, 123 Atlanta World (newspaper), 148 Baily v. Alabama (Supreme Court Case), 93 Barad, Karen, 114 Barrier Williams, Fannie: new accommodationism, 29–­31; radical ecology, 27–­ 29; “The Relation of the Trained Nurse to the Negro Home,” 10, 24; speculative realism, 25–­26 Baynton, Douglass, 9, 55 Beck, Ulrich, 159 Bell, Bernard, 113 Bell, Christopher, 69, 234 Bennett, Bill, 78 Bennett, Jane, 108, 115 Berlant, Lauren, 23 biological citizenship, 14, 236n15 biomapping, 46, 116, 127, 132–­34 biomedicalization: Black women, 155, 166, 170–­7 1; racial politics, 12, 47, 151, 153, 159, 164 biopolitical delinquent: noncitizen, 9 birth control debate and Black women, 12, 165, 172 Black aesthetics, 182, 194 Black Arts Movement, 182 Black cosmopolitanism, 190, 191, 193, 195–­ 98, 204, 208 Black Lives Matter movement, 8 Black well-­being: alternative understandings, 4–­5, 21, 23, 29–­30, 33–­34, 37, 112, 126, 148, 190 blood and racial differences, 57, 158, 212, 216 BMIs (Body Mass Index): obesity, 220 Bogardus, Emory, 184 Bone, Robert, 167 Bonner, Marita, 46, 114, 116; “The Hands: A Story,” 129–­32; “Prison-­Bound,” 133–­ 36; “Tin Can,” 127–­29 Bourke, Joanna, 207 Bousfield, Midian Othello, 8

Briggs, Charles, 85, 236n15 Brown, William Wells: Clotel, 96 Brown v. Board of Education, 180, 197 Bruce, La Marr Jurelle, 182 Burroughs, Nannie, 127 Bush, Jeb, 224, 229 Butler, Judith, 8, 114, 230 Byrd, W. Michael, 54, 85 Cacho, Lisa, 88 capacity contract, 9–­10 Carby, Hazel, 30, 75, 256n13 Carmody, Todd, 57 Chesnutt, Charles, 45, 84, 86–­87, 183; The Colonel’s Dream, 249n46; Conjure Woman, 45, 104–­5; “The Goophered Grapevine,” 105–­10; The Marrow of Tradition, 45; precarity, 99; representation of debility, 100–­102; shadow narrative of slow violence, 102–­3; “Superstitions and Folklore of the South,” 103–­4, 108 Chicago Defender, 121–­23 Child, Lydia Maria: Romance of the Republic, 96 The Chinaberry Tree. See Jessie Fauset chronic agency. See agency chronic disability, 38, 44, 51–­53, 58, 69; The American Negro, 57–­58; The Souls of Black Folk, 72–­75 chronobiopolitics: Up from Slavery, 44, 52, 85 citizen-­patient, 4, 11, 17–­18, 20–­21, 23; Booker T. Washington, 65; The Living Is Easy, 39, 47 citizenship: sanitary, 12, 85, 167, 170–­73, 176, 179 Clark, Adele, 20 Clark, Keith, 113, 137 Clark, Kenneth, 180, 197 class differences: health politics, 4, 10, 21, 23, 32, 35, 47, 169; The Living Is Easy, 37–­39, 41; The Souls of Black Folk, 71–­ 72; viral working class, 22–­23, 27 Clayton, Linda A., 54, 85

Index | 295 Clotel. See Brown, William Wells Cohen, Edward, 162, 181 colorblindness: ablest assumptions behind, 236n9; liberal meritocracy, 59; multiculturalism, 184, 200; opioid crisis, 225, 230; shared precarity, 99, 103, 106 Committee of One Hundred on National Health, 14 Congressional Black Caucus, 220 Conjure Woman. See Chesnutt, Charles Connolly, William, 138 contagion: Black women’s ecology, 27; new language of, 25, 37, 153, 163; Quicksand, 167–­69; Rachel, 174 Cooper, Anna Julia, 56 Coviello, Peter, 234 Craddock, Susan, 25, 153 Craig, Layne Parish, 165 Crane, Stephen, 129 Crawford, Lucas, 5 crip ecology, 114, 147 cripistemology, 11, 33–­34; The Living Is Easy, 35, 39, 41, 43 crip negativity: Rachel, 176; The Souls of Black Folk, 78–­79, 81 Crisis, The (NAACP magazine), 20; Jessie Fauset’s book reviews, 200–­201; “The Terrorists,” 87–­88, 129; “The Younger Literary Movement,” 180 cruel optimism, 23; Up from Slavery, 61–­ 62. See also affect Cruz, Ted, 224, 226 Davidson, Olivia: wife of Booker T. Washington, 64, 75–­76 debility: defined, 5. See slow violence depression: Black women, 48, 143, 183; The Chinaberry Tree, 210–­16; part of opioid narrative, 226, 232 Dewey, John, 181, 187; “The Uses of Social Psychology,” 187 disintegrated personality, 48, 184. See also social psychology disgust: affective pedagogy, 39, 154, 159;

The Living Is Easy, 40–­41; Quicksand, 169 domestic ideology, 117. See also sentimentalism Douglass, Frederick, 94, 192–­93 drug courts: and race, 229 Du Bois, W. E. B., 10, 20, 44–­45, 50 123, 183, 221; Dusk of Dawn, 92; Health and Physique of the Negro, 73, 91, 97; pageant for the Neighborhood Union anniversary, 148; peculiar indifference, 89; The Philadelphia Negro, 45, 83, 87–­ 90, 97; The Quest of the Silver Fleece, 45, 87; The Quest of the Silver Fleece: debt bondage and debility, 92–­94; The Quest of the Silver Fleece: speculative realism, 95–­96; The Quest of the Silver Fleece: sociological realism critique, 97–­98; The Souls of Black Folk, 44, 51; The Souls of Black Folk: debility troubles, 68; The Souls of Black Folk: disability narrative, 73–­74; The Souls of Black Folk: “Of the Meaning of Progress,” 72–­73; The Souls of Black Folk: “The Passing of the First-­Born,” 53, 76–­ 80; “The Talented Tenth,” 69 Dudley, John, 113 dying race: myth of, 18, 67, 79, 157, 229; The Marrow of Tradition, 100–­101 ecofeminism, 118 ecological aesthetics, 120, 126, 140 Eggleston, Edward: The Ultimate Solution to the Negro Problem, 157 emancipation: alternative meanings of, 1, 3, 5–­6, 23, 218, 221, 234; Barrier Williams, 28, 34; The Living Is Easy, 37, 42 English, Daylanne, 95 epidemiology, 153, 156–­58, 168; alternative community epidemiology, 161–­62, 171, 257n22. See also germ theory Erevelles, Nirmala, 5, 221 Eversley, Shelley, 191 Fairchild, Amy, 153

296 | Index Fauset, Jessie, 48, 180–­85; The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life, 48, 184, 210–­18; indebtedness to social psychology in, 202–­4; “mad” characters in, 204–­7; review of Countee Cullen, 200; review of Du Bois’s Darkwater, 200–­ 201; “Some Notes on Color,” 199–­200, 201; “The Symbolism of Bert Williams,” 201; There Is Confusion, 48, 180, 184, 188, 201; troubling of liberal multiculturalism, 209–­10 Ferguson, G. S., 119–­20 Ferguson, Roderick, 198 Fineman, Martha, 8 Fiorina, Carly, 224 Fisher, Irving: report on “National Vitality,” 13–­14, 30 Foucault, Michel, 16, 84 Frazier, E. Franklin, 123, 189 Freedmen’s Bureau, 54–­55 Fuqua, Antoine, 224. See also Southpaw Gaines, Kevin, 154 Gamble, Vanessa, 7 Garb, Margaret, 126 Garcia, Jay, 191 germ theory, 25, 29–­31, 101, 114, 115; black ecology, 120–­21; The Living Is Easy, 37–­ 38, 40; National Notes, 150 153, 157, 162, 174 Goldsmith, Meredith, 34, 167 Gordon, Alfred, 200, 205 Gordon, Linda, 162 Gothic tradition: African American literature, 25–­26, 95, 113, 142 Great Migration, 4, 10, 24, 34, 46–­47 Grimke, Angelina: contemporary response, 172–­73; crip negativity, 176–­77; hyperbolic minstrelsy, 174–­75; Rachel, 47, 155, 164; speculative fiction, 179 Grimke, Archibald, 173 Guerrero, Ed, 232 Hancock, Ange-­Maria, 154 Harlem Renaissance, 47–­48, 155; mental

pain, 182–­84, 186, 190, 199, 203; postrace multiculturalism, 180, 182, 184, 217; social psychology 187, 198 Harris, Eugene: “Physical Conditions of the Race, Whether Dependent upon Social Conditions or Environment,” 61–­62 Harris, Joel Chandler, 104, 110–­11 Harris, Leonard, 187 Harrison, Hubert: “At the Back of the Black Man’s Mind,” 190 Hartman, Saidiya, 67, 76, 84, 136 Health and Physique of the Negro. See Du Bois, W. E. B. health disparities: limits of framework, 2, 7, 13, 16; post-­Reconstruction, 54–­55, 85; statistics in The Philadelphia Negro, 89–­90. See also African American mortality healthism, 221, 236n14 Henderson, Chloe, 110–­11 Herndon, A. F.: Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 11 Highmore, Ben, 115 Hine, Darlene Clark, 11, 151 Hoffman, Frederick L.: Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, 55–­ 56, 62 Hoover, J. Edgar, 138 Hope, Lugenia, 1–­2, 4, 45, 86, 123, 126, 135, 140, 148, 220–­21 Hopkins, Pauline: Contending Forces, 86; “The Mystery within Us,” 178–­79 Hospital Herald, 30, 241n82 Hughes, Langston, 182, 262n41 Hunter, Jane Edna: A Nickel and a Prayer, 10; 30–­34, 45 Hunter, Tera, 153 Hutchinson, George, 164, 191, 195 immunity: acquired, 155, 161, 163; political value as metaphor, 162–­64; Quicksand, 166, 171–­72 incorrigible sick and dying Negro, 9, 27, 90–­93, 97, 229, 247n11

Index | 297 insurance industry: National Negro Health Week, 11, 240n57; race-­based assessments, 13, 55–­56, 169, 244n18 integration: Locke, 191–­93, 195; social psychology, 47–­48, 180–­82, 187–­88, 191 Jackson, Algernon: National Negro Health Week, 1, 3; sanitary citizenship, 12 James, Jennifer, 69, 246n53 Jenkins, Candace, 127, 165, 256n13 Johnson, Charles, 133, 189 Journal of the National Medical Association, 13, 47; C. V. Roman’s articles, 154, 156–­58; morbid obsessions, 200, 205 Judson, Sarah, 153 Kafer, Alison, 51 Kasich, John, 224–­25, 226, 232 “Keeping Fit” columns. See E. Elliott Rawlins Kenney, John: denigration of folk doctors, 102; The Negro in Medicine, 22; retrospective, 156; Tuskegee Institute medical director, 50–­51, 65 King, Martin Luther, 217 Larsen, Nella, 47, 164–­65; Quicksand, 47, 155, 164, 182; Quicksand: biomedicalized language 165–­67, 168–­69; Quicksand: as risk narrative, 168–­72 Lawrie, Paul, 67 “Let’s Move” anti-­obesity campaign. See Obama, Michelle Lewis, David Levering, 159, 185 liberal antiracism: Bonner’s challenge, 116; Chesnutt’s fiction, 99, 102, 104, 106; critique, 7, 9, 27; liberal antirace fiction, 46, 84; neoliberalism, 231; There Is Confusion, 205 liberal multiculturalism, 6, 181–­82, 198; Alain Locke, 191, 194–­96; 204; Jessie Fauset, 201; There Is Confusion, 204, 207–­10, 217–­18 living in prognosis, 190, 191, 193–­94, 197, 205, 262n40

Locke, Alain, 48, 182, 184, 185, 187; “Art or Propaganda,” 193; “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture,” 192; forward to Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times, 192–­93; influence of social psychology, 188–­91; ”The New Negro,” 180, 194, 194–­97; “Race Contracts and Inter-­Racial Relations: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Race,” 192; “The Younger Literary Movement,” 180–­81 Locke, John, 120 Logan, Rayford, 118 Lorde, Audre: “The Uses of Anger,” 199 Lowndes County, AL. See Du Bois, W. E. B.: The Quest of the Silver Fleece Luciano, Dana, 43, 52, 85 Lupton, Deborah, 43 MacDonald, John M., 229 Machlin, Elizabeth, 113 maiming. See debility; slow violence Mann, Susan, 118 The Marrow of Tradition. See Chesnutt, Charles Massumi, Brian, 174 Matheson, Neill, 104 McClennan, Alonzo, 30, 241n82 McClure, Kirstie, 89 McDowell, Deborah, 202 McHenry, Elizabeth, 119, 155, 205 McKittrick, Katherine, 2 McRuer, Robert, 5, 51 medicalization of race. See biomedicalization medical sentimentalism, 48, 175 Melamed, Jodi, 7, 84, 99 mental distress, 4, 48, 180–­81, 185; Alain Locke, 197; The Chinaberry Tree, 210, 213–­14, 218; defined 182–­84; Jesse Fauset’s essays, 200–­201; “The Paradox of Color,” 185–­87; social psychology, 189–­ 91 Metzl, Jonathan, 181, 221 Mitchell, David, 62 Mitchell, Michele, 12

298 | Index Mbembe, Achille, 84 Molesworth, Charles, 187 mood, 115, 120, 122, 126; management, 167, 259n60; medicalization of in social psychology, 183, 199, 202; The Street, 134, 137–­38, 140, 143–­46, 252n2, 254n57 Morehouse College, 1, 123 Morrison, Toni, 59 mortality: statistical disparities. See African American mortality Moynihan, Daniel, 154 Mullen, Bill, 138 multiculturalism, critique of. See liberal multiculturalism Musser, Judith, 128 NAACP, 173–­74, 177, 220 Narrative f(r)iction, 126, 131, 143–­44 National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 4, 24, 46, 85–­86; history, 117–­19; respectability ecology, 121–­22, 127, 137, 140, 142; sanitatary advice, 150, 175 National Negro Business League, 11 National Negro Health Week, 1, 27, 54, 85; Atlanta parade, 11–­12; bulletin 1927, 17–­ 23; “clean-­up” campaigns, 12; governing of Black women, 18–­21; health sermons, 18; history, 240n57; visual artifacts, 20–­21 National Medical Association, 50, 154, 156, 212 naturalism: African American tradition, 113, 116, 129, 143, 145 necropolitics: The Living Is Easy, 38; The Marrow of Tradition, 99–­100, 111, 249n46; Post-­Reconstruction necropolitics, 6, 23–­2 4, 30, 44–­45; psychological maiming, 183, 185, 201, 211; racial capitalism, 62, 74–­7 8, 84, 87–­ 88, 90 Negro Women Incorporated, 138, 140 Neighborhood Union (Atlanta). See Lugenia Hope Nelson, Alondra, 7 neurodiverse fiction, 48, 185

The New Negro anthology, 185, 194, 197, 201 New York Times, 224, 225 New South: racial capitalism, 15–­16, 38, 51–­52, 55, 58, 61, 63, 67–­74, 79–­81; The Marrow of Tradition, 100–­102, 105–­11, 250n57; The Quest of the Silver Fleece, 87–­95 Nicosia, Nancy, 229 Nold, Christian, 132–­33 Nixon, Rob, 84, 105 Obama, Michelle, 219–­21, 223 opioid crisis: and relationality to black debility, 223, 228–­29; white face of addiction, 224–­32 Opportunity (National Urban League magazine), 13, 46, 116, 133 pain: event, 203–­4; politics, 180, 183–­84 Patsavas, Alyson, 51 Patterson, Andrea, 153 Patterson, Orlando, 8–­9. See also social death People’s Voice (Harlem newspaper), 138 Peterson, Carla, 26, 86 Petry, Ann, 46, 112, 193; naturalist tradition, 116; object-­oriented materialism, 139, reimagined ecology, 114, 126, 140–­ 48; The Street: inspiration behind, 136–­ 38; transcorporality, 112–­13 The Philadelphia Negro. See Du Bois, W. E. B. Pickens, Theri, 5 Plessy v. Ferguson, 216 Pollock, Anne, 7 Posnock, Ross, 191 posthuman, 4, 32; African American women’s political ecology, 114, 130, 135 postrace ideology: Harlem Renaissance writers, 182, 184, 194; Jessie Fauset’s challenge of, 209, 210, 215; opioid crisis, 220, 223, 226 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 49 Pratt, Lloyd, 85, 94

Index | 299 predictive racism, 55 prison reform: Black debility, 224, 234 proletarian fiction, 128; Marita Bonner, 130, 132 Prophylactic Topics. See Mary Fitzbutler Waring protest fiction: African American literary history, 83–­84, 116, 145–­46 psychological disability. See mental distress Psychological Review, 181, 187 Puar, Jasbir, 5, 51, 107, 143, 236n11, 252n60 public health education: anti-­obesity, 219–­22; Black women as risk group, 25, 47, 150, 154, 160–­62, 164, 170, 171, 175; language of contagion, 20, 122, 169; mental health, 181, 200: opioid crisis, 225, 231; productive power of, 3, 36, 43, 84, 159, 164; racial uplift, 11–­18, 20, 61, 117, 120, 112–­13, 159, 69; racism, 8 13, 20, 25, 74, 91, 110, 157: sanitary citizenship, 8; shift to prevention, 158–­59, 164. See also National Negro Health Week quasi-­events, 3, 49, 230, 235n7 Quest of the Silver Fleece, The. See Du Bois, W. E. B. Quicksand. See Larsen, Nella Quinones, Sam, 226 Rachel: A Play in Three Acts. See Grimke, Angelina race psychology, 48, 184, 192, 203, 212 racial capitalism, 6–­7, 234; Booker T. Washington, 61, 63; defined, 9, 92; Conjure Woman, 105–­6, 109; The Marrow of Tradition, 84, 86, 100, 103; practices of debilitation, 26, 39, 44; The Souls of Black Folk, 45, 69, 71–­80; surplus labor, 16, 38, 51, 85 racial uplift, 4, 44, 154, 191; Black women’s reimagining, 34, 39, 43, 47, 114, 116, 142, 147, 149, 256n13; biomedicalization of behavior, 150–­51, 153–­55, 156, 158–­59, 163, 164, 257n22; Chesnutt, 99, 101, 103,

108; Fauset, 205, 210; invisibility of disability, 70, 246n53; Quicksand, 165–­66, 169; Rachel, 173, 175, 177, 179, 185; rehabilitative politics, 10, 17, 20, 23, 51, 54, 119, 196, 236n11, 255n1, 256n15 radical self-­care, 217 Rampersad, Arnold, 87 Rawlins, E. Elliott, 47, 154, 164, 166–­67, 170, 177–­78; “Keeping Fit” columns, 159–­61, 174, 176, 258n35 realism: literary tradition, 32, 86–­87, 95–­ 97, 101, 104, 106, 113,142, 166, 247n13 Reed, Adolph, 68 rehabilitative politics: racial uplift. See racial uplift respectability ecology, 10; 27–­28, 30, 32, 34, 45; Ann Petry, 140, 143, 149; Marita Bonner, 132, 134, 142; National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 113–­15, 117–­19, 123, 126 respectability politics. See racial uplift response-­ability, 24, 29, 32, 49, 113–­14, 116, 241n79; Ann Petry, 142, 147; Marita Bonner, 132 risk narrative, 47, 150, 154, 156; defined 159, 257n19; narrative of Black women, 155, 158–­59, 161; Quicksand, 164, 70–­72; Rachel, 173, 175, 179; social psychology, 182 Robeson, Paul, 185, 192 Robinson, Cedric, 9, 92 Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, 104 Roediger, David, 16, 92 Rolling Stone magazine. See David Amsden Roman, Charles Victor, 12–­14; 30, 24, 27, 30, 40, 47, 154; “The Negro Woman and the Health Problem,” 156–­58 Rose, Nikolas, 14, 181, 236n15 Ruffins, Kimberly, 133 Ruskin, John, 121 sanism, 11, 180–­82, 188, 190; Alain Locke, 193, 198, 200; Rachel, 175–­77, 179; There Is Confusion, 202, 204, 218

300 | Index sanitary citizenship, 79, 85, 167, 170–­7 1, 176, 179, 236n15, 256n16 sanitary mother, 20, 23, 47, 120, 154, 172; Rachel, 173, 175–­79, 256n15 Savitt, Todd, 7, 85 Schalk, Sami, 5, 70 Schuyler, George, 262n41 Schweik, Susan, 72. See also ugly laws sentimentalism, 115, 117, 120, 175, 180, 205; sentimental fiction, 86, 207 settlement house work, 1, 24, 30, 123 Sexton, Jared, 7, 226 Sharpe, Christina, 8 Sherrard-­Johnson, Cherene, 165 Shockley, Evie, 113 Shufeldt, Robert W.: America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro, 12 Simplican, Stacy, 9 slow violence, 23–­24, 32, 37 44–­45, 47, 60, 67, 71, 234; African American literary history, 83–­85, 87; Charles Chesnutt, 99–­107, 109, 29n46, 250n57; mental health, 184, 193; Michelle Obama, 220–­ 23; respectability ecology, 116, 127, 131, 138, 149, 177–­78; W. E. B. Du Bois, 88, 90–­92, 94–­97 Smith, Susan, 11 Snyder, Sharon, 62 Snyder, Teri, 78 social death: defined, 7–­8, 203; Ann Petry, 142–­43, 146; Marita Bonner, 127; W. E. B. Du Bois, 78, 88 social psychology, 48, 181–­84, 187–­91, 261n22, 263n41, 262n49; Alain Locke, 192–­98; Jessie Fauset, 201–­8, 210, 212–­ 13, 215, 217–­18 Souls of Black Folk (The). See Du Bois, W. E. B. Southern Workman, 24 Southpaw (2015 film), 224, 231–­33 speculative realism, 24–­26, 31–­33, 45, 86; Charles Chesnutt, 86, 106–­9; W. E. B. Du Bois, 87, 95–­97 Spelman College, 1, 124 Spelman Messenger, 1

Stewart, Sallie W. 117–­19, 120, 140 Stone, Andrea, 34 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 175 Sundquist, Eric, 104 surplus labor. See racial capitalism Susman, Warren, 186 Sutherland, H. L.: “The Destiny of the American Negro,” 91–­92, 100 Sutherland, Robert Lee: Color, Class, and Personality, 189–­90, 202 Tapper, Melbourne, 85 Tate, Claudia, 155, 162, 257n19 temporality, 5, 8, 44, 221, 238n33; alternative temporalities in speculative realism, 94–­97, 104, 108–­9; African American fiction, 94–­95; chronic temporality, 33, 51, 53; time of contamination, 84–­85, 96, 101 There is Confusion. See Jessie Fauset thing scripts, 122 Thomas, William Hannibal: The American Negro, 56–­60, 68 Tomes, Nancy, 153 Tuskegee Institute, 17, 22, 50, 54; Fauset’s representation of, 164–­66; Up from Slavery, 58, 65–­7, 156, 162, 240n57, 246n49 ugly laws, 72 (un)becoming archive: African American literary history, 10, 32, 34–­36, 41, 43, 68 unimagined community, 102, 106 unsanitized domestic allegories, 47, 150; defined, 155 unsanitized mother. See sanitary mother Van Vechten, Carl, 197, 201 vibrant naturalism, 45, 112, 114, 116; Ann Petry, 141–­42; Marita Bonner, 135, 146 vitality politics: defined, 6–­8 Waggoner, Jess, 181 Wailoo, Keith, 7, 183 Wald, Priscilla, 153, 259n61

Index | 301 Waring, Mary Fitzbutler, 47, 155, 172–­73, 177–­78, 221; immunity for women, 163–­ 64, 166; National Notes columns, 161–­ 64, 221; Prophylactic Topics, 150–­51 Washington, Booker T., 10–­15, 22, 24, 29, 44, 50, 193, 221; “Atlanta Cotton States and International Exhibition Address,” 15–­17; biochronology of slow natural growth in, 65–­68; chronic fatigue of wife in, 64; cruel optimism in, 61; debilitated health, 59–­60; questionable health of students, 50–­52; The Story of My Life and Work, 53–­34, 59; “Training Colored Nurses at Tuskegee,” 22, 165; Up from Slavery, 50, 52–­23, 58–­68 Washington, Harriet, 7 Watson, Hattie Rutherford, 1 Watson, Janet, 99 Weathering: psychological stress, 183, 185; The Chinaberry Tree, 210–­11, 216, 261n17 Weheliye, Alexander, 7, 70, 226 Weinstein, Arnold, 166

West, Dorothy: debility and antiblackness, 37–­40; disgust as affective biopolitics, 40–­41; diverse embodiment, 34–­ 35, 41–­42; The Living Is Easy, 10–­11; radical cripistemology, 41–­43 Wharton, Edith: novel of manners, 211 Wharton, Susan: Philadelphia Settlement Society, 89 White, Deborah Gray, 118 White, Walter, 184, 185; “The Paradox of Color,” 185–­86, 195, 199, 201, 218 white nationalism: and opioid crisis, 223, 230 whiteness: Black debility, 7, 81; material ecologies, 137, 143; wages, 16, 92 white supremacism, 2, 7, 25, 36, 88, 137, 190, 214–­16, 220, 226 Wilderson, Frank, 7, 226 Williams, Bert, 201–­12, 207 Woodward, Kathleen, 159 Wright, Louis, 220 Wright, Richard, 116, 129. See also naturalism