Gothic Race: The Horrors of Racism

Specters of Race and the Literature of Terror

Gothic Race: The Horrors of Racism

Slavery & Social Death

“If the slave no longer belonged to a community, if he had no social existence outside of his master, then what was he? The initial response in almost all slaveholding societies was to define the slave as a socially dead person. [...] The slave is violently uprooted from his milieu. He is desocialized and depersonalized. [...] The next phase involves the introduction of the slave into the community of his master, but it involves the paradox of introducing him as a nonbeing. He can never be brought to life again [...]. The slave will remain forever an unborn being.” Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (1982)

The Afterlife of Slavery

“Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2006)

Spacetime in Narrative

“We will give the name chronotope (literally, 'time space') to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. [...] In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole." Mikhail Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937)

No Black Narrative?

"Afropessimism is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness. [...] Blackness, as a paradigmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrements), cannot be disimbricated from slavery." “If social death is aporetic with respect to narrative, this is a function of both space and time, or, more precisely, their absence” Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (2020)

Blackness & Narrative

“The narrative arc of the slave who is Black […] is not an arc at all, but a flat line [...]: a flat line that moves from disequilibrium, to a moment in the narrative of faux-equilibrium, to disequilibrium restored and/or rearticulated.” “[T]he violence that both elaborates and saturates Black ‘life’ is totalizing, so much as to make narrative inaccessible to Blacks. […] [H]istory and redemption (and therefore narrative itself) are inherently anti-Black.” Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (2020)

Space and Blackness

“Social death bars the Slave from access to narrative at the level of temporality; but it also does so at the level of spatiality.” “Just as there is no time for the slave, there is also no place for the slave. The Slave’s reference to his or her quarters as a 'home' does not change the fact that it is a spatial extension of the master’s dominion.” Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (2020)

“Time” and Blackness (1)

• Modern linear “Time” as an epistemological dimension (i.e., the way in which we understand and organize History) proceeds from the humanistic (man-centered) view born out of the Enlightenment.

• This system of knowledge is also resposible for defending pseudo-scientific discourses on white supremacy, slavery, and the de-humanization of Black people.

• “In the 'time' [created by] modernity Blackness and Slaveness [overlap] ab initio" (Wilderson 2020).

• “[The] 'slave' is perceived as the essence of stillness [...] or of an undynamic human state, fixed in time and space" (Spillers 1987)

• “For the slave, 'historical' time is not possible” (Wilderson 2020)

“Time” and Blackness (2)

"The afterlife of slavery produces a certain set of aesthetic and intellectual, conceptual challenges, and I think one of those for me is around temporality, and how do we narrate time? […A] way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery [...] is the sense of temporal entanglement. […] How does one narrate that?" Saidiya Hartman, “On working with archives” (2018)

Gothic & Race

“The gothic as a literary genre can be defined by characteristics that resonate strongly with important aspects of the nineteenth-century literature of racial prejudice, imperial exploration and sensational anthropology.” Howard L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century England (1996)

The Gothic & Slavery

“Rather than an exaggeration, the gothic’s sensationalism was the means through which to express the empirical truth of slavery’s horrors. The antislavery movement turned to the gothic with its spectacles of punishment and monstrous crimes to picture slavery’s dreadful practices in order to name slavery as a social problem. The gothic provided a ready vocabulary to make the unspeakable realities of slavery speakable.” Teresa Goddu, "U.S. Antislavery Tracts and the Literary Imagination" (2016)

How Does One Narrate Blackness?

In order to break free from the paradigm of Historical stillness and spatial constriction imposed by Western narrative paradigms that exclude Blackness/Slaveness from a meaningful narrative representation, it is necessary to "disrupt linear, prescriptive constructions" and produce "liberating spaces" (Russell 2009).

...what is (in) a ghost, then?

“The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course.” Avery Gordon Ghostly Matters (1997)

Hauntology (i.e., the ontology of haunting), is a concept coined by Jacques Derrida. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott explain it as follows: "Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past. [...] Does then the ‘historical’ person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. The temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical, at once they ‘return’ and make their apparitional debut."

“It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (1993)