12, 000 Words?

There is much wrong with anonymous peer review. As Brian Rathburn points out, anonymous reviewers need not be “bitchy,” to use his term. They also need not take as long as they do, to add my own complaint. I understand folks are busy–but if you’re too busy to turn something around quickly, don’t take it on.

Peer reviewing is *not* writing or re-writing an essay.

That said, this strikes me about Rathburn’s article:

To say anything remotely interesting in 12,000 words is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE.

My discipline is founded on condensation and synthesis: we abstract to compare. We teach summary and paraphrase. I say this to note my training and my preferences. I also say it because, perhaps as a result of my training and the age I live in, I have no patience for long-windedness. Most articles and books I read can be cut in half without any loss.

One can say many interesting things in 6,000 words. Scientists frequently do it in under 3,000.

Sagging Time

As “fashion week” is splashed all over, I started thinking about styles that seem to resist the “time” of fashion, the habit of trendiness, the pull of now. About extended time, stretched time, persistent time. The time of sagging. Less abstractly, I was waiting for the bus and started thinking about the longevity of sagging: it’s been around for a long time, certainly far longer than “trend” or “fashion” would suggest. What accounts for this longevity? I ask this as one who cannot sag, lacking both the body shape and the aptitude.

Sagging also comes to mind because I’m writing about African prisons and re-reading sections of Regina Kunzel’s wonderful Criminal Intimacy, which begins with the insight that prisons are often considered “ahistorical” spaces, certainly according to the patterns of generational time (Halberstam) and chrononormativity (Freeman) through which we measure temporality (here one could also raise settlement over transience, following Nayan Shah). Given that so many of the ways we talk about time are measured not in coffee spoons, but in the patterns of birth, school, marriage, divorce, retirement, and death, the prison appears to be a spatial remove from time. A place governed not by change over time, but persistence and inevitability, strange and stranger intimacies.

I mention sagging and prison because histories of sagging join the two. I am not an expert in these histories—I am following internet crumbs. According to e-historians, sagging began as an act of necessity: prisons refused to let inmates wear belts. Sagging then spread from prisons to elsewhere.

Claiming “sagging spread” is dangerous.

Let me re-word it.

Sagging does not register the movement of a “style” from prison. Instead, sagging registers the movements of prison inmates in and out of the prison system. It is a material reminder of imprisonment in the U.S., a country that holds a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Sagging registers the temporality of prison living—the stretched time, the no time, the time of working out, the time of staying alive, the time of learning how not to kill oneself.

Sagging is about prison time. It’s about a time those outside the prison want to forget.

What would it mean to understand sagging as a rupture in normative time? What would it mean to frame sagging as an unpleasant, irritating, obnoxious reminder of the ideological and material violence required to participate in and support normative time?

Those against sagging have described it as “immoral” and “indecent,” as a rupture of shared spatial codes. Sagging introduces something unwanted into the atmosphere. It introduces prison materialities into spaces designed as non-prisons. I stretch, but only a little. One can certainly read protests against sagging as protests against the making public of prison materialities: we lock people away so we don’t have to engage them. We should not have to engage with their practices and styles and habits.

Sagging divides the world into the imprisoned and those who are not.

But sagging also emphasizes the porousness between the prison and the non-prison. It registers prison as a space of mobility and transience. It registers the time of prison that is not, cannot be, marked by “trend” or “fashion.” It registers the stubbornness of non-normative time. Prison time. Sagging time.

What might it mean to think of sagging as a theory and practice of temporality?

Sagging happens over time. In that sense, it is part of time’s effects. We want to imagine that it is “natural.” Or “inevitable.” Even though a judicious nip and tuck will slow it or prevent it. Sagging happens.

Sagging, as material practice, as stylization, breaks the rules of sagging as temporal inevitability. It suggests there are other ways of inhabiting time—it foregrounds those who slip in and out of chrononormativity, drawn into state systems that run on other kinds of times. Sagging pushes against the forgetting we are encouraged to embrace as normativity.

“The bad people have been put away. You can forget them.”

A line from many TV shows featuring cops. Many of whom hate sagging.

Sagging forbids forgetting. Those towns that have passed laws criminalizing sagging—which often means criminalizing young minority men—make my point about the forgetting that we desire. The towns want to uphold “morality” and “decency” and “gentlemanliness,” qualities whose normative weight is based on silence and forgetting. Against the violence of normative silence and forgetting, sagging.

If sagging is the pull of time, what might sagging as un-fashion, as persistence, as material practice, tell us about how time pulls and stretches, about the logics of prison temporalities as they leak out of prisons into our daily practices? I’m thinking of Oz, for instance, with its repetitions of what Dennis Brutus would call “love, strange love,” its fits of jealousy and frenetic sex, the cycles of boredom and violence, the sameness of minor variations. As I write this, I’m struck by the time of the soap, the non-events of the sitcom, the forms of unfreedom we term normal life, the disruptions we welcome and fear.

Sagging time.

I am not quite sure where this is heading. I wanted to think about fashion and time, about persistence and habit as practices that make time feel differently, about the impress of time on space, the precariousness of sagging—one fears and hopes that pants will fall down. Those who write about sagging describe it as a mode of resistance to normative fashion, a disruption of style, a hiccup in the visual field. I *think* this is right.

But what is one to make of the persistent disruption, of the hiccup that will not stop, that so disrupts breathing that speech becomes impossible? What is one to make of the sag of sagging, its long life?

I had hoped to make visible the time-work of sagging—to note its politics and erotics. To think of the bodies shaped by it, the atmospheres saturated with it, the public spaces fractured by it, and those created by it. I wanted to ask why sagging annoys and irritates, even as it inflames and excites. Perhaps I wanted to abstract the sharp pang of desire that sagging incited recently—one can think away feeling, or so the fool believes. Which is to say, I don’t yet have a handle on how to think about the time of sagging, but I’m interested in its cleavages and crevasses, its passages to thinking through and with other temporalities.

It Gets Harder: On Teaching

This post can go wrong in many ways. It is not about sex. This post can go wrong in many other ways. It really is not about sex. Stop reading right now if you think it’s about sex. Really. Stop. Since I’ve used the word sex so many times, search engines will probably direct those looking for sex to this post that is really not about sex.

So be it.

We are entering the fourth week of the semester. By this point, I have evaluated at least one assignment from my students. I know their names and I’m beginning to get a sense of their personalities, even the silent ones. I have a pretty good sense of the ones who are effortlessly brilliant, the ones who work hard and produce excellent results, the slackers who work hard sometimes, the very smart who don’t quite understand academic protocols and will amaze their instructors in a few years, and the disengaged.

The class is following a trajectory that I follow every semester, even cultivate: it’s getting harder.

The ideas are getting bigger, even as how we get to them becomes more localized. For instance, we spent a lot of time asking why Langston Hughes uses the term “torture” in “The White Ones.” Time well spent as I insisted that we think and re-think Hughes’s language and voice. Hughes is a cascade of sound—one needs to linger for the full effect, for the spray and the shimmers.

The White Ones

I do not hate you,
For your faces are beautiful, too.
I do not hate you,
Your faces are whirling lights of splendor and loveliness, too.
Yet why do you torture me,
O, white strong ones,
Why do you torture me?—Langston Hughes

As the semester continues, I demand more.

I reason that the more students know, the more they should be able to accomplish.

Difficulty is not measured in terms of extra writing—some years ago, a now very famous student complained that my class was not rigorous because I didn’t require long papers. I’m hoping that in the interim he’s learned about the rigor of the short paper, especially as he’s now working as an editor. Handling complex ideas lucidly and concisely is difficult. Anyone who has condensed a dissertation into a pithy 50 words knows what I mean.

Pithy. Lucid. Condensed.

What I ask for is counterintuitive: increasing complexity rearranges thinking and writing. One struggles to engage new knowledge. As we encounter new ideas, our prose tends to become knotty, circular, tangled, clotted. I can barely read what I wrote when I first encountered theory or when I was reading Lacan every single morning during my first year of grad school. My first drafts are word-traps, syntax-snares, semantic-follies.

I know that what I’m asking for is difficult.

And I ask for it.

I do so as an act of faith in my students. I raise the bar because I believe they can reach it. Even surpass it.

But it always comes as a shock.

Those whose first assignments got Bs blanch when their second assignments get Ds. Those who turned in good first work are surprised when I describe subsequent work as adequate or terrible, both words I use. While I sympathize with the knotty prose of ideas being worked on, I do not indulge sloppy thinking. I can tell the difference.

The semester gets harder. I ask for more.

Some students get it. Try harder. Do more. Others attempt to slide. Those who have decided early on that they’ll “take a C” discover that I am very comfortable handing out Fs. Some give up. Decide that the encounter with difficulty is not worth it. I respect this.

I respect it.

But I don’t reward it.

It gets harder.

“I Watched the Late Show”

I watched the late show, An Officer and a Gentleman,
which is a movie about factory workers
not having a dream
except to put out when they are shat on
until a man dressed in white
carries one of them
away. Then everyone claps they are so happy.

Forrest Gander, “Distractions from the Real World”

How to Remove Trousers when Fettered

The secret is one leg at a time.

Lower the trousers and push one trouser-leg down inside the shackle, between it and the leg, until you have stuffed through as much as will go, including some of the crutch. Then pull the shackle as high up the leg as it will go and remove your foot from the trouser-leg which should now all be below the shackle. Next feed back all the loose cloth of the trouser-leg back through the shackle. One leg is now free. Repeat the process on the other leg.

Putting them on again merely invokes reversing the operation.

J.M. Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee

“We Have Chosen To Be Gay”

An anonymous African gay man says,

We have chosen to be gay, that is what we want, and that is what we like. That is what we have chosen and we want to display it.

What does it mean to “choose to be gay”? What does it mean for an African man to “choose to be gay”? I am not interested in claiming that “gay” is a “Western” term so I can privilege alternative terms—kuchu, basha, and so on. Instead, I am interested in “gay” as an object of desire and as choice and as spectacle: “we want to display it.” Because, arguably, what is at stake in most anti-gay legislation is precisely the relationship between choice and spectacle: the making public of what Foucault terms “a way of life.”

Some old ground: In Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta claims there was no homosexuality among the Gikuyu. I have wrestled with this statement for a long time. Was he simply homophobic? Was he so removed from the Gikuyu that his statement carries no weight? (Kenyatta left his rural home at 9 years of age and never “returned” to it.) Was he responding to theories of sexuality in anthropology? (For answers to these, wait for the book, where I address them in complete sentences.) In more generous moments, I have absolved Kenyatta of homophobia and considered his statement a comment on homosexuality in the U.K. Re-framed in this way, it would read, there is no homosexuality among the Gikuyu as exists among the English in 1930s England. This is, perhaps, too generous, but it allows a necessary way of thinking about the geo-histories of homo-sentiment.

All the African anti-homosexuality legislation I have seen and the various reports I have followed focuses on homosexuality as public spectacle: the problem of chinkhoswe for Stephen and Tiwonge; the circulation of queer-friendly material in the form of pamphlets, film, books, posters, music; the public appearance of queer intimacies—same-sex individuals holding hands, kissing, displaying affection. Implicitly, anti-homosexuality campaigns are, more precisely, campaigns against public homosexuality. (I set aside, for the moment, the question of whether homosexuality can exist as private.)

Indeed, Kenya’s minister of justice, Mutula Kilonzo, has followed a Lawrence v. Texas paradigm by arguing that the state has no business monitoring same-sex consensual acts performed in private. In other words, be a gay on your own time, away from innocent African publics.

Practically, we know this doesn’t work. Rowdy homophobes break down doors, invade private residences and rented hotel rooms, leave nasty facebook and email messages, scrawl trollish blog comments (I don’t get this, and if I figured out why, I might offer advice to those who do). The public always breaks through to the private: and one might argue that at least since Oscar Wilde’s trial, homosexuality has been constituted as the making public (through humiliation) of the private.

To “choose to be gay” is not the same thing as “coming out,” even though they both intervene into a public. Here, I use a Foucauldian distinction. Today, coming out is understood as an expression of identity, an “I am this.” And it is troubling, as Samuel Delany explains:

The rhetoric of singular discovery, of revelation, of definition is one of the conceptual tools by which dominant discourses repeatedly suggest that there is no broad and ranging field of events informing the marginal. This is true of science fiction versus the pervasive field of literature; art as compared to social labor; blacks as a marginal social group to a central field of whites; and gay sexuality as marginal to a heterosexual norm. That rhetoric becomes part of the way the marginal is trivialized, distorted, and finally oppressed. For what is wrong with all these seemingly innocent questions—which include, alas, “When did you come out?”—is that each tends to assume that the individual’s subjective field is one with the field of social statistics.

Sexual interests, concerns, and observations form a broad and pervasive field within every personality, as broad a field in me as it is in you, as broad within the straight man as it is in the gay woman. When we speak of burgeoning sexuality, that’s the internal field we speak of—not the social field defined by what percent of us are gay or straight, male or female. The discourse behind that same rhetoric of singularity is, of course, the discourse which stabilizes the belief that a single homosexual event can make an otherwise straight person gay—or that the proper heterosexual experience can “cure” someone gay and turn him or her straight. (“Coming/Out”)

To “choose to be gay” is to contest the singularity of definition, to engage and re-organize the social. It is to shift the air, to pluck at vibrations, to unsettle the low hum of heteronormativity. To bring attention to the silence that passes for normativity by exposing its fiction, disrupting what Elizabeth Freeman terms its “chrononormativities”: the middle-aged gay man who goes out dancing and drinking and fucking instead of staying at home with the wife and kids or cheating on his wife with his mistress. The unattached who trouble our belief in adult heteronormative attachments with their illegible and promiscuous attachments to objects, animals, friends, fictive kin.

To choose to be gay is to contest dominant narratives about life trajectories: school, work, marriage, children, grandchildren death. One acquires, instead, and perhaps, tricks, lovers, cum-encrusted souvenir jock straps, an STI or two, dildos, cockrings, massive porn collections, open relationships, a houseful of cats, poetry. One accumulates a narrative that requires narrating, complicating the unspoken scripts prepared for us to follow.

One notes, to the state’s consternation, that the unspoken script is damaged: soaked in floods, rubbed through mud, eaten by termites. Words are illegible, the language foreign, the instructions unfathomable. That to live is to innovate, to practice what John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living.” Such experiments trouble the ostensible stability envisioned by the state and privileged by tradition. They trouble the narrow trajectories that manage “population.” They trouble the quotidian heteronormative, heterocetera interactions that lubricate the social. They make “trouble.”

Those who “choose to be gay” offer the disturbing possibility that attachments and affiliations can be chosen outside of state-sanctioned norms. That there are ways of living not envisioned in school textbooks. That how we choose to live matters just as much, if not more, than how we are supposed to live.

To choose what one “likes” over one’s “duty.”
So much depends on the latter.
Too much.

The Whitney Soundtrack

I grew up listening to Whitney Houston. Not simply in the sense that she was famous as I entered adolescence, but that the affect-world she created saturated and colored my sense of what it meant to live in the world. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was fun, Prince was nice to like, New Edition appealing, but Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All” felt transformative. Along with my best friend then—I claimed him as a best friend while he tolerated me—I memorized and sang the song, performing it, if memory serves, for a school assembly. I might be misremembering this. I do remember how affirming it was to believe, as a child, that children were “the future,” and how, as I entered my non-rebellious adolescence as a very religious person, I embraced the possibilities of living “as I believed,” determined not to “walk in anyone’s shadow.”

I want to register the importance of these sentiments. Today, I might sneer at everything that young Keguro did not know. But, as I note in recent writing, “I am learning to treasure the ecstasies of my youth.” Not nostalgia, but a deep respect for the intuition of youth—a moment when, to use Whitney, I was “living on feelings”

Amid what feels like a flood of sneers about Whitney’s “banal” songs—great voice, but terrible lyrics and style, I’ve read—I keep thinking about what it means to lose the soundtrack to one’s life. About the worlds of loss and desire Whitney enabled: she was my gateway to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith and Abbey Lincoln, all very different vocalists. The foundation she laid let me spend a heartbroken two weeks in Seattle playing Bessie over and over and over.

But I’m trying to get to something else.

As I watch and re-watch her videos, even those I have not seen for a long time, I’m reminded that I *know* Whitney’s voice—the runs, the catches, the slight shifts, the trembles, the hand gestures, the shoulder movements, the eye rolls. I *know* Whitney. She stamped my life in ways I will probably never be able to recognize.

What does it mean to lose the soundtrack to one’s life?

I’ve tried collecting music before, but I am terrible at it. I yearn for the familiar. I am mostly indifferent to the new. And despite efforts from good friends to diversify my tastes, I incline toward particular sounds, particular singers, particular styles. Whitney is my one constant. In my years of collecting and purging music collections, I have always collected her. I don’t have a Whitney habit—I don’t listen to her all the time—but I like knowing she’s around. I like to glide on her voice.

It is, after all, the voice that ushered me into adulthood. In the late 90s, I spent more time dancing to Whitney dance mixes than to anything else. She was my “welcome to America” figure: I didn’t know much about rock, had to discover about Janis Joplin, but Whitney was familiar. I lack the language to describe the effect of her voice, the “vibrations” of her presence—the wide, wide smile; the playful grin; the candy colors of her first videos. She was fun. And, what some call “over-processed” and “commercial”—can I pause to say how much I dislike music critics who sneer at “popular” taste—I found enabling.

I keep coming back to the word “enabling,” perhaps because I have been thinking about love in Fanon, thinking, that is, about racial life that is not a Greek tragedy. Perhaps this is why I so resent the idea that many British shows champion: Othello is the best role for black men. See Idris Elba in Luther. At times, many times, I have craved the quotidian.

Over the past ten years, the “quotidian” has been one of my critical foundations—I don’t have a theory of it and I don’t know that I need one. I think about what might be termed the “black ordinary” when I’m in the States and about the “Kenyan ordinary,” when I’m in Nairobi. I want to register not simplicity, that’s not what it is, but the thickness of daily living, of encounter and solitude, stasis and movement, flavor and sensation. Whitney has been part of my quotidian—my experience with feeling and being—for as long as I had taste that was not borrowed or simply available. (Some might question “taste,” especially those who remember my daisy dukes or, earlier, my maroon moccasins, as we termed them.)

I chose Whitney.

As I watch and re-watch her, I remember the little queer boy who sang soprano for far too long and found refuge in Whitney’s vibrations. My vocal chords remember patterns, move silently, aching to chase notes I lost a long time ago.

Her not being in the world makes those notes more elusive.

Love in Fanon

My (lightly edited) comments at GWU today. I’m not sure where this particular avenue is headed, but it helped me clarify some thinking about race and the academy and the role of the minority professor.
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Today we believe in the possibility of love, and that is the reason why we are endeavoring to trace its imperfections and perversions.—Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon is not someone we turn to for advice on love. Far from it. His biographer, David Macey, claims that if there’s a “truly Fanonian emotion” it’s “anger,” and Alice Cherki insists that Fanon was “a thinker about violence.” While we can certainly talk about the range of emotions in Fanon, from rage to ecstasy, and from despair to hope, love seems to be a stretch. For love, we turn to Barry White and Marvin Gaye and Luther Vandross. Never Fanon. Indeed, while Fanon claims to take love seriously in Black Skin, White Masks, by the end of Black Skin, Fanon has turned to Hegelian recognition and a deep-rooted bodily skepticism, as noted in his famous closing “prayer”: “Oh my body, always make me a man who questions.” Against the possibilities of love, Fanon embraces the inevitability of skepticism. What has happened to love? Why does it appear in Black Skin only to disappear? And what might be useful in thinking about Fanon and love?

Because Fanon is foundational to black studies, black diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies, he is the gateway for scholars working in transnational black queer studies. However, Black Skin, White Masks, his major contribution to black ontology and epistemology, has posed a major stumbling block for black queer scholars. Today, I want to move away from the problem of Fanon’s homophobia to consider strategies through which black queer studies can engage Fanon. I will suggest that love is a crucial, understudied element of Fanon’s thinking and an essential component of his vision for an anti-racist, anti-colonial world.

In Black Skin, Fanon explores love in a two-chapter sequence focusing on interracial relationships. The first chapter condemns Martiniquan writer Mayotte Capecia for her “self hatred” while the second empathizes with the Martiniquan author René Maran. I’ll focus on Fanon’s engagement with Capecia. As is well known, Fanon condemns Capecia for desiring a white man, which he misreads as her desire to be white. In a moment of strategic misreading, he argues, “Mayotte loves a white man unconditionally. He is her lord. She asks for nothing, demands nothing, except a little whiteness in her life. And when she asks herself whether he is handsome or ugly, she writes: ‘All I know is that he had blue eyes, blond hair, a pale complexion and I loved him.’” Fanon continues, “If we reword these same terms it is not difficult to come up with: ‘I loved him because he had blue eyes, blond hair, and a pale complexion.’” It may not be difficult to reword Capecia, but note here that Fanon changes coincidence to causality. Capecia’s inability to control how she loves demonstrates her self-alienation. All interracial love is suspect. Perhaps all love is suspect.

Feminist scholars have rightly critiqued Fanon for how he depicts women, but few have asked why Fanon doubts Capecia’s love. This scholarly absence can be attributed, in part, to how we have inherited Fanon. Within the U.S., Fanon comes to us from a predominantly U.S.-based black studies. Rooted in the political and aesthetic radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, black studies privileged a binary understanding of racial feeling: one experienced pride or self-hatred. Literary and political works were revolutionary or assimilationist. Love was a bourgeois emotion. Given this paradigm, Fanon’s claim that Capecia was self-hating went unquestioned.

Let me suggest that we set aside Fanon’s indictment of Capecia as an individual, and focus on the larger conceptual problem he lays out: authentic love can neither be experienced nor sustained under conditions of oppression. Here, I take my cue from anthropologist Jennifer Cole and Historian Lynn Thomas. In their introduction to a wonderful book called Love in Africa, they argue, “contemporary discourses, sentiments, and practices of love are the product of complex historical processes and intersections.” In their work, love is not a method of disengaging from the difficult labor of politics or removing oneself from the complications of history. If anything, the complications of history and the labor of politics make love more difficult to recognize and realize. To return to Fanon’s indictment of Capecia: the problem with her declaration of love is that it is abstracted from its historical condition. Fanon believes that Capecia does not grant enough weight to the role of history and politics in matters of the heart. She believes, wrongly, that love is a refuge from the complexities of colonial modernity.

But this is not simply a problem for Capecia.

Toward the beginning of Black Skin, Fanon claims, “In our view, an individual who loves Blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them.” As Fanon will later clarify, he objects to the idea of anyone loving “Blacks” because the “black” is a constructed fiction, an abstraction that ignores the lived experiences of individual subjects. To love “Blacks” requires one to believe racial fantasies about irreducible racial difference. Put otherwise, it requires one to believe in the existence of the black as a distinct category, something Fanon challenges when he concludes, “the black man is not.”

At this point, it might seem that I am conflating two very different definitions of love: love as individual psychic and libidinal experience and love as an expression of goodwill and affection for a collectivity. That is, the love one might have for a lover versus the love one might experience for one’s political, religious, or ethnic community. However, if, as I have suggested, love takes root and flourishes within the material circumstances of politics and history, then it becomes very difficult to distinguish between the two kinds of love. To extend Fanon’s thinking: all love becomes impossible to experience or sustain under conditions of oppression.

At this point, you might be wondering why a discussion of love in Fanon matters. In fact, as I was looking at the poster for this event and noted the range of topics—the Algerian revolution, decolonization, Occupy Wall Street, Malcolm X, and Edward Said—I experienced palpitations. I worried that talking about love felt too frivolous. I worried that I would be the literature professor who proved, once again, that literary scholars are removed from reality and inhabit an ivory tower filled with tea and poetry and violins.

Yet, over the past few years, I have been stunned by how often we talk about Fanon and black scholars in general in terms of resistance and revolution, anger and rage, resentment and bitterness, disappointment, and for a very brief moment a few years back, hope. We who work in black studies and related fields are tasked with discussing anger and rage and survival, asked, always, to discuss struggle and pain. And while all of these are necessary, I have wondered about the price we pay. It is difficult to sustain a career that focuses exclusively on negative emotions. And it is strange to believe that black scholars and activists spent their lives wandering around in a haze of rage and anger, unable to think about love and tenderness, unable to understand or theorize why these facets of human experience matter.

When Fanon declares, “Today I believe in the possibility of love,” he gestures toward a future that is unmarked by the paranoia of racism. More than that, he suggests that political resistance and social revolution have, as one of their goals, the cultivation of love. Simply, love flourishes under conditions of freedom and equality. This kind of love, this kind of free love, should be one of the goals of political labor.

However, when he wrote and published Black Skin in the early 1950s, this ideal of love was only a possibility: he did not believe it existed or could exist in the world as it was then.

When I started writing this series of reflections, I hoped to suggest the importance of love in Fanon by embedding his statements within their historical context. I hoped to suggest that understanding love as a historical formation and as an end-goal of politics would add richness to discussions about political freedom and economic equality.

Yet, I find myself stuck.

Like an annoying character from a movie, I keep wanting to ask, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

I have no answer.

We no longer inhabit the world Fanon described in 1952.

Much of Africa is decolonized, if still largely neo-colonial; while the shadow of racism continues to haunt Africa, often transforming into a destructive poltergeist in the guise of global policies and aid, many Africans nations act with self-determination; and while many across Africa continue to pursue various freedoms and equalities, these do not seem as impossible as they once did.

If we no longer inhabit Fanon’s world, then it might be time to take love seriously, time to ask whether we are closer to realizing its possibilities.

Teaching on Lynching

While the scholarship on lynching has proliferated over the past 10 or so years, the memory of lynching seems more elusive than ever. Lynching has lost its force, so much so that lynching has become a common metaphor for having a bad day. Curiously, not since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have images of lynching been more readily available. One wants to account for the erasure of the available. For the fantasies that erasure sustains. For the activity of erasing through silence. For the conversations that we are told should not happen because they will spread bitterness. In our Disney world, there are no more strange fruits. And rainbows describe happiness, not the shades of death-ripened bodies.
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I saw images of lynched U.S. blacks before I saw images of lynched Kenyan blacks.
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I do not know how to teach about lynching.

I played a movie.

I asked my students whether they would teach about lynching and how they would teach it. They were silent for a long time. The class could have remained silent. We could have left then. But we had to push through, to create speech and conversation, to refuse the comfort and risk of silence.

How, I asked, could we think about the labor of representation? What language and in what form can render (render: the smell of burning fat) the lynched as human, all too human, with desires, appetites, smiles.

One does not dare use a question mark.

How, I asked, could we approach lynching as scholars. What languages could we create. What strategies to discuss those who were once human—the body grotesque, and not through special effects. The grotesquerie of rotting flesh juxtaposed against beaming smiles. How does one think about the banality of dehumanization. About the righteousness of racism.

It is easier to forget. Easier not to teach. Easier not to think about.
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I wonder how many of my students, if any, will return to images of lynching. I wonder how many will allow themselves to be haunted. Is this my job. To speak about history and literature.

We are reading Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, an anti-lynching play. We need context. No, that’s not right. We need to experience, if only partially, the horror of writing about precarious life. Of experiencing precarious life.
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Is this relatable?
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Repeatedly, authors on lynching challenge what we think we know.

Here is Paul Laurence Dunbar:

Oh, the judge he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight. (“The Haunted Oak”)

And Grimké:

[Your father and brother were lynched]—by Christian people—in a Christian land. We found out afterwards they were all church members in good standing—the best people. (Rachel)

*
The violence by “the best people.” This stays with me. Perhaps because of the ICC. Perhaps because of our belief that foot soldiers wield machetes while shadowy generals sit in plush rooms.

The threads are getting snarled.
*
A student worries that teaching about lynching will lead to racial hatred, to animosity between white and black. Easier, or more convenient, to allow the lubrication of silence.

My people suffered too.

We have all suffered.
*
A student says that all responsible books declare slavery “America’s shame.” Perhaps even “America’s sin.”

“We” are all implicated.

There is no racialization to the history of slavery, no attribution of guilt or shame or culpability. The entire nation blushes before slavery.

Is this too convenient?
*
Dunbar again:

Did Sanctioned Slavery bow its conquered head
That this unsanctioned crime might rise instead? (“The Monk’s Walk”)

*
Is screaming in rage and grief a pedagogical method?
*
One can open a door in teaching or point to a doorway; one cannot compel another to cross a threshold. One can hope that a question might direct interest—be an ethical act.

I am stuck in this period—I claim to have chosen it. I dwell in it. A scavenger hunting for stories.
*
It is a strange thing to live out of time—to wander around thinking about why forgetting lynching matters. Maybe it’s better to forget. To believe in the amnesia of Oak trees. In the now-fashionable flavor of strange fruit. One feels out of step, unfashionable, not quite, not right.

One’s language of feeling is awkward.

I ask, “how are we supposed to feel about these images” to students forced into an encounter that, despite my warnings, they could not have anticipated. They probably did not seek out. They would probably prefer not to handle. At least this is what I am thinking. I don’t know what to think. And so, I spur debate, hope that the apparatus of teaching will provide a way in, a move away from silence, a way to distance oneself from shock and horror and anger and guilt and shame.

I do not know what my students are feeling.
It feels cruel to ask.
It feels cruel not to ask.

We struggle to find languages appropriate to this situation.
*
Increasingly, I wonder if teaching is always about this struggle to find language appropriate to a situation. I opened this semester by talking about the Occupy movement: at this moment in history, I cannot and will not pretend that the literary is a refuge from the world.

I am more hesitant. I stumble more. I shelve cleverness. I want to model something about intellectual inquiry, something about inhabiting the fractures of what Hemphill called ass-splitting truth.

Course objectives cannot name this.

No doubt, some would consider this bad teaching. Or no teaching.

Far from elevating minds, I am risking something else: alienating feeling.

Ass-splitting truth.

A course objective: by the end of this class, students will have encountered ass-splitting truth.
*
I do not know how to teach about lynching.

I hope that an encounter with the nakedness of history does something.

Coming Up

On Thursday.

I’ll post a draft of my paper as soon as I have something that feels substantive. I’ll be talking about love in Black Skin, White Masks, and also touching on Wretched of the Earth.

Here’s the abstract:

Love in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon is not someone we turn to for advice on love. Far from it. His biographer, David Macey, claims that if there’s a genuine Fanonian emotion it’s “anger.” And while we can certainly talk about the range of emotions in Fanon, from rage to ecstasy, and from despair to hope, love seems to be a stretch. For love, we turn to Barry White and Marvin Gaye and Luther Vandross. Never Fanon. Indeed, while Fanon claims to take love seriously in Black Skin, White Masks, love understood as psychic and bodily abandon, by the end of Black Skin, Fanon has turned to Hegelian recognition and a deep-rooted bodily skepticism, as noted in his famous closing “prayer”: “Oh my body, make me always a man who questions.” Against the possibilities of love, Fanon embraces the inevitability of skepticism. What has happened to love? Why does it appear in Black Skin only to disappear? And what might be useful in thinking about Fanon and love? More precisely, what might black queer studies have to say about love in Fanon?

Because Fanon is foundational to black studies, black diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies, he functions as an inevitable gateway for scholars working in transnational black queer studies. However, Black Skin, White Masks, his major contribution to black ontology and epistemology, has posed a major stumbling block for black queers, as outlined by Kobena Mercer, Fanon’s most prominent black queer critic. This presentation moves away from the problem of Fanon’s homophobia to develop other strategies through which black queer studies can engage Fanon. It argues that love is a crucial, understudied element of Fanon’s thinking and an essential component of his vision for an anti-racist, anti-colonial world.