Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers

Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

Jean Wyatt, Sheldon George, Jean Wyatt, Sheldon George

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429581359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture.

Part 1
African American Women Writers

Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

1 At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology

Disidentification in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

Catherine Romagnolo

Over the last few decades, scholars have called for a “critical race narratology,” a concept we can define as the study of the ways sociohistorical context and racialized subjectivities impinge upon the formal and structural features of narrative. In 2011, Analyzing World Fiction, A Collection, edited by Frederick Aldama, began to move the field of narrative studies in that direction. And, the more recent collection Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, edited by James Donahue, Sue Kim and Shaun Morgan, extends the work of the 2011 volume. Moreover, many contemporary scholars of African American literature (such as Madhu Dubey, Deborah McDowell and Cheryl Wall)¹ have sought to analyze the ways Black writers, through both the form and content of their narratives, illuminate the intersections of narrative and racialized/gendered subjectivities. Reading at the crossroads of form, content and ideology is not a simple task, these critics argue, but it must be accomplished if we are to challenge historically limiting ways of reading literature by writers of color. As Dubey asserts,

1 See Deborah McDowell, The Changing Same; Cheryl Wall, Worrying the Line; and Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic.

Recognizing that form is not the ideology-free domain of pure literature is the first step toward challenging the division between art and ideology. An ideological analysis of form should be particularly useful for black feminist criticism, for it questions the notion of real, nonideological literature that undergirds the formation of dominant literary traditions.

(8)

Despite these calls from the fields of African American literature and narrative studies, the consideration of race as a category of narratological analysis still resides on the margins of the discipline. The work of displacing a narratological criticism that assumes a white, male, Euro/American subject remains largely undone.

Perhaps the persistent whiteness of the field can be attributed in part to a kind of illegibility through the lens of traditional narrative theory of the narrative strategies of many minoritized writers. In order to adequately address this problem, we must revisit the question Susan Lanser asked years ago: “[U]pon what body of texts, upon what understandings of the narrative and referential universe, have the insights of narratology been based?” (“Toward” 612). In James Donahue’s words, we need to face up to the “many ways narrative theory still appears to be ‘race/ethnicity’ blind” (Donahue 4–5).² I would suggest that a first step on this path is to acknowledge that the central tenets of narrative theory, which continue in large part to rely on notions of ideology-free narrative structures, occlude the ideological implications of form in narratives by writers of color.

2 I wish to avoid any position that tends to essentialize narrative form by implying that narratives utilizing particular techniques (linearity, sequentiality) are inherently either hegemonic or counterhegemonic. These essentializing theories posit a monolithic view of narrative, which occludes the many writers who strategically utilize so-called conventional forms to disrupt hegemonic effects. Moreover, as Molly Hite has argued, this view also has a tendency to elide the “distinction between the … writer’s deliberate attempts to create innovative and disruptive narrative structures or styles—to write other-wise—and the otherness that a [hegemonic] culture posits and expects” (Hite 14).

I assert that a notion of “narrative disidentification” can offer an alternative heuristic through which to view these formal strategies. José Muñoz defines disidentification as narrative subject formations that expose and recircuit the encoded messages of the dominant culture in order to “account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (6). It is subjectivity produced “at the point of contact between essential understandings of self (fixed dispositions) and socially constructed narratives of self” (Muñoz 6). This conception is one that is fluid, not static; it is not normatively gendered, and it does not posit a restrictive essentialist conception of minoritized identity in opposition to its socially constructed inferiority. Disidentification works as a process of narrative subject formation that “exposes the [dominant culture’s] encoded message[s], [its] universalizing and exclusionary machinations” (31). Muñoz elaborates extensively upon the role played in disidentification by queer narrative performativity, but I would like to suggest that his description of the ways that the “process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text” also provides a sharp lens through which to view specific formal strategies utilized by texts and writers invested in the production of radical Black subjectivities.

By shifting the interpretive framework of formalist analysis, my hope is that the lens of disidentification can bring into focus the formal narrative strategies of Black U.S. writers who intervene in conventional narrative constructions that often provide the scaffolding for restrictive notions of social identity. Perhaps this notion of “narrative disidentification” can open up a space for the production of knowledge about forms that are “unable,” or perhaps unwilling, “to fully identify … [because] of the ideological restrictions implicit in an identificatory site” (Muñoz 7). Expanding and adapting the lens of disidentification to account more explicitly for narrative form, I assert that through the form as well as the content of their texts, Black writers often forge disidentifying, intersectional subjectivities that represent modes of resistance to dominant narrative structures. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen provides a salient example of the ways this process of narrative disidentification might work in a text that is both formally complex and deeply concerned with the construction of racialized and gendered subjectivities.

Intersections

Citizen, published in 2014, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Despite the fact that Rankine has subtitled her text An American Lyric, it has been described in much more expansive terms as a hybrid collection of lyric, visual, critical and narrative fragments. Though it might not immediately present itself as a narrative, it possesses a kind of dynamic, emergent narrativity that the lens of disidentification can bring into focus. This dynamic form mirrors and enables the text’s representation of disidentificatory constructions of raced and gendered subjectivity.

Although most reviewers and critics rightly home in on the racialized experiences represented in Citizen, it is apparent from the beginning that Rankine is also closely attentive to how race intersects with other subject positions. This intersectional understanding of identity can be viewed as a kind of break with “feminist strategies of identification and counteridentification,” a disposition Muñoz describes as an example of “disidentification as political strategy” (Muñoz 22). Rankine’s attentiveness to intersectionality exemplifies Muñoz’s notion that disidentification is the space in which “binaries finally begin to falter” and what might be termed intersectional forms emerge (Muñoz 20, 25).

Citizen’s focus on intersections is apparent throughout the text’s descriptions and intimate narrations of the micro-aggressions that aggregate to depict a powerful, palpable understanding of minoritized experiences in the U.S. Race is the most apparent positionality indexed in the text, but the more subtle ways in which gender, for example, plays a role are visible through Rankine’s representation of a collision of multiple subject positions in contemporary experiences of oppression. Looking briefly at the section entitled “In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” we can see how Rankine depicts disidentificatory Black masculinity and the manner in which it is often performed in contemporary society. It begins, “My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place. My brothers are notorious. They do regular things, like wait” (89). Here, the speaker juxtaposes the ordinariness of her literal and metaphoric brothers’ quotidian existence with the violence always looming, a violence her brothers must vigilantly await and avoid. It is a violence that constructs a prison of “no place” and every place, a violence that “accumulate[s] into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us. Its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through” (90). Rankine displaces the spurious white supremacist representations of Black men as violent with the material violence perpetrated daily by white people against real Black citizens. She illuminates the subject position in which Black men regularly find themselves. As Michael Eric Dyson explains,

You [white people] make us afraid to walk the streets, for at any moment, a blue-clad officer with a gun could swoop down on us to snatch our lives from us and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes, or compact discs, or breathing too much for your comfort, or speaking too abrasively for your taste. Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or being silent, or doing as you say, or not doing as you say fast enough.

(Dyson)

Citizen reveals this impossible situation: how, even if an individual Black man has not experienced the physical violence so prevalent in our society, he awaits it, until the history of “plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy” descends upon him with all the weight of American history (Rankine 89–90).³

3 While Rankine and Muñoz are primarily concerned here with a type of resistance that might be described as passive, neither excludes the possibility or the efficacy of a more active resistance to racialized violence and microagression. Instead, they both mark and distinguish the ways in which disidentificatory resistance is often not figured as resistance at all.

Visual Narrativity

Rankine’s representation of intersectional subjectivity is mirrored by the intersections of form in the text. She often utilizes a hybridity of textual and visual narrative fragments to construct a story of gendered and racialized subjectivity. Reflecting Muñoz’s understanding of disidentification, Rankine describes her visual narrative strategy as

“signs” [that] are meant in part to destabilize the text so both image and text would always have possibilities, both realized and unimagined by me, beyond my curating powers… . I wanted to create an aesthetic form for myself, where the text was trembling and doubling and wandering in its negotiation and renegotiation of the image, a form where the text’s stated claims and interests would reverberate off the included visuals.

(Berlant)

Her use of visual narrativity is simultaneously reinforced and destabilized by the written narrative, evoking a notion of narrative disidentification. In one instance, she utilizes this strategy to portray the experiences of the Olympic champion tennis player Serena Williams. Within the text, Rankine inserts a photograph taken during a San Paolo exhibition match between Caroline Wozniacki and Maria Sharapova. Wozniacki, who is white, is captured mocking the shape of Williams’s body. In the image, Wozniacki has stuffed towels in her skirt and bra, ostensibly to mimic Williams’s body shape. She is caught using her hand to draw attention to her rear, in a pose that evokes a kind of knowing sexualization. Recalling historical representations of Black women’s bodies as hyper-sexualized and non-normative, Rankine’s use of this photo calls up the micro-aggressions endured by people of color and the dominant cultural narratives about Black women’s bodies. As bell hooks describes, these cultural narratives are built upon the commodification and sexualization of Black women’s bodies during slavery and beyond. These representations “were part of the cultural apparatus of 19th-century racism and … still shape perceptions today… . [B]lack female bodies [have] become ‘icon[s] for deviant sexuality’ ” (2). The image evokes this history, while the text that follows represents a “remaking or rewriting of this dominant script” (Muñoz 23): “Caroline Wozniacki … imitates Serena by stuffing towels in her top and shorts, all in good fun, at an exhibition match. Racist? CNN wants to know if outrage is the proper response” (36). CNN and other media outlets focused on the supposed friendship between the two women, attempting to minimize the racist impact of the “joke.”⁴ Rankine’s text neither denies nor reinforces the truth of Williams’s and Wozniacki’s friendship. Instead, its “negotiation and renegotiation” documents the symbolic violence perpetrated upon Black women’s bodies in the media and public discourse (Berlant).

4 Despite its racist implications, the vast majority of major news outlets dismissed this incident as “not racist,” citing the fact that Serena herself claimed to take no offense to the joke. See CNN, Essence and ESPN for just a few of these dismissals. Some commentators saw clearly how problematic this “joke” was, especially in light of the ways Serena had been stereotyped, essentialized and mocked by sports writers and commentators in the past. For example, Ms. magazine’s Anita Little “linked the sexualization of Williams’ physique to the legacy of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ an African woman whose real name was Saartjie Baartman, who was displayed before European audiences as a freak show attraction in the 1800s” (Desmond-Harris).

Citizen highlights the ways in which the narrative put forth by CNN and other mainstream outlets undermines the perspectives of those, especially people of color, who see the racist implications of this “prank.” As a writer for Ebony pointed out at the time of the incident,

[Williams has] been the subject of great derision for her shape. She’s been likened to a primate for no other reason other [sic] than she’s a Black woman with a stunningly chiseled body in a world where the average star is blonde and lithe. There is nothing funny about such a person who meets the desired “standard” for tennis player aesthetics mocking Williams’ curves.

(Arceneaux)

The dialogic work performed by Rankine’s text and image reveals the ways in which the mainstream narrative refuses to acknowledge either the personal or the national history surrounding the incident. It uncovers what Robin DiAngelo refers to as the effects of “white fragility.” According to DiAngelo,

White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves [by white people]. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, funct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Narrative Theory and Contemporary Black Women Writers
• Part 1 African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form
• Part 2 Black British Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form
• Notes on Contributors
• Index