The Black Radical Tragic

Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution

Jeremy Matthew Glick

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479885664
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

2017 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association As the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora. In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.

1. Haitian Revolutionary Encounters

Eugene O’Neill, Sergei Eisenstein, and Orson Welles

Ah, Haitians,—that is quite another thing! Haitians are the écarté of French stock-jobbing. We may like bouillotte, delight in whist, be enraptured with boston, and yet grow tired of them all; but we always come back to écarté—it is not only a game, it is a hors-d’oeuvre!

“A Flurry of Stocks,” Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo

This chapter examines three Haitian revolutionary inspired “lines of flight”:

Lines of flight, for their part, never consist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic about lines of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans. Even History is forced to take that route rather than proceeding by “signifying breaks.” What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State. “I may be running, but I’m looking for a gun as I go” (George Jackson).1

These three uses of the Haitian Revolution act as a kind of rehearsal for our discussion of African diasporic dramatic performances of Haiti in revolt. As Deleuzian “lines of flight” they do not propose concrete solutions, nor do they aspire to dialectical synthesis. They do not proceed via “signifying breaks.” The Haitian revolutionary example is one of repetition and persistence. As dramatic performances they “worry the line”2 of demarcation separating imaginary, symbolic, and prioritized action. As works of drama inflected with past history or as preparatory exercises they do not simply constitute the Real. They relate but do not directly correlate to their historical referent: the Haitian Revolution. They resonate with Fredric Jameson’s insight that “history is not a text, nor a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.”3 A continuum of performance, they repeat therefore endure. New weapons get crafted by way of confrontation with the old.

Here are the three:

1. The late-night forest run of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Brutus Jones.

2. A lesson given by Sergei Eisenstein to his students at the VGIK (the State Cinema Institute in Moscow), where he lectured from 1932 to 1935. A semester-long class in staging Haitian revolutionary combatant Dessalines fleeing a French infantry ambush via a line of flight out a window. As well as Eisenstein’s essay “A Course in Treatment,” consisting of his discussion of The Count of Monte Cristo and cinematic treatment for a Hollywood adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

3. Orson Welles’s radio play on the Haitian Revolution, in which the queer narrative arc flees from its long nineteenth-century Caribbean context, employing its theoretical knowledge to champion the United Front against twentieth-century fascism.

These three sites use the Haitian Revolution as source material to present radical innovations in aesthetics that speak to urgent political questions of domination and resistance. As a cluster, they function as an appropriate preamble to African diasporic theatrical uses of Haiti examined in this study.

The Theatrical Cauldron of the Black Radical Tragic: The “Yet” and “And” of The Emperor Jones

To write ghost stories implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material effects.

Avery F. Gordon

Yeah we got ghost writers, they just actually ghosts.

Malik Yusef

Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920)4 was composed in a climate of U.S. imperialist intervention in the Caribbean. Five years prior, President Woodrow Wilson sent three hundred marines to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A constitution written in 1918 was imposed on that nation by then assistant secretary of the United States Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, undermining the Haitian combatant-statesman Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s 1804 principle forbidding foreigners from owning Haitian land.5 O’Neill’s play stages both the fall of his protagonist Brutus Jones and an African American intervention in Afro-Caribbean sovereignty. The relationship of O’Neill’s text to an understanding of Black radicalism generally, and Haiti specifically, is one of marked ambivalence. If “Western society,” as Cedric Robinson writes, is the “social cauldron [for] Black radicalism,”6 O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones7 presents a model theatrical cauldron. O’Neill’s work provided unprecedented opportunities to Black actors and breathed new experimental life into the American theater. The play’s movement is both progressive and regressive. It cannot resolve its structuring tension between its radical aesthetic and its foreclosure of its own radical political conclusions. I will focus on the political implications of O’Neill’s use of abstraction and what he calls “super-naturalism.”8

Shannon Steen recounts an objection to one of the play’s stage directions voiced by actor James Earl Jones, lead role in the 1970 Caedmon Production’s audio recording of the play. Jones took issue with O’Neill’s description of the protagonist as “typically negroid, yet there is something distinctive about his face.” He “questioned O’Neill’s use of the conjunction ‘yet’ in this description, asking how our conceptions of this character would be different if O’Neill had instead used the conjunction ‘and’; ‘as if ordinarily there is not dignity in the negroid face . . . as if there is something keen and unnegroid about him.’”9 The “yet” of the play implies a discourse on Black essence that undermines the specific representation of Brutus Jones as individual in favor of a politics of expressionist abstraction overdetermined by a racialist calculus. The “and” signifies the latent possibility that undermines and escapes such retrograde formulation. Abstraction and particularity are in constant flux in the play. Each of its movements inherits the political consequences of how wide or how narrow it scopes its target. Even the Emperor’s namesake houses this contradictory doubling. Carme Manuel references Norman Sanders’s introduction to an edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to illustrate the contrary, double-signification of O’Neill’s character’s first name: “At one extreme, we have the medieval Brutus condemned to suffer at the center of Dante’s Inferno, as a man guilty of criminal assassination and personal betrayal; and on the other, ‘the noblest Roman of them all,’ Plutarch’s ‘angel,’ the one just man, gentle and altruistic, among the wicked and envious conspirators.”10 The Emperor Jones exhibits a progressive and regressive movement, a tension between its radical aesthetic and underdeveloped radical politics. The critical tension between the “and” and the “yet” underscores the main problematic of the play. It marks an American model of Expressionism that stages an unresolved tension between racist primitivism and a radical attempt to foreground U.S. indebtedness to stolen Black labor and stolen Black life. In its formal construction and thematic content, The Emperor Jones balances a commitment to both acute specificity and a simultaneous radical and retrograde politics of abstraction.

The super-naturalism of O’Neill’s aesthetic on one hand worries the line separating reality and fantasy in terms of what his character sees during his forest line of flight. The concept of haunting illuminates such work. For Tzvetan Todorov, the supernatural “often appears because we take a figurative sense literally.”11 To represent key moments of North American oppression of African people as figurative, haunting delusion performs a complex task in The Emperor Jones. It is a similar problem posed by the film version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1998): abstract literary figuration accepts the challenge of representation, subtracting from it the burdensome hubris of conflating such representation with its traumatic real correlative. This feat is an acute challenge for film. Morrison’s novel declares in a warning itself defies: “It was not a story to pass on.”12 One cannot represent the afterlives of American racial slavery, the genocide of New World Africans in a realist grammar, without betraying the horror of those experiences. Yet representation remains and, as such, performs critical work. To figuratively represent such signposts renders them as capable of overhaul. Latent in such representation is the possibility that these structures can and should be resisted and toppled. O’Neill does not draw out the latent potential in his work but offers it to the world for further development. The play exists as a multilayering of self-reflexive theatrical tricks: a psychodrama/hallucination, a play within the play. It maintains fidelity to its Modernist milieu by foregrounding its status as aesthetic object. The super-naturalist employment of haunting memories of an African American past bound up in militant resistance to enslavement has a great deal to say to Avery F. Gordon’s notion of haunting. The ghost, Gordon argues:

makes itself known to us through us through haunting and pulls us affectively into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience as a recognition. Haunting recognition is a special way of knowing what has happened or is happening.

. . . The ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. From a certain vantage point the ghost also simultaneously represents a future possibility, a hope. Finally, I have suggested that the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. Out of a concern for justice would be the only reason one would bother.13

I explore the specific contours of Brutus Jones’s “haunting recognition” and demonstrate how such recognition proceeds by way of O’Neill’s aesthetic innovation. I engage the aporias of representation bound up in O’Neill’s Haitian drama in order to delve deeply into Houston A. Baker’s prescient insight: “If only O’Neill had bracketed the psycho-surreal final trappings of the Emperor’s world and given us the stunning account of colonialism that remains implicit in his quip at the close of his dramatis personae: ‘The action of the play takes place on an island in the West Indies, as yet un-self-determined by white marines.’”14 The “yet” of the “as yet un-self-determined” (in its veiled political critique) pushes up against the “yet” of James Earl Jones’s critique. It is that constituted tension that makes the play such a site for heated contestation.

How does one reconcile the critique of O’Neill as symptomatic of certain white writers’ racialist paternalism yet salvage some sort of radical gestic moment in the work that would engender revolutionary use? Edward Said’s insights into Joseph Conrad help expose the latent liberatory kernel in O’Neill’s flirtation with colonialist representation. Said on the problem of the porter:

The horribly attenuated and oppressed black porters that Conrad portrays that [Chinua] Achebe finds so objectionable not only contain within them the frozen essence that condemns them to the servitude and punishment Conrad sees as their present fate, but also point prophetically towards a whole series of implied developments that their later history discloses despite, over and above, and also paradoxically because of, the radical severity and awful solitude of Conrad’s essentializing vision. The fact that later writers keep returning to Conrad means that his work, by virtue of its uncompromising Eurocentric vision, is precisely what gives it its antinomian force, the intensity and power wrapped into its sentences, which demand an equal and opposite response to meet them head on in a confirmation, a refutation, or an elaboration of what they represent. In the grip of Conrad’s Africa, you are driven by its sheer stifling horror to work through it, to push beyond it as history itself transforms even the most unyielding stasis into process and a search for greater clarity, relief, resolution or denial. And of course in Conrad, as will all such extraordinary minds, the felt tension between what is intolerable there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it is what is most profoundly at stake—what the reading and interpretation of a work like Heart of Darkness is all about. Texts that are inertly of their time stay there: those which brush up unstintingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation after generation.15

What is the “antinomian force” underlying O’Neill’s caricature of Brutus Jones? Is there a comparable Conradian horror in O’Neill’s play? Conrad’s representation of a “stifling horror” forces in its reception the need to push beyond it to an indeterminate cluster of possibilities. These include “clarity, relief, resolution, or denial.” The staying power of O’Neill’s work is in its very ability to brush up against such historical constraints and gesture toward future challenges facing anti-systemic and decolonizing forces. Surely this is what attracted the radical intellectual Paul Robeson to the production. There is a prophetic calculus implied in Houston Baker’s remarks. It is a foregrounding of historical memory (poetry of the past) as it relates to the traffic in Black bodies as the building blocks of American Empire and the foundational material for American thought. I read The Emperor Jones as a meditation on colonialism that functions via coercive force and an overdetermined symbolic code generated from U.S. imperial encounters in the Caribbean. By presenting the audience with a series of sites and signifiers of racist tools of domination and American primitive accumulation (the slave block, the chain gang, the overseer guard), O’Neill makes space in the theatrical cauldron for further intervention by Black r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Haitian Revolution as Refusal and Reuse
• Overture: Haiti Against Forgetting and the Thermidorian Present
• 1. Haitian Revolutionary Encounters: Eugene O’Neill, Sergei Eisenstein, and Orson Welles
• 2. Bringing in the Chorus: The Haitian Revolution Plays of C.L.R. James and Edouard Glissant
• 3. Tragedy as Mediation: The Black Jacobins
• 4. Tshembe’s Choice: Lorraine Hansberry’s Pan-Africanist Drama and Haitian Revolution Opera
• Conclusion: Malcolm X’s Enlistment of Hamlet and Spinoza
• Coda: Black Radical Tragic Propositions
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author