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Abstract
This essay takes up the fundamental tension in black study between black life and black death, and forwards the idea of black ambivalence as a way of theorizing this tension. But given recent conceptions of the scope of black death as total and constitutive of what has generally come to be thought under the rubric of the “antiblack world,” this essay also asks what room is left for the thought of black life, not as a meager or even primarily defiant feat, but a veritable abundance. In the effort to actually think what Christina Sharpe has called “the largeness that is black life,” without flinching from the sense of antiblackness as indeed constitutive of a world, I propose a practice of black study that holds open a critical distinction between the world and what the poet Ed Roberson has alternatively called "the Earth." Ultimately, I argue that even if the world is totally defined by antiblackness, blackness is not totally defined by that world; and has further to be appreciated as a relationship to the Earth. It’s when a sense of the larger Earth enters black study that we are able to appreciate black life as a veritable largeness.
Notes
1 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 17.
2 Fred Moten, all that beauty (Seattle, WA: Letter Machine Editions, 2019).
3 From the spiritual, “Ain’t Got Time to Die” written by Hall Johnson.
4 Perhaps this is owing to a still more fundamental opposition between life and death.
5 While there are significant differences between the two, their essential claims boil down respectively to the not altogether oppositional claims that blackness is “social death” or social life. The incompleteness of the opposition of these claims inheres in how both concede to elements more strongly emphasized by the other. The noted afropessimist, Jared Sexton, for instance, has written in ways informed by the insights of black optimism of the “Social Life of Social Death,” just as the noted black optimist, Fred Moten, has written in ways informed by the insights of afropessimism of a “social death” that is really “political” death, and has further contended that these schools of thought, however rhetorically oppositional, are really “just friends.” The friendship between afropessimism and black optimism, inheres in their shared critique and rejection of the antiblack world; and the primary point of contention between is whether blackness is ultimately social death or social life, but not that blackness expresses something of what it intended by both within it.
6 Robert L. Woodson, Sr., ed., Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers (New York, NY: Emancipation Books, 2021), 31.
7 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. An Authoritative Text (New York: Norton, 2001), 38.
8 Arguably, just being alive in such a world, whoever and wherever you are, is an exercise of black study to which we consent or not in varying degrees of intensity and consciousness. Black Study is “the weather” too. All there is to do or not do in a world where our death constitutes both ground and climate. Anti-blackness built this world in which we all live, and move, and have our being.
9 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 72.
10 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ 14 (2–3): 191–215, doi: 10.1215/10642684-2007-030.
11 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018): 6.
12 The black art I mostly have in mind is the literature of the African Diaspora, but the mixed media art practice of Ashon Crawley is a Sunday unto itself.
13 Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 187. (emphasis mine)
14 Here, I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers of this essay, who, in response to my contention that “blackness is a lot,” pointed out this second connotation of “a lot of land.”
15 One recalls, for instance, M. NourbeSe Philip’s attention to the massacre of 150 middle passing Africans in her poem Zong! as a “story that cannot be told.” See: M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Toronto, Canada: The Mercury Press, 2008), 199.
16 An important recent example of what I describe here as “the skewed study of the largeness that is black life” or what we might alternatively call black life studies is Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being.
17 This recalls Ira Berlin’s famous distinction in Many Thousands Gone between “societies with slaves” and “slave societies.”
18 I return to this important critical distinction at the conclusion of this essay. See: Ed Roberson, “We Must Be Careful,” in Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, ed. Camille T. Dungy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 3.
19 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 11.
20 Wilderson distinguishes Middle Passage as the “dawning of blackness” and the “Black’s first ontological instance.” See: Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 31.
21 Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 38.
22 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
23 Equiano famously offered this description of the hold: “At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.”
24 By “nonhuman hold,” I intend both the human and nonhuman cargo in transit across the Atlantic, which, as black or nature alike, were dismissed as nonhuman and ejected from the exclusively human realm of ethical regard and social life.
25 Fanon writes: “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge.” See: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008), xii.
26 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 11.
27 Hartman, Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” 187.
28 Frank B. Wilderson, III, Afropessimism (New York, NY: Liveright, 2020), 102.
29 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 11.
30 See entry for “welt” in Dictionary of Untranslatables along with the entry for “world” in the OED.
31 Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
32 My reading of the Human here via the Anthropocene is also informed by and indebted to Sylvia Wynter’s work on genres of human being. See: Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Trust/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation --An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3, 257–337.
33 Or what Fanon has famously described in the similarly negative terms of a hellish “zone of nonbeing.”
34 Sharpe, In the Wake, 2,3.
35 Ibid, 11.
36 Ibid, 104.
37 Elsewhere in this study, I have argued, along with several others (most notably Paul Outka in Race and Nature), that what appears as two problems (racial and environmental) is in fact one problem. The climate invoked by Sharpe here, and that which is usually intended by climate scientists, though often discussed in isolation, are one and the same. Which is to say that one cannot be a good climate scientist without also being an anti-antiblack-racist.
38 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 83.
39 Vann R. Newkirk, II, Floodlines, podcast audio, 2020.
40 Sharpe, In the Wake, 7.
41 With time, the names we give to the precarious instability of the world and the methods by which we measure it only grow more numerous. It is really remarkable how unanimous we are in the intuition that the world is coming to an end. Few things are more interdisciplinary or cause for a greater consensus than the apocalypse.
42 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6, 8. (emphasis mine)
43 In my own work, I have alternatively argued for a “deep community,” with an eye towards the aqueous, and not merely solid, surface of the planet. See “Swim Your Ground: Toward a Deep Ethic” forthcoming in Atlantic Studies. There, I also critique Leopold’s elision, in calling for what he presents as an unprecedented land community, of indigenous peoples who already viewed humans as part of so-called land communities. See also: Aldo Leopold’s writings on the land ethic in A Sand County Almanac.
44 “[P]recedes and exceeds” is Wilderson’s formulation, while “immanent and imminent” is Sharpe’s. Sharpe quotes the former in In the Wake, as follows: “violence…precedes and exceeds Blacks.” She also defines her method of “wake work” as the “plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of everyday Black immanent and imminent death,” and the tracking of “the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially” (emphasis mine). See Sharpe, In The Wake, 11, 13.
45 Lewis and Maslin, The Human Planet, 4.
46 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Planetarity,” in Death of a Discipline (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003), 209–92.
47 Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 41.
48 The “deep” is the subject of my first and forthcoming book, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness.
49 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), viii.
50 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions, no. 5, 39.
51 Moten, Black and Blur, viii.
52 Ibid., vii.
53 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 6, 10–11.
54 My focus in this essay has been the relation between black life and black death, which I have argued possess a fundamental status in the historical expression of the poles of black ambivalence. But in his delineation of black study into the celebration of blackness and the critique of anti-blackness, Moten puts forward, in blackness and anti-blackness, what seems another expression of black ambivalence that seems to hold a fundamental status in the field. Of course, blackness/black life and antiblackness/black death are related and overlapping terms. But it may be worthwhile to parse out the nature of their relation more carefully than it has been my specific objective to do here. This would include a careful interrogation of just what we mean by blackness, antiblackness, black life, and black death. And more than all the others, I believe black life in particular, can go unthought, and as a category demands further, more deliberate, and robust interrogation. One example of the thought of black life that informs my own is Moten and Harney’s suggestion in “Michael Brown,” that life itself is black. In their essay, they argue “not that black lives matter but that black life matters; that the absolute and undeniable blackness of life matters.” The shift from the plural black lives to the singular black life implies a vision of life that is irreducibly social and, I would add, ecological. This is the understanding of black life that underwrites this essay, and blackness, I further read, along with Moten, as a sociality that is indistinguishable from ecology, “a consent not to be a single being” than unfolds within an entire ecosystem. Leopold’s “land community,” perhaps, if not for its unacknowledged whiteness. Or perhaps a “deep community,” to the extent that, on this blue planet of ours, we are all inhabitants of the deep. But again, the scope of my argument in this essay is limited mainly to thinking the specific relation between black life and black death and considering what happens to our conception of that relationship, which often assumes the form of life insisted from a still greater death, when our critical frame shifts from the world to the Earth, as our ecological crisis seems to demand.
55 Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 38. (emphasis mine)
56 Ellison writes, “Until Some Gang Succeeds in Putting the World in a Straightjacket, It’s Definition Is Possibility.” See: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, NY: Random House, 1952), 576.
57 Roberson, “We Must Be Careful,” 3.
58 Three important examples of what happens when a sense of the larger Earth enters black thought, and of black writers whose work makes a consistent practice of beholding the Earth before the end of the antiblack world, are the Camille Dungy edited anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the poetry of Ed Roberson, including, City Eclogue (Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2006); To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010); Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1995);, and the poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, including M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Dub: Finding Ceremony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020). Poetry and the poetic may have a unique capacity to facilitate this phenomenon and house this practice. Perhaps, we all need to become poets of some kind or another. But beyond poetry, I would also cite Lauret Savoy’s Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2016) and J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2017), as two texts that also practice seeing the Earth from a black vantage point.
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Jonathan Howard
Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice.