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Existentialisms: Blackness, Literature, Performance

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-10345393

1527-2117

Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Paige A. McGinley, Shane Vogel,

Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Two Black men hang out on the street corner. They trade jokes, tell stories, pass the time. From time to time they are interrupted: by floodlights that freeze them in their tracks, by a strange white man seemingly plucked from another time, and finally, by a menacing racist cop. In playwright Antoinette Nwandu’s hands, this Beckettian tale shows us, perhaps, that the racial absurd (Vogel 2022) is not solely an applied or adapted European phenomenon, but an intellectual and aesthetic tradition of its own, which surfaces in Nwandu’s play, Pass Over. The play opened on Broadway in August 2021—the first play to open after more than a year of shuttered theaters due to COVID-19. It had already been widely celebrated, having premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2017; Spike Lee’s filmed version of that production was released on Amazon Prime the following year. The most striking difference between the 2017 and 2021 productions was in the final moments of the play. Whereas in the earlier version, the police kill Moses, the Broadway version does not end with his murder. In the moment of confrontation between the Black men and the white cop, as anti-Black violence exerts itself again (and again), the world of Pass Over spins toward the fantastical with a series of stunning images and movements that suggest something akin to joy or escape or hope . . . something other than the repetition of Black death and its accompanying grief. In its multiple versions, Nwandu’s play poses questions about the oscillation between hope and despair, repetition and breaking free, Afropessimism and Black joy, Black being, and Black Being (Warren 2018). Given the two very different endings, it is tempting to try to resolve the (admittedly reductive) binary oppositions they evoke. But the play also points us toward the philosophical and aesthetic terrain of what we describe in this forum as Black existentialisms—both a making-use of a European existential tradition and the surfacing of a Black diasporic intellectual tradition that precedes and supersedes that mid-century European moment. Why Black existentialisms, and why now?Our current literary, cultural, and performance studies rarely take existentialism as a still productive or urgent philosophical project. At best, it is viewed as a museum piece, an interesting historical moment surpassed by the more sophisticated critiques of the subject launched by structuralism and poststructuralism. Its classic mid-century European texts have long been painfully liable to charges of naïve humanism, bourgeois individualism, and (via Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus especially) an often patronizing and tone-deaf engagement with decolonial politics. Nonetheless, as philosopher Lewis R. Gordon writes, “the teleological question of black liberation, the ontological question of agency, and the question of black identity in the midst of an antiblack world” are not only of historical interest, but also pose enduring existential imperatives (2000: 11). The Africana creolized philosophies of (Black) existence explored by scholars such as Linda Martín Alcoff (2006; 2008), Jane Anna Gordon (2015), Mabogo Percy More (2021), Henry Paget (1997; 2000), Reiland Rababka (2011; 2015), and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (1997; 2002), among others shape the essays in this forum and point us toward submerged traditions of existential thought in Black cultural modernity.First among these thinkers is Lewis Gordon, who has steadfastly outlined a history and philosophy of Black existentialism over the past thirty years. Gordon reminds us that “the body of literature that constitutes European existentialism is but one continent’s response to a set of problems that date from the moment human beings faced problems of anguish and despair . . . . [raising] questions beyond Eurocentric attachment to a narrow body of literature” (2000: 6–7). A different tradition of Black existentialism, one prior to and ahead of Sartre’s tradition, remains a vital resource for liberatory cultural politics, as Pass Over indicates. The experimental vision not only of Nwandu, but also of contemporary playwrights such as Aleshea Harris, Jackie Sibblies Drury, James Ijames, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; the ontological turn (or return, or turn away) in Black studies and the related recent explorations of Blackness and time; and the vital social movements for Black lives after Ferguson and Minneapolis confirm our sense that Black existentialism offers a needed conceptual apparatus to approach literature, culture, and performance today.As the essays in this forum suggest, existentialism is less a school of thought or a program than it is a standpoint and an emphasis. One crucial starting point for any existentialism, one that counters the charges of Eurocentrism and naivety, is that the concrete situation of lived experience constitutes both reflection and action. Key existential concepts such as freedom, authenticity, anguish, action, choice, nothingness, bad faith, absurdity, responsibility, and ecstatic temporality will take on different significances and trajectories based on one’s situation. For Sartre, “situation” refers to the historical, biological, and brute circumstances that constitute the horizon of one’s freedom and futural possibilities. “Can I choose to be tall if I am short?” Sartre asks. “To have two arms if I have only one? etc. These depend on the ‘limitations’ which my factual situation would impose on my free choice of myself” (1956: 481). Scaling between the personal and the historical, he grants in this preliminary sketch that “I am not ‘free’ either to escape the lot of my class, of my nation, of my family, or even to build up my own power or my fortune or to conquer my most insignificant appetites or habits” (481). But rather than see these given circumstances as a limit to or negation of our freedom to become ourselves, an external force that works against freedom, he proposes that this facticity is immanent to freedom as its “reverse-side” (481); it is through a situation that one’s “freedom arises as freedom” (482).Turning to the example of Frederick Douglass, Gordon elaborates such an existential philosophical framework in an Africana context. After months of terror and abuse, Douglass fights back against the slave-breaker Covey in a two-hour battle that forever alters the terms between them. At this key turning point in his Narrative, Douglass describes this individual uprising as an upsurge of existential resolve that then becomes action in the world: “but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose” (2017: 52). For Gordon, this scene highlights the distinction between options and choices in an existential context. Douglass’s “options were factical, mediated, and ‘objective’ (Historical), but his choices were transcendent, immediate, and ‘situated’ (historical)” (1995: 31). Gordon further explains, “Frederick Douglass’s situation was that of once being a slave. But Frederick Douglass emerged out of a clear understanding of his situation and his facticity. The Frederick Douglass of History is one figure. The man who made the decision to fight the slave-breaker, Covey, and to escape from Maryland was another. . . . When Douglass was making the decision to fight back, he was no hero. He simply knew the world mattered to him in specific ways that limited his options but not his choices” (1995: 30–31, original emphases; see also Gordon 2000: 41–61; Boxill 1997). One’s options are limited, but one’s choices are (in an existential sense) one’s own. We conjecture that the distinction Gordon makes between options and choices, as well as many other existential hermeneutics, may provide productive opportunities to reevaluate (or eschew) some of the seeming binaries that have shaped conversations in Black studies (in the mid-twentieth century and again today) such as hope/despair, being/nonbeing, humanism/antihumanism, and social life/social death. Moreover, Douglass’s choice is then shared out in his writings, speeches, and activism, nourished by and nourishing a collective freedom movement that informed his choice and its subsequent aesthetic crafting. Unlike the Sartrean tradition and its individual isolate, a Black existential tradition recognizes how “each individual act participated in a larger movement within a long historical period—working together, resulting in a totality of action that enabled becoming free” (Colbert 2021: 23).Like our current moment, the mid-twentieth century was another significant moment in the historical convergence of these two existentialisms, most famously in the work and relationships of Richard Wright. His interactions with Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir influenced his thinking and writing (as he influenced theirs), but as his biographer Michel Fabre writes, “Wright held an existential view of life long before he had even heard the word. In that respect his perspectives are quite original and little indebted to the French or German existentialist philosophers” (1978: 39). The dominance of Jim Crow segregation’s economic regimes (e.g., redlining) and social enforcements (e.g., lynching) rendered the moral frameworks and political logics of the US civil rights movement absurd. The realities of mid-century Black American life flew in the face of ideas such as justice is ineluctable or democracy is an inherently good mode of political organization. Existentialism’s refusal to posit anything as true or real other than the facticity of the world appealed to Black artists, critics, and writers, because everyday life in Black America gave the lie to human experience having purpose and meaning beyond itself. Events like the brutal blinding of Isaac Woodard clarified for many the necessity of Black existentialist aesthetics and hermeneutics. Upon his return from serving several years in the Pacific theater of WW2, Woodard had an encounter with a bus driver in South Carolina in which the driver called him “boy.” Woodard replied, “I am a man just like you” (Gergel 2019: 15). At the next stop the driver called the police. When the chief arrived, he brutally beat and blinded Woodard—who was in his army uniform. Woodard’s case galvanized the Civil Rights movement and even moved President Truman to desegregate the military and the federal workforce. For Black persons who adopted or were inclined to existentialist principles and judgments, Woodard’s maiming was nothing other than the reality of Black existence in the US. The defeat of fascism and imperialism abroad had no deep or transcendent meaning for Black liberation at home, from which his blinding contravened or distracted. That Woodard was wearing his uniform was not the marker of tragic irony but, rather, a signifier of the racialized absurdity of American democracy and, more generally, the world itself.Readers of Wright’s fiction would have found parallels in his protagonists’ plight with that of Woodard’s. Wright became the most famous Black existentialist writer in the era, especially with the publication of his novel The Outsider (1953), but stories, sights, and sounds grounded in principles of Black existentialism, even when unmarked, proliferated throughout mid-century American arts and letters. The most lasting and well known is the bebop revolution in jazz, which refused the melodic and harmonic coherence of popular compositions and tunes for a probing deconstruction of the music in and of itself. Black cultural producers found in existentialism a philosophical approach that freed them not only from political strictures, but also from formal ones. In African American theater and performance, artists defied audience expectations for realist and social protest narratives and character renderings. We find something of a culmination of Black existentialist dramaturgy in 1964 with Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. The major interventions these plays make are by way of the discursive and formal mechanisms with which they query ontologies of Black existence. Works like Funnyhouse and Dutchman, like Wright’s fiction and Nwandu’s Pass Over, require interpretative and philosophical models that are lacking in dominant critical paradigms.The four of us convened to discover and posit new ways of reading Black literature via existentialism. In May 2020 we formed a reading group after realizing we were all engaging theories of existentialism in our individual projects. We sought to strengthen the foundation of our individual projects by engaging in collective study. On October 9, 2020, we met via Zoom as the Black Existentialism Reading Group to explore how theories of existentialism intersected with Black studies. We began in the 19th-century with Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Friedrich Nietzsche and moved onto Martin Heidegger, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Ann Petry, Sartre, Camus, Wright, Frantz Fanon, Beauvoir, Lorraine Hansberry, Gordon, and Calvin Warren. We met once a quarter for two years and during each meeting one group member would lead the discussion by reviewing pre-circulated questions. Between the meetings we exchanged essays, ideas, and cultural criticism about artists, particularly playwrights, who were creating work about despair, existence, and how one acts responsibly in a chaotic world.In forming our group, we joined in a habit and contributed to a new habitat for learning popularized by our inability to safely meet in person during the first year of the pandemic. Scattered along the United States east coast and Midwest, we would not have had the luxury to meet in person regularly anyway, but the pandemic integrated virtual meetings into everyday life and offered a portal for new study rooms. Eventually ideas began to cohere, and we realized we had the beginnings of a set of essays informed by our collective thought. Our work bears the imprint of studying together and is made material in this special section. We hope these essays will be read collectively, as an interlocking set of questions that range from novels to theater to music to activism; from Lorraine Hansberry and Miriam Makeba (Colbert) to Robert Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer (McGinley) to Richard Wright (Jones) and Ann Petry (Vogel). While the essays focus on the historical engagement between Black existentialisms and mid-century European existentialism, their commitments reach before and beyond this concentrated moment of convergences and divergences.