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Hope Draped in Black: Decolonizing Utopian Studies

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.34.3.0498

2154-9648

Caroline Edwards,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

What does utopian studies have to learn from critical race theory, Black studies, and ideas of Black futurity? While utopian scholars have begun unpicking the colonial entanglements of utopianism’s origins (particularly as a literary genre grounded in pelagic crossings to the New World that have advocated slavery, extractivism, and eugenics to name a few notable examples across the utopian canon), few, if any, have incorporated the perspectives, aesthetics, and theoretical work of Black scholars themselves.1 The following are a few brief remarks organized around keywords (in a nod to Raymond Williams, a fierce advocate of utopian thinking) that attempt to sketch an answer to these questions, with a focus on my own area of utopian study: utopian literary and cultural production in the contemporary period.We might start by considering the literary utopia’s most prolific period, from roughly 1880 to 1915. In a deluge of utopian narratives, many of them penned by amateur writers, we find the emergence of a genre that is thoroughly rooted in industrialized progress. Whatever their perspective on capitalism and waged labor, these works privilege advanced industrialization as the primary means to eliminate poverty and disease, thereby liberating workers into automated futures of post-scarcity abundance. Examples include Edward Bellamy’s highly rationalized system of pneumatic delivery (Looking Backward: 2000–1887 [1888]), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s chemical production of food from waste products (Mizora: A World of Women [1890] 1999), H. G. Wells’s titanic hydro-powered engineering (Men Like Gods [1923]), Edward Bulwer Lytton’s lithic limitless energy, Vril (The Coming Race [1871]), or the ubiquitous electricity that powers Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s clean city (New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future [1899] 2011), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Marchant’s advanced Martian society (Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance [1893]), and Alexander Bogdanov’s advanced scientific culture on the red planet (Красная звезда [Red Star (1908) 1984]). Indeed, many notable dystopian novels begin with the same premise of highly automated societies that focus, rather, on the awfulness of life without purpose (Anna Bowman Dodd’s The Republic of the Future; Or, Socialism a Reality [1887], E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” [1909], Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano [1952]). While they are far from uncritical of the telos of historical progress (most of the works highlight the class and gender inequalities of their own time), utopian novels in this period tend to view the utopian process as one of harnessing historical progress in a more equitable direction; they rarely question the Hegelian premise that history moves through contradictory forces in a dialectical series of stages.In his 2016 book Hope Draped in Black, Joseph R. Winters explores the lasting damage that ideas of historical progress have wrought on Black writers, artists, and thinkers. While notions of racial uplift are loaded with a linear narrative of Black progress such conceptions, he writes, “are mediated by melancholy, loss, and a recalcitrant sense of tragedy” (6–7). Building on Adorno and Horkheimer’s landmark critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as well as the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Winters notes thatExamining the relationship between melancholy and hope in Black literary and aesthetic traditions, Winters explores how writers such as Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison incorporate jazz into their works, using its discordant, improvisational structures to imagine time out of joint (the Derridean deferral of justice announced by the arrival of the specter of old King Hamlet, who returns) (Derrida 1994). Here, Winters writes, “the past can always haunt and disturb the present [so that] the present is always a site of potential breaks and ruptures that can signify both dislocation and pain as well as novelty and possibility” (2016, 25). If we are to contemplate the almost overwhelming task of decolonizing utopian studies, then deconstructing the idea of historical progress unfolding in Hegelian dialectical stages towards Geist is where we need to start; not just in the sense of the Frankfurt School’s disaggregation of hope from optimism which recalibrates utopian possibility as suffused with tragic pessimism (or “hope, yes, but not for us,” as Walter Benjamin phrased it) (qtd. in Mertens 2006, 63), but also in the sense of Black theorizations of racial progress. As Jamaican novelist and critic Sylvia Wynter puts it, the “white utopia” of industrial progress was a “black inferno” (Wynter, qtd. in Yusoff 2018, 23). In ignoring Black experience as a vital historical site for exploring the utopian impulse, utopian studies alienates Black scholars, artists, and writers who denounce, or ignore, utopianism tout court (it is notable, for example, that Joseph R. Winters never once uses the terms “utopia” or “utopianism” in his 300-page analysis of hope).In his 2019 study Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin reminds us of the historic blindness of utopianism to its own presumed whiteness. American political thought has thereby repressed a Black utopian tradition stretching back to the runaway maroon settlements and all-Black towns founded by ex-slaves such as Mound Bayou in the Mississippi Delta: intentional Black communities whose “utopian strain of hope” can be traced back through African American political thought (Zamalin 2019, 7). Zamalin’s analysis of Black intellectuals writing fantasy literature (including Sutton E. Griggs, Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Edward A. Johnson) explores how these writers adapted the genre of the literary utopia to their own exploration of future visions of Black dignity, replete with Black self-governance, interracial freedom, Black political possibility, that “dismantled Social Darwinist myths of natural inferiority and superiority that justified Jim Crow and lynching” (Zamalin 2019, 48). Serialized in the Colored American Magazine between 1902 and 1903 while she was editor, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood establishes an alternative continuity via Ethiopianism, an early strand of Black nationalist discourse that took its inspiration from Psalms 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” Its fantastic “back to Africa” plot rejects the highbrow realism associated with Edith Wharton and Henry James introducing Black speculative fiction more than twenty years before George Schuyler published Black No More (1931); with its cyclical return to ancient Ethiopian mythology as the guarantor of Black dignity in the future, the novel has been read by scholars as forming part of Hopkins’s broader editorial and authorial labors of promoting Black consciousness (Daniels 2013, 159).However, it’s not just the content of Hopkins’s Black utopian novel that can help us think about how to decolonize our utopian readings; the text’s formal properties also suggest what a decolonized textual practice might look like. Of One Blood is notable for its odd generic mixings and appropriation of numerous sources—some acknowledged, such as William James’s “The Hidden Self” (1890) (the novel’s subtitle), many more unattributed. Hopkins’s ambivalent treatment of literary genre—mixing “‘modern’ turn-of-the-century realism and older nonrealist forms” (in particular, the Freudian unheimlich as it animates Gothic tropes of temporal disturbances and uncanny returns), but also melodramas and romantic adventure—offers a necessary utopian strategy to “retrieve and recuperate black life from the disorganizing effects of slavery,” as Jalondra A. Davis puts it (2019, 8). This recuperation is also achieved via Hopkins’s appropriation of numerous contemporary sources, which we might read as a politicized strategy of appropriation; what Ira Dworkin (2018) calls Hopkins’s archival “revenge.” In addition to borrowing from popular white periodicals such as Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly and Scribner’s Magazine, Hopkins extensively cited numerous sources in Of One Blood. Scholars have recently uncovered extensive and frequently wholesale inclusion of unattributed sources—with more than 300 words lifted from John Harley Coombs’s Dr Livingstone’s 17 Years Explorations and Adventures in the Wilds of Africa (1857), material borrowed from H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure (1887), and Rudyard Kipling’s The Naulahka (1892). Given Kipling’s fiercely protective stance toward his copyrighted works, as well as Hopkins’s own attentiveness to copyright law (she had filed copyright applications for all her works sometimes several years in advance of their actual completion), there seems sufficient evidence to claim that Hopkins’s practice of textual poaching in Of One Blood is part of a sophisticated praxis of critiquing literary ownership at a time when, as Dworkin notes, “Emersonian ideals of collective authorship were giving way to the codification of the ‘text-as-individual-property’” (2018, 17).Paying attention to these noncitational practices changes how we read Hopkins’s text and helps us rethink the novel’s place within literary utopian studies, recognising its value as a politicized form of citational praxis (or archival revenge). This connects the novel with what Sylvia Wynter has called a Black counterpoetics. In her 1992 essay “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” Wynter analyses the function of reggae and rap in the films The Harder They Come (1972) and Do the Right Thing (1989). In these films, Wynter suggests, the complacent hegemony of middle-class liberal humanism is challenged by an emergent Black popular point of view; the films’ “new video-like Black popular musical forms and their counter-poetics of rhythm” thus anticipates a potent Black aesthetics and praxis (1992, 260).Kathryn Yusoff picks up this idea in her 2018 study A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, in an analysis of the suspension of time as a recurring trope within Black aesthetics. It’s worth exploring this trope, which has been theorized within contemporary Black visual studies, as it suggests a compelling example of Black utopianism that is opening up rich areas of scholarly inquiry that do not see themselves necessarily as utopian, do not name themselves as such, and yet which utopian studies has much to learn from. Steve McQueen’s film Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep (2011) presents two moments of suicidal escape and collective resistance (one in Grenada in 1651, the other in a contemporary South African gold mine) suspended, as it were, in mid-air. As Yusoff writes: “We see the figures always in mid-flight, never jumping or landing but suspended in an endless, ever falling body, gently held by the atmosphere. These figures defy gravity” (2018, 89). In the proximity between the Black body and inhuman materials, a potential exists for what Tiffany King calls “black fungibility” in her analysis of plantation landscapes. Rather than discrete human bodies, this Black fungibility recognizes the instability, the process, of Black bodies denied full humanity, and the latent power that resides in more-than-human relationships with plants, objects, and other life forms which cleave apart “a site of deferral or escape from the current entrapments of the human” (qtd. in Yusoff 2018, 91).Yusoff relates this idea to examples in Black literature, painting, film, and other creative practices. One example she cites is an 1817 print by an unknown printmaker held in at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. It was included in an exhibition titled “Making a Way Out of No Way” and features a woman suspended in the air, as if almost seated at the height of the third-storey window behind her, seemingly defying gravity. The print was inspired by the real-life story of a woman who tried to commit suicide by jumping to her death after her husband was sold into slavery, but who survived the fall. Scholars who have analyzed this image suggest that the woman is somehow outside of time and temporal flow. “In the geophysics of this image of the suspended woman,” Yusoff writes, “gravity is both the problem and the solution, rendering her invulnerable, held in the possible, awaiting a different tense of being. A different future” (2018, 93). Yusoff reads the image comparatively alongside a passage from Tina M. Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), which considers photographic images from quotidian everyday Black life. As Campt puts it, in such images, people strive “for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen.” In other words, this is the grammar of a Black feminist futurity which, as Campt writes, signifies:Campt’s idea of “the future that hasn’t yet happened but must,” which is made visible through a Black speculative act of temporal arrest, suggests a rich counterexample of what I have elsewhere theorized as non-contemporaneity (building on Ernst Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit as developed in Erbschaft dieser Zeit [Heritage of Our Times (1935) 1991]); a utopian temporal formulation that holds the unredeemed historical potential from failed revolutionary attempts in the past (as understood via Walter Benjamin’s tragic pessimism and Ernst Bloch’s ontology of hope) alongside a materially embodied set of futural actualities that are already astir within the present moment (Edwards 2019, 9–12). This Black mode of non-contemporaneity has important implications for deconstructing the whiteness of the traditional literary utopia but also offers us a powerful early example of Sylvia Wynter’s Black counterpoetics, echoing the unending temporality of the blues, which, as Wynter describes, “without climax or end, established time outside of European sense of time and factory time, blues time is taken as space and a subversive territory of place; making of time into space creates territory free from enslaved labor, a counterpoetics” (paraphrased in Yusoff 2018, 88–89).In her latest book, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021), Tina M. Campt returns to the future real conditional’s subjunctive tense. “It proceeds ‘as if’ our aspirations were being or had already been realized,” she writes. “It is a radical provocation to see blackness differently and, in so doing, to create a new path to living blackness differently—not in the future, but now” (Campt 2021, 24). In exploring what she calls an “emergent Black gaze” (17), Campt—like Wynter before her—is offering a radical provocation to the intellectual revolution of liberal humanism: a particular way of seeing the world that privileged the new bourgeois subject of industrialized Europe and established the “evolutionary regressive and genetically dys-selected mode of human nature (as empirically expressed in peoples of Black African descent and, to a lesser extent, in all non-white peoples)” (Campt 1992, 257). As Yusoff brilliantly demonstrates in A Billion Black Anthropocenes, the proximity of Black and Brown bodies to the raw natural resources they mined within capitalism’s extractivist system (fossil fuels, in particular coal, as well as the railway network used to transport them and power the American Century) confirmed a dehumanization of Black and Brown subjects begun with G. W. F. Hegel (Yusoff 2018, xii). Indeed, as Joseph R. Winters attests, “according to Hegel, Spirit [Geist] ‘skips over’ Africa, meaning that Africa does not participate in the development of reason, truth, and freedom. [. . .] Hegel’s thought [thus] demonstrates how the logic of progress operates to establish and justify racial hierarchies” (2016, 9–10).Returning to Tina M. Campt’s question above, how can we see Blackness differently and what utopian strategies are Black scholars employing in this ongoing collective project? This brings us to what I am calling the utopian possibilities of the inhuman, as well as the genocidal implications of liberal humanism as it has been enacted during the modern period of capitalist accumulation. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World:Rather than arguing that the Black and Brown subjects of capitalist modernity’s genocidal logic were denied humanity (or full humanity), Jackson asks us to consider how African diasporic art and culture in fact present a “contrapuntal potential” that dismantles the Enlightenment conception of human subjectivity altogether and offers a forcefully “dissident ontological and materialist thinking in black expressive culture” that reimagines the interrelations between human and nonhuman. We need to be careful, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues, to avoid the “confluence of animality and racialization” that led to the bestialization and thingification of black subjectivity within Enlightenment discourse; as Sylvia Wynter revealed in her influential 1994 essay, “ ‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Wynter’s essay was inspired by the court case defending Rodney King, an African American whose beating by police in 1991 was caught on camera and led to widespread riots, which revealed the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of the acronym NHI—No Humans Involved. Evidence delivered at King’s trial exposed the widespread use of this acronym by the police to refer to any incident involving young Black Angelinos. As Wynter argues, King’s case demonstrates that humanness and North Americanness are the sole preserve of whiteness within systemic anti-Black racism; young Black men can only be perceived, and therefore behaved toward, through their lack of the human.Elsewhere in contemporary Black critical theory, this imagined proximity to the nonhuman confers upon Black artists and writers a powerful imaginative resource, particularly at a time of escalating ecocatastrophe. The category of the human has come under increased pressure as the hegemonic agent of Western modernity and its insatiable extractivist logic of capital accumulation, which is destroying the planet on which all living beings depend for their survival. The mixed media collages of New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu are a brilliant example of how a Black counterpoetics can help us to imagine what the utopian possibilities of the inhuman might look like, within the context of complete environmental collapse and the increasing popularity of what Sarah E. McFarland (2021) calls “cultures of human extinction.” Mutu is known for her violent juxtapositions of human, animal, vegetal, and mycelial forms into arresting hybrids. In these works, the Black female body is repeatedly ripped apart and reassembled within fantasy landscapes that speak of death and decomposition but also of regenerative regrowth. As Chelsea M. Frazier argues, “In Mutu, we find [a] cultural producer imagining new mutations of humanity and constructing new ecologies ‘rich with utopian possibilities’ that reflect and audaciously critique the racial, spatial, and gendered ordering of our present world” (2016, 60). Ekwo Eshun, curator of the 2022 exhibition “In the Black Fantastic” at London’s Haywood Gallery, which featured a room of mixed media collages and videographic works by Wangechi Mutu, writes that “the Black fantastic finds productive tension in the to and fro between the everyday and the extraordinary. [. . .] [It] is less a genre or a movement than a way of seeing, shared by artists who grapple with the legacy of slavery and the injustices of racialized contemporary society by conjuring new narratives of Black possibility” (2022, 11–12, italics added). Artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Lina Iris Viktor, Nick Cave, Chris Ofili, and Hew Locke undo clear distinctions between species boundaries, historical timescales, reality, and fantasy in their experimentation with a distinctive Black gaze. This fecund process of aesthetic dismemberment and radical reconstitution into arresting new hybrid forms offers a visual representation of the formal and temporal possibilities that I term utopian non-contemporaneity, or what Kristen Lillvis defines as “posthuman blackness.” This describes “the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their coincident experiences in multiple temporalities” (2017, 4). Lillvis’s posthuman temporal profusion is a powerful rejoinder to the linear telos of settler colonial time as the guarantor of American “progress”; but it is also an expression of queer utopian possibility, as Kara Keeling demonstrates in Queer Times, Black Futures. The queer times of anticolonial, antiracist, and pro-Black art, activism, and theory, writes Keeling, “can ignite existing yearnings to imagine, and moreover to enact, another world here now in this one” (2019, 85).This is an index of time to come, the Blochian Noch Nicht of utopian possibility that lies waiting; like the mushrooms that populate many of Mutu’s works, it can pause sporulation until conditions are most favorable for germination. If we attune our aesthetic gaze to the latent noncontemporaneity of such images, their inhuman properties become visible. Like Keeling’s queer Black temporalities, this specifically Black gaze enables us to see how “new life might be breathed in any moment whatever into that which has been pronounced dead, reinvigorating it, and, like a specter or, perhaps, a witch in flight, setting it to work unpredictably” (2019, 87). Released from the shackles of human exceptionalism, these literary and aesthetic images of hopeful inhumanism demonstrate utopian elemental strategies for imagining a less human, but more humane, relationship with the environment: one that will be necessary for our species survival in an increasingly dangerous and hostile planetary climate. Deconstructing human exceptionalism is the project in which utopian studies and scholarship on Black speculative futural imaginaries meet. This becomes thinkable, as Joseph R. Winters puts it in Hope Draped in Black, when “a different kind of hope and set of possibilities emerge through melancholy, remembrance, and a heightened understanding of history’s tragic features” (2016, ix).