Wake thesis

Keeping each of the definitions of wake in mind, I want to think and argue for one aspect of Black being in the wake as consciousness and to propose that to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding. To be “in” the wake, to occupy that grammar, the infinitive, might provide another way of theorizing, in/for/from what Frank Wilderson refers to as “stay[ing] in the hold of the ship.” 20 With each of those definitions of wake present throughout my text, I argue that rather than seeking a resolution to blackness’s ongoing and irresolvable abjection, one might approach Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness. Political scientists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars, and others have posed as a question for thought the endurance of racial inequality after juridical emancipation and civil rights, and they have interrogated the conflation of blackness as the ontological negation of being with Black subjects and communities. That is, across disciplines, scholars and researchers continue to be concerned with the endurance of antiblackness in and outside the contemporary. In that way In the Wake: On Blackness and Being joins the work of those scholars who investigate the ongoing problem of Black exclusion from social, political, and cultural belonging; our abjection from the realm of the human. But the book departs from those scholars and those works that look for political, juridical, or even philosophical answers to this problem. My project looks instead to current quotidian disasters in order to ask what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion, this ontological negation, and how do literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this un/survival. To do this work of staying in the wake and to perform wake work I look also to forms of Black expressive culture (like the works of poets and poet-novelists M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Kamau Brathwaite) that do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use the wake in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (Hartman 2007, 6) Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property” and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children. Living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and effects of continued marked migrations, Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters, trans-American and -African migration, structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/colonialisms, and more. And here, in the United States, it means living and dying through the policies of the first US Black president; it means the gratuitous violence of stop-and-frisk and Operation Clean Halls; rates of Black incarceration that boggle the mind (Black people represent 60 percent of the imprisoned population); the immanence of death as “a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy” (James and Costa Vargas 2012, 193, emphasis mine). Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased. Put another way, living in the wake means living in and with terror in that in much of what passes for public discourse about terror we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments; the ground of terror’s possibility globally. This is everywhere clear as we think about those Black people in the United States who can “weaponize sidewalks” (Trayvon Martin) and shoot themselves while handcuffed (Victor White III, Chavis Carter, Jesus Huerta, and more), those Black people transmigrating 21 the African continent toward the Mediterranean and then to Europe who are imagined as insects, swarms, vectors of disease; familiar narratives of danger and disaster that attach to our always already weaponized Black bodies (the weapon is blackness). We must also, for example, think of President Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs, who said, commenting on the drone murder of sixteen-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman Al-Alwaki, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if you are truly concerned about the well being [sic] of your children” (Grim 2012). 22 We must consider this alongside the tracking of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent without papers by drones in the midst of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic. 23 We must consider Gibbs’s statement alongside Barack Obama’s reprimands of Black men in the United States, his admonishing them to be responsible fathers. Consider, too, the resurgence of narratives that Black people were better off in chattel slavery. This is Black life in the wake; this is the flesh, these are bodies, to which anything and everything can be and is done. In the immediate aftermath of the June 17, 2015, murders of six Black women and three Black men in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in South Carolina in the United States, the poet Claudia Rankine published a New York Times op-ed piece titled “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.” Rankine writes, “Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black” (Rankine 2015). To be in the wake is to live in those no’s, to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no citizenship, to live in the long time of Dred and Harriet Scott; and it is more than that. To be/in the wake is to occupy that time/space/place/construction (being in the wake) in all of the meanings I referenced. To be in the wake is to recognize the categories I theorize in this text as the ongoing locations of Black being: the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather. To be in the wake is also to recognize the ways that we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force. 24 In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death? I want to suggest that that might look something like wake work.