The alt is an investigation of the black psyche and the lost archives of racial slavery to define blackness outside of the mandates of civil society

Undoubtedly, history does matter in how we subjectively bear its weight, but the recording of history is also a subjective enterprise. What Head and Kennedy’s texts also demonstrate is the impossibility of comparative analysis of African and Black diasporic identity and Black (global) structural positionality since the former is multifarious and the latter is singular. However, both are the products of significant historical events underscoring what Anthony Paul Farley has described as “perfecting slavery”: “The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie...And slavery is death.”47 Achille Mbembe also posits that “[t]he slave trade had ramifications that remain unknown to us; to a large extent, the trade was the event through which Africa was born to modernity.”48 If one were to maintain that these texts were about the vagaries of specific events of twentieth century racial violence or the political status of Black people in the US and Africa, then Kennedy’s allusions to Africa seem as irreconcilable as Head’s reference to the KKK: “What did mothers, Black mothers, say to children whose fathers had been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in America? She had a picture of a Southern lynch mob, a whole group of white men and women. Two Black men hung dead from a tree. The lynchers were smiling.”49 Elizabeth’s question of the Klan’s presence in America is directly followed by reference to the Black woman she hallucinates, Medusa, as a displacement for the signifier of racial terror assigned to the KKK: “Medusa smiled like that [the lynchers] in her mental images, but Medusa was as close as her own breathing, and each night she looked straight into Medusa’s powerful Black eyes. It was tracing evil to its roots. The eyes of the lynch mob were full of comprehension, bold, consciousness, deliberate.”50 Kennedy’s inclusion of Africa, via one of the protagonist’s “selves” as Patrice Lumumba, his personification as the continent’s “jungle,” or the “ebony mask” with which he is bludgeoned links Africa and the US through the metaphysical properties of Blackness as Africanness. Throughout the drama, the long durée of racial slavery and its psychic afterlife appear on a continuum through the “libidinal economy”51 of violence. Funnyhouse of a Negro’s displacement of the sexual violence of miscegenation on the Black male figure of Patrice Lumumba and A Question of Power’s displacement of the racial violence of lynching (often a punishment over the perceived threat of miscegenation) onto the figure of Medusa demonstrate how the “epidermal racial schema” of Blackness, or its relegation to the physical alone, is auxiliary to the psychic fantasies in which Blackness, as a product of racial slavery, circulates. As such, I argue that we must investigate the Black psyche and the figurative registers of the lost archive of racial slavery therein to elucidate what is untranslatable in the magnitude of slavery’s breach. One such figuration, the semiotics of psychosis, illuminates Black anti-Blackness as a constitutive element of itself—a product of the white imagination within the foundation of the Black unconscious. This is recognition of one’s self as both double and split, a non-being (in relation to Human others) severed from a history one can’t quite remember but also cannot forget has been lost, what Brand describes as the “place which holds the before of history.”52 If slavery’s archive speaks through the living dead in these texts, it is through and against the language of history, the language of madness, that they attempt to speak “outside” of themselves.