Performance is an antiblack strategy—it leads presumes a notion of consent that blackness disarticulates and gets commodified for white enjoyment

S.V.H. — But I think there's a certain integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider obscene: the attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually the project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1970s, who were trying to locate the agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration, as if there was a space you could carve out of the terrorizing state apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in particular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was an argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of looking at the status of the slave. F.W. — That's very interesting, because it's something I've been thinking about also in respect to Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon suggests that Gramsci breaks down hegemony into three categories: influence, leadership, and consent.5 Maybe we could bring the discussion back to your text then, using the examples of Harriet Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,7 a white anti-slavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this. Now, what's really interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only explain how the positionality of black women and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness disarticulates the notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You write: "[BJeing forced to submit to the will of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery" (5, 110). In other words, the female slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fungible object, which is to say that she is ontologically different than a white woman who may, as a house servant or indentured laborer, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this case, sex] is required to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option. . . . Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very notion of subjectivity is predicated upon the negation of will" (5, 111). S.V.H. — Once again, trying to fit into the other's shoes becomes the very possibility of narration. In the chapter "A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl's Life," the question for Jacobs is how she can tell her story in a way that's going to solicit her white readership when she has to efface her very condition in order to make that story intelligible to them. I look at this messy moment as kind of a vortex in Jacobs' narrative, where in order to fashion herself as a desiring subject, she has to deny the very violence, which elsewhere she said defines her position as a slave: her status as a thing and the negation of her will. In one sense, she has to bracket that so she can tell a story about sexuality that's meaningful in a white dominant frame. And I think this is why someone like Hortense Spillers raises the question of whether gender and sexuality are at all applicable to the condition of the captive community.8 That's what I was working with there, that impossibility or tension between Jacobs as an agent versus the objective conditions in which she finds herself. This is something you talk about in your work as well, this existence in the space of death, where negation is the captive's central possibility for action, whether we think of that as a radical refusal of the terms of the social order or these acts that are sometimes called suicide or self-destruction, but which are really an embrace of death. Ultimately it's about the paradox of agency for those who are in these extreme circumstances. And basically, there are very few political narratives that can account for that. F.W. —And we have to ask why. In my own work, obviously I'm not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the trajectory of our life (within our terrain of civil death) is bound up in claiming — sometimes individually, sometimes collectively — the violence which Fanon writes about in The Wretched of the Earth, that trajectory which, as he says, is "a splinter to the heart of the world"9 and "puts the settler out of the picture."10 So, it doesn't help us politically or psychologically to try to find ways in which how we live is analogous to how white positionality lives, because, as I think your book suggests, whites gain their coherence by knowing what they are not. There is tremendous diversity on the side of whiteness and tremendous conflict between white men and white women, between Jews and gentiles, and between classes, but that conflict, even in its articulation, has a certain solidarity. And I think that solidarity comes from a near or far relation to the black body or bodies. We give the nation its coherence because we're its underbelly.11 S.V.H. — That's what's so interesting for me about Achille Mbembe's work, the way he thinks about the position of the formerly colonized subject along the lines of the slave as an essential way of defining the predicament. Essentially, he says, the slave is the object to whom anything can be done, whose life can be squandered with impunity.12 F.W. — And he's suggesting that what it means to be a slave is to be subject to a kind of complete appropriation, what you call "property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and nefarious uses of slave property" and then demonstrates how "there was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery" (5, 24). So. Not only are formally enslaved blacks property, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibility of becoming property is one of the essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intriguing about your argument is the way in which you demonstrate how not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the property of white enjoyment, but so is — and this is really key — the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that too belongs to white people.13