Structural change is possible but depends on commitment to collective political action that is divested by their emphasis on individualized survival strategies

Coates’s Dream is a terrible and practically invincible hegemon, so enduring and impervious that it brings about a sense of hopelessness that borders on philosophical cynicism. His protagonist walks close enough to the valley of total disillusionment that he must overtly protest that he is not a cynic (71). And finally, Between the World is not an exercise in cynicism. The narrator’s aphoristic insights are earnestly delivered in the hope that they will equip the son for the “struggle” (71, 107, 151). But the struggle that is recommended to the son and to readers is conceived in intensely private, almost solipsistic terms: Greater personal understanding of the beautiful but doomed world seems the endpoint of this striving. The narrator entreats his son to “[s]truggle for wisdom” (151), which is most attainable through the “singular gift of study” (116). It is no overstatement to say that, for Coates’s narrator, a rigorous personal scholarship is the apogee of living. “If my life ended today,” he writes, “I would tell you that it was a happy life—that I drew great joy from study, from the struggle toward which I now urge you” (115). Of course, this elevation of inquiry and learning has rich precedent in the tradition of black masculine autobiography that traces back to antebellum slave narratives. But while the giants of this tradition—Douglass, Du Bois, and Malcolm among them—framed individual study as a means of advancing the collective toward a “Canaan [that] was always dim and far away” (Du Bois 5), Coates’s narrator casts study as a form of personal therapy that enables one to endure the moment. As he puts it, the “struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness” (106). This conception of study as life’s ultimate activity, and wisdom as its Canaan, is anomalous in the [End Page 190] tradition of socially transformative black intellectualism that Coates inherits; but it is the logical expression of a world-view dominated by the insuperable Dream.

If there is no hope of impeding the forces that plunder the black body, then there is no point in being collectively organized against those forces. The intelligent and expedient response to this condition is to develop a personal strategy for survival—like the cerebral exercises of the intellectual who struggles to study and understand a world he can do little to change. Coates’s narrator also seems to endorse other strategies that black people have used to survive under the Dream—most notably the vernacular arts of music and dance, but also the collective acts of “black people toasting their cognac and German beers, passing their blunts” (149). These are the folk remedies and temporarily healing rituals of the therapeutic nationalism that give comfort to Coates’s narrator. Indeed, the emotional high point of his narrative is reached when he describes the state of ecstatic safety experienced while held in the loving bosom of blackness that he finds at a Howard Homecoming tailgate party. Encircled by a reveling microcosm of “the entire diaspora,” he experiences a spiritual transcendence and a return to the womb, feeling himself disappear into the surrounding bodies of “hustlers, lawyers, Kappas, busters, doctors, barbers, Deltas, drunkards, geeks, and nerds” (147). In this climax of therapeutic nationalism the narrator himself dissolves, as do the apparently superficial differences that fracture black community in the neoliberal era. The divergent class interests that might set the lawyer in political conflict with the hustler, or the sociospatial mobility that might distance the doctor from the barber, are irrelevant in this transcendent rapture, described by the narrator as “a moment imbued by a power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill.”

Any black person who has been in “the club” at two a.m. knows the power of this bass-drum-induced moment of bacchanalian unity. But it is, at the very least, surprising to see this ephemeral feeling ranked above the hard-won political achievements of black people in America, achievements that have advanced global (not simply American) democratic culture. On the one hand, this concomitant deflation of black political struggle and inflation of recreational black unity communicates a plausible exhaustion of civic faith as the Obama presidency enters its denouement paced by a refrain of horrors like the murder of Tamir Rice and the mass killing at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church. On the other, it represents a nostalgic longing for black communal solidarity that has steadily eroded in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the era that brought an end to de jure segregation. But what is finally encoded in this medley of faithlessness and nationalist longing is a message that is quite compatible with the socio-ethical array of neoliberalism, which fosters an “ambient insecurity” that leads to individualistic strategies of survival, and that welcomes evanescent, apolitical solidarities divested of visions of social transformation. Because Between the World is layered in evocations of King, Malcolm, Baldwin, Wright, Nas, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Robert Hayden, it takes on the aura of a black artistic and intellectual tradition kindled by radical imagination. But in its abdication of all forms of faith, and its armoring rejection of hope, this newly acclaimed text deserts the tradition it recalls. In explaining the necessity of poetry for women, Audre Lorde offers the best description of the conception of art as public discourse that is abandoned in Coates’s text. She insists that poetry “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives” (37). It is crucial to mark Between the World as a rejection of a tradition built on the belief that black art and public intellectualism ought to illuminate a path toward futures improbable, but always and only possible when imagination gives birth to “tangible action.” [End Page 191]