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SPECIAL ISSUE: RHETORIC AND THE TEMPORAL TURN: RACE, GENDER, TEMPORALITIES

For the Time(d) Being: The Form Hate Takes in The Hate U Give

 

Abstract

The fight for Black lives is waged in seconds; that’s the lesson of the young-adult-novel-turned-feature-film The Hate U Give, hailed for its empowering narrative of one Black girl speaking out for justice. Reading critical reception of the film and novel against the official film trailer, I argue that the trailer’s tracking of hands displaces speech (prosopopoeia) with “the cut” (ellipsis) as the dominant trope of a Black political agency that depends on being able to read for, not speak about, the form hate takes. The trailer offers vigilance as an akairic (akaireomai) temporal pedagogy for Black audiences who can no longer see the mountaintop and White audiences who might momentarily experience a life lived in seconds. Unfortunately, the trailer’s disrupted marriage plot renarrates the loss of Black lives as a matter of (one) Black (woman’s) guilt; the tragedy we are meant to mourn is the loss of a love, not the taking of a life.

Notes

1 Following George Floyd’s murder, mainstream publications including The New York Times began capitalizing the B in Black as a textual corrective to systemic White violence. Several Black scholars, including Kwame Anthony Appiah, suggested that in fact both Black and White needed to be capitalized as they are both racial constructions and not simply demographic descriptors. For this article, I have chosen to follow the style conventions suggested by Appiah and others. See also Coleman.

2 I am interested in the dominant thematic of “finding voice” that emerges among critical reception to the novel and film because, borrowing a turn of phrase from Ernesto Laclau, critical reception constitutes/expresses the more general public investment in the narrative of the good subject speaking well (99).

3 For example, T. Owens Moore has argued that “double consciousness is adaptive as a survival technique, but it can be considered maladaptive because it can generate mental conflict” (752).

4 Robert Terrill, for example, argues that the most poignant moment of Barack Obama’s dedication of the King memorial is prosopopoeic.

5 In Aristotle’s formulation of tragedy in Poetics, the good-subject-speaking-well is irreconcilable with peripeteia: “Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects[, . . . contains] the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy-Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation.”

6 For a theory of the divided subject within rhetorical studies see Biesecker, “Rethinking.”

7 The self-same effect of prosopopoeia can also serve emancipatory ends, as in post-Holocaust literature (Guyer 13).

8 A google search for “black lives matter vigilance” returns a number of responses that have not the word vigilance highlighted—the key search term specified—but the term surveillance. https://www.google.com/search?q=black+lives+matter+vigilance&oq=black+lives+matter+vigilance&aqs=chrome..69i57j33l3.3508j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.

9 “Akaireomai” is translated “to be without opportunity or occasion” (Mounce and Bennett).

10 bicken back bein bool, “In the Cut,” Urban Dictionary, 29 Feb. 2016, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=in%20the%20cut.

11 Language matters and the word choice used to describe the moment of Khalil’s shooting is part of where the struggle to place responsibility takes place. Often, reviewers of the film belie their ideological investments with the supposedly descriptive language they use, all while rehearsing the cliched argument that the film challenges Americans to be racially aware. For example, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian describes Khalil’s shooting thusly: “stroppy, headstrong Khalil is pulled over by a jumpy young cop. It ends in catastrophic violence.” The contrast between Khalil’s arrogance and the cop’s naivete, as well as the agentless phrasing “it ends in” enunciates what critics cannot or will not say at the level of the statement.

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