Subject to/flesh, object/to verb (:) the business of naming

ABSTRACT

How do quotidian speech-acts, lived experiences, and normative grammars/logics capture affects of antiBlack racism that co-constitute campus memory and landscapes beyond infrastructure and spectacular commemoration of exceptional past events/historical figures? How does Black resistance to white supremacist university structures (un)fold with/in them? This experimental essay considers power dynamics inherent in complaint about antiBlackness at an historically white U.S. campus amid 2020’s racialized pandemic violence. Through narrative-driven inter(con)textual reading, it toys with the politics of subject(ivity), t(h)inking through how names function rhetorically to reify what Hortense Spillers conjures as “American grammar,” while wrestling (in-and-of itself) with onto-linguistic violence in re/membering trauma.

KEYWORDS:

• antiblackness
• subjectivity
• complaint
• universities
• temporality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 75. Emphasis in original.

2 Add this study to scholarship on naming, like Star Medzarian Vanguri, ed., Rhetorics of Names and Naming (New York: Routledge, 2016). Consider, particularly, how it relates to chapters on onomastics, naming in/of social movements, and nominal blackness.

3 Louis M. Maraj, Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2020).

4 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

5 Houston A. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere” in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, ed. Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3.

6 Zora Neale Hurston, How it Feels to be Colored Me (1928; repr. Nashville: American Roots, 2015).

7 Franz Fanon, White Skin Black Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952, repr. London: Pluto Press 2008): 84.

8 Discohere normative Western logics of grammar, syntax, style, genre, language, embracing how maybe blackness “often obfuscates, often disorients, often shatters/scatters fungibility but offers much by way of meaning.” Maraj, Black or Right, xiv.

9 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

10 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dudoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

11 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 74.

12 Ibid., 65.

13 Saidiyah V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press 1997); Frank B. Wilderson III, “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption,” Humanities Futures: Franklin Humanities Institute, https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/ (accessed October 18, 2022).

14 Flow across/through Glissant’s creolization, as near to a tangible Poetics of Relation as possible, that with/in language leaves one “rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and errantry” in its always mixing polysemy. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 34.

15 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (1916; repr., London: Fontana/Collins, 1974), 67.

16 Greta Anderson, “Campuses Reckon with Racist Past,” Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/06/campuses-remove-monuments-and-building-names-legacies-racism (accessed November 5, 2022).

17 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 71. Emphasis in original.

18 Jackson, Becoming Human, 71.

19 Sharpe, In the Wake.

20 Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 27; On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 117.

21 “police, n..” OED Online. September 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/146823 (accessed October 19, 2022).

22 Ahmed, Complaint!, 24

23 Patrick Gallagher, “Statement on Racial Injustice and the Death of George Floyd,” University of Pittsburgh: Office of the Chancellor, https://www.chancellor.pitt.edu/spotlight/statement-racial-injustice-and-death-george-floyd (accessed October 18, 2022).

24 Charles Athanasopoulos Sugino, “Smashing the Icon of Black Lives Matter: Afropessimism & Religious Iconolatry,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 40, nos. 1–2, 71–91.

25 “consume, v.1,” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39973?rskey=HEC2gS&result=1 (accessed October 19, 2022).

26 Denise Ferreira da Silva. Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxxix.

27 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2017), 87.

28 Black Student Leaders (University of Pittsburgh), “Black Senate Final Demands” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MbjRi0jERQyySWJW4g5AAi8evCh4KSdGaLs3R4e7NGA/edit (accessed October 18, 2022).

29 Natasha Warikoo, The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

30 Ahmed, Complaint!, 25. Emphasis in original.

31 Stephanie E. Rogers-Jones, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020).

32 Sharpe, In the Wake.

33 Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, “Multicultural Anti-Racism: Anti-Blackness and Asian Americans in Students for Fair Admissions V. Harvard,” Western Journal of Communication 86, no. 4 (2022): 423–42.

34 “animosity, n.,” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/7798?redirectedFrom=animosity (accessed October 19, 2022).

35 Jackson, Becoming Human, 27.

36 Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

37 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal beyond the Limits of Critique,” philoSOPHIA 8, no. 1 (2018).

38 Silva, “Hacking the Subject,” 21.

39 Maraj, Black or Right.