“Mindful of the Sacrifices Borne by Our Ancestors”: Terror, Historical Consciousness, and the Slave Sublime

This paper benefited greatly from discussions with Peter Rachleff and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows at Macalester College. I am also grateful to Stephen Eric Bronner, Leah Njoya, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions at various stages in the writing process.

Abstract

This article contends that the arts have a crucial part to play in calling attention to the decline of America's democratic traditions, while simultaneously enabling the recollection of what remains of ideals of liberty and justice in the wake of American empire. Following Cornel West, the author argues that the tragicomic hope that characterizes the musical and artistic heritage of blues people offers an incomparable resource for political renewal. Specifically, representations of moral resistance against racial terror can reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between liberty and justice, on the one hand, and the need for security in a dangerous world. The author considers the contributions of blues women of the 1920s and 1930s, and then traces the ethos of the blues through the creative writing of Toni Morrison, whose characters represent a commitment to liberty even in the most devastating circumstances.

Notes

¹ Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 21.

This paper benefited greatly from discussions with Peter Rachleff and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows at Macalester College. I am also grateful to Stephen Eric Bronner, Leah Njoya, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions at various stages in the writing process.

² The three-part characterization of American imperialism in terms of aggressive militarism, market fetishism, and escalating authoritarianism is taken from West, Democracy Matters. Also see Carl Boggs, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Stephen Eric Bronner, Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005); Cynthia Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

³ West, Democracy Matters, pp. 216–218.

⁴ Paul Gilroy, “‘Not a Story to Pass On’: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime,” in his The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 187–233.

⁵ Darren K. Carlson, “Liberty vs. Security: Public Mixed on Patriot Act,” Gallup Daily News, July 19, 2005, < http://www.gallup.com/poll/17392/liberty-vs-security-public-mixed-patriot-act.aspx> (accessed January 20, 2010). In this poll, 41% of Americans said the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the powers of law enforcement and reduced privacy protections, was “about right” in restricting civil liberties in order to investigate suspected terrorism. Twenty-one percent of respondents said the Patriot Act “does not go far enough.”

⁶ Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Kevin Attel (trans.) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

⁷ See Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.

⁸ Judith Resnik, “Detention, the War on Terror, and the Federal Courts,” Columbia Law Review 110:2 (2010), pp. 579–685 at 579.

⁹ I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of an anonymous reviewer in providing some of the following references and outlining the historical dimensions of the central problem with which this article is concerned.

¹⁰ Some connections between these situations are highlighted in Nina Bernstein, “Echoes of ‘40s Internment Are Seen in Muslim Detainees’ Suit,” New York Times, April 3, 2007, p. B1.

¹¹ For the relationship between old forms of brutalizing the black body during slavery and Reconstruction and new applications of such torture techniques in the fight against terrorism, see Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007); Jerome H. Skolnick, “American Interrogation: From Torture to Trickery,” in Sanford Levinson (ed.), Torture: A Collection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 105–127.

¹² President Barack Hussein Obama, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 2009, < http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address> (accessed September 22, 2009).

¹³ See the legal action taken by the American Civil Liberties Union, amongst others, to obtain recognition of due process rights for prisoners in US custody at Guantánamo Bay and other detention facilities abroad. Legal documents available at: < http://www.aclu.org/national-security/detention> (accessed February 23, 2010).

¹⁴ See John R. Crook, “Contemporary Practice of the United States Relating to International Law: Efforts to End Guantánamo Bay Detentions Continue; Obstacles Abound,” American Journal of International Law, 103 (October 2009), pp. 758–760.

¹⁵ Mark Mazzetti, “CIA Resists Disclosure of Records on Detention,” New York Times, September 2, 2009, p. A11.

¹⁶ Mark Mazzetti, “US Says CIA Destroyed 92 Tapes of Interrogations,” New York Times, March 3, 2009, p. A16.

¹⁷ As quoted in West, Democracy Matters, p. 6.

¹⁸ Key laws are the United Nations Convention against Torture (1984); The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the Geneva Conventions (1949), especially Common Article 3; and the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice.

¹⁹ Alan Dershowitz, “Should the Ticking Bomb Terrorist Be Tortured?” in his Why Terrorism Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 132–163; and “Tortured Reasoning,” in Levinson, Torture, pp. 257–280.

²⁰ Dershowitz, “Tortured Reasoning,” p. 257.

²¹ Dershowitz, “Should the Ticking Bomb Terrorist Be Tortured?,” p. 144. Although he characterizes this cost–benefit analysis as a “simple and simple-minded” approach, it certainly factors into his consideration of how a security officer would likely assess the situation, and therefore his proposal for how the law should institute checks on that officer's response.

²² Years before the current torture debates, Henry Shue summed it up very nicely: “Notice how unlike the circumstances of an actual choice about torture the philosopher's example is. The proposed victim of our torture is not someone we suspect of planting the device: he is the perpetrator. He is not some pitiful psychotic making one last play for attention: he did plant the device. The wiring is not backwards, the mechanism is not jammed: the device will destroy the city if it is not deactivated” (“Torture,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 7:2 [1978], pp. 124–143 at 142). Also see Elaine Scarry, “Five Errors in the Reasoning of Alan Dershowitz,” in Levinson, Torture, pp. 281–290.

²³ For a development of this critique and an explication of the societal impact of torture, see James Ross, “A History of Torture,” in Kenneth Roth and Minky Worden (eds), Torture: Does It Make Us Safer? A Human Rights Perspective (New York: The New Press and Human Rights Watch, 2005), pp. 3–17.

²⁴ Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Reflection on the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands,’” in Levinson, Torture, pp. 77–89 at 83.

²⁵ Mark Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” The Atlantic, October 2003, < http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/10/the-dark-art-of-interrogation/2791> (accessed on March 3, 2010).

²⁶ Elshtain, “Reflection on the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands,’” p. 87.

²⁷ Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affair 2:1 (1973), pp. 160–180; Albert Camus, The Just Assassins, in his Caligula and 3 Other Plays (New York: Random House, 1958), pp. 233–302. The reference to “dirty hands” in Walzer's essay comes from Jean-Paul Sartre's play by the same title.

²⁸ Camus, Just Assassins, p. 245.

²⁹ Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 13.

³⁰ Walzer, “Political Action,” p. 179. Note, also, the warning issued by Camus's character Dora, who states: “I fear for the future. Others, perhaps, will come who'll quote our authority for killing; and will not pay with their lives” (Just Assassins, p. 296, emphasis in original).

³¹ Ross uses careful historical analysis to argue that no practice can be actively pursued by the state without becoming normalized and institutionalized. States of exception do become normative (“A History of Torture”).

³² Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (trans, eds) (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 57.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ See the “Analytic of the Sublime” in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, James Creed Meredith (trans.), Nicholas Walker (ed.) (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 75–164.

³⁵ Schiller, “On the Sublime,” in his Essays, Daniel O. Dahlstrom (trans.), Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (eds) (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 23 (emphasis in original).

³⁹ Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 92.

³⁶ Kant calls this the “mathematically sublime” (Critique of Judgment, pp. 78–90).

³⁷ This, in Kant's terminology, is the “dynamically sublime” (ibid., 90–94).

³⁸ Notable contemporary interpretations of the sublime include: Gilroy, Black Atlantic; Drucilla Cornell, Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); and Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989); Zizek looks at the question of incomprehensibility as it pertains to political ideology. He contends that ideology, properly speaking, is not a mask that hides “the real state of things”; rather, it is the very constitution of our reality, which would dissolve at once if we were to render it fully comprehensible (Sublime Object, p. 25). Kathy Ferguson develops Zizek's analysis very insightfully in order to reveal the ideological character of the militarism that saturates life in the United States even as it gives Americans a sense of insulation from the War on Terror that is happening “over there” in distant lands (“The Sublime Object of Militarism,” New Political Science 31:4 (2009), pp. 475–486).

⁴⁰ Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in his Practical Philosophy, Mary J. Gregor (trans., ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 473.

⁴¹ Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” in his Essays, pp. 1–21.

⁴² Cornel West, Hope on a Tightrope: Words & Wisdom (New York: Smiley Books, 2008), p. 189.

⁴³ Cornel West, “Celebrating Tikkun and Tragicomic Hope,” Tikkun 19:6 (2004), pp. 53–54.

⁴⁴ W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Fawcett, 1961), pp. 181–190.

⁴⁵ Du Bois reported, as the nineteenth century came to a close, “in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers [were] peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery from which the only escape [was] death or the penitentiary” (ibid., 41).

⁴⁶ Ibid., 189–190.

⁴⁷ Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones], Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It (New York: William Morrow, 1963), pp. 78–79. Also see Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 183.

⁴⁸ See Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 217–297.

⁴⁹ Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 10, as quoted in Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), p. xviii.

⁵⁰ Davis comments on misconstructions of the blues in the work of Samuel Charters and Paul Oliver, amongst others; ibid., 92–94.

⁵¹ Ibid., 106.

⁵² Ibid., 119.

⁵³ For a detailed discussion of the connection between music, democratic theory, and political contestation, see Mark Mattern, Acting in Concert: Music, Community and Political Action (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Nancy S. Love, Musical Democracy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

⁵⁶ “Strange Fruit,” words and music by Lewis Allan. Copyright 1939 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Music Sales Corporation and used by permission of Edward B. Marks Music Company.

⁵⁴ “Strange Fruit,” words and music by Lewis Allan. Recorded by Billie Holiday, Commodore 526, April 20, 1939.

⁵⁵ Although there is no evidence that Holiday ever witnessed a lynching, her memoir reveals that thoughts of her own father's death were foremost in her mind as she worked to recreate the song in performance. Her father fought in World War I and sustained permanent lung damage during combat. In the crucial weeks before his death, he was unable to receive treatment from segregated hospitals in the South and his health deteriorated beyond the possibility of recovery. Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (New York: Penguin, 1984) as quoted in Davis, Blues Legacies, p. 183.

⁵⁷ For a brief discussion of what solidarity meant in progressive movements of the 1930s, see Davis, Blues Women, pp. 190–192. Meeropol's union activism and the long life of his famous composition as a protest song are documented in Joel Katz's excellent film Strange Fruit (California News Real, 2001). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.

⁵⁸ West, Democracy Matters, pp. 20–21.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 3.

⁶² Mari Evans (ed.), Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews (London: Pluto Press, 1983), p. 340, as quoted in Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 219.

⁶¹ The challenge of maintaining artistic integrity in today's corporate-controlled music industry is of course considerable; classic blues singers encountered similar problems, but not to the same degree (Levine, Black Culture, p. 228). For studies that follow the legacy of the blues women up to the present, see Guthrie P. Ramsey Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-hop (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); and Buzzy Jackson, A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005).

⁶³ See Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in his Small Acts (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), pp. 175–182, portions of which are quoted in Black Atlantic, p. 78.

⁶⁴ Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 222.

⁶⁵ Toni Morrison and Cornel West, “Blues, Love and Politics,” The Nation, May 24, 2004, p. 18.

⁶⁶ See Julius Yanuck, “The Garner Fugitive Slave Case,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (now Journal of American Historians) XL:1 (1953). Reprinted online by the Detroit Opera House, < http://www.michiganopera.org/mg_ed/educational/Garner%20Slave%20Case.pdf> (accessed February 7, 2010).

⁶⁷ Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 192.

⁶⁸ Interview with Toni Morrison, BBC World Book Club, first broadcast January 3, 2009. < http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/2009/03/000000_worldbookclub.shtml> (accessed February 23, 2010).

⁶⁹ Morrison, Beloved, pp. 295–296.

⁷⁰ This understanding of dignity has much in common with Kantian moral philosophy.

⁷¹ Interview with Toni Morrison, BBC World Book Club.

⁷² Sethe's agony intensifies as Beloved recounts her experience of sexual violation by “men without skin” beyond the grave. The injustices of this world are carried into the next.

⁷³ Kant, Groundwork, pp. 84–85.