Making a scene: performance and Black maternal remembrances

Abstract

This article draws attention to the oppositional critiques of History and Humanism four Black mothers performed as they (re)made public memories of their children who had been killed by state-sanctioned violence. Lacking sociolegal authority to protect their children's lives, Margaret Garner, Mamie Till-Mobley, Dr. Karla F.C. Holloway, and Lezley McSpadden nonetheless publicly staged embodied acts of care at and beyond the site of death that problematized their children's vulnerability to anti-Black violence and its unruly spectacles. Attending to these acts as reproductive labor, the article clarifies how Black mothering challenges the putative valuelessness of Black life in the material and discursive economies of racial capitalism. Although Black mothers can never dislodge the structuring logic of anti-Blackness that subtends the deathly acts of violence—a logic which has organized our episteme since the invention of modern Man—performative analyses of their production and reappropriation of public memory suggest that the scenes they make do undermine the insistent oversights that make Blackness (un)representable.

Keywords:

• Blackness
• maternity
• racial capitalism
• performance
• spectacle
• grief

Acknowledgments

I would never have arrived at this argument without having had my friend and colleague, Umniya Najaer, as an interlocutor. The rigor and care she exhibits in her own work on the Black womb is largely responsible for any contribution this article can claim to make. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Michaela Bronstein, and Jakeya Caruthers lent particularly helpful insights as the argument developed into this article’s first draft, my qualifying paper for the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford. My fellow members of the Black Studies Collective at Stanford graciously invited me to workshop that earlier draft of the paper. The feedback I received there, particularly from Jameelah Imani Morris, Danielle Marie Greene, and Lucas T. Williams, was instrumental in developing that draft into the article proposal. Dionte B. Harris read so many drafts throughout the process that he can probably recite the introduction from memory. I am especially thankful to him, along with the editorial collective of W&P and my anonymous reviewers, who all made this work better while also treating it and me with care. Finally, I am grateful to Dr. Karla F.C. Holloway for authorizing my engagement with her personal story, and to all of the Black mothers performing in and against the pervasive reality of premature Black death.

Notes

1 I invoke Morrison’s rememory here in order to call attention to the way that the quotidian and iterative nature of state-sanctioned, premature Black death materially and psychosocially shapes the lives of those who live to tell the tale. In the afterlife of slavery, Sethe explains to Denver in Beloved,

Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. (1998, 43)

This is to say that part of the tragedy in Brown’s death for me was in its formative familiarity, inasmuch as the structurally mandated vulnerability to premature death I share with Brown haunts my supposed status as a person and citizen in ways I knew in my body even before I learned through experience and study.

2 My thinking on this matter has been profoundly impacted by Christen A. Smith’s work in “Facing the Dragon,” where she notes that “although state terror often results in the immediate physical death of young Black men, it is principally, yet tacitly, performed for Black women and impacts Black women disproportionately” (2016, 31). Black women, she notes, are figured as sequelae who must bear the “gendered, reverberating, deadly effects of state terror that infect the affective communities of the dead” (2016, 31).

3 In Constructing the Black Masculine, Wallace poignantly invokes the term to describe “an interpretive imposition on black men’s being in public space,” which “restricts, if not altogether dooms, a black man’s potential for transcending the chasmed otherness of race by establishing boundaries (screens, image repertories, stereotypes), mental parerga, that thwart sameness” (2002, 8). He insists that Black men are not merely seen, but enframed. When former officer Darren Wilson invoked the pathologized tropes of Black men in his interview with George Stephanopolous, then, he merely lubricated the invocation of that “interpretive imposition” (2002, 8). My discussion of Black men’s particular enframement here is also informed by Patrice D. Douglass’s important observation of “the conflation of all Black genders as male,” particularly in discussions about anti-Black violence and the political discourse such violence engenders (2018, 109). Such conflation, she clarifies, both “misaligns [anti-Black violence] as inherently without gender, since maleness is assumed as structurally unbound by the suffering of gender violence” and “reveals that violence deracinates Black gender into an unrecognizable state, such that what is seen does not account for all that has occurred” (2018, 109). Taking Douglass’s provocation seriously, I endeavor to explicate the specificity of the calculus of violence animating Brown’s encounter with Wilson and its gendered visual logic, but without suggesting that his vulnerability to gratuitous violence is exceptional to his maleness.

4 Part of what I am trying to do here is to build on Christen A. Smith’s important observation of the oft forgotten affective and material impacts fatal anti-Black violence against Black men has on the communities they leave behind—their mothers in particular—to note that the enframement of Black men which justifies the violence against them (to use Maurice O. Wallace’s language) is inextricably tied to the enframement of their Black mothers. The presumed failure of the Black mother is indexed in her child’s putative pathology. I am indebted to my undergraduate thesis advisors, Wahneema Lubiano and Mark Anthony Neal, for helping me to begin to think about the relationship between the representation of Black men and the representation of the mothers who raise them.

5 I am especially thinking about the article that John Eligon wrote in The New York Times shortly after Brown’s death delineating the “problems and promise in his young life” (2014). The writer bizarrely builds a case that Brown was troubled using details about Brown’s background and upbringing. These details, including that Brown “lived in a community that had rough patches,” “dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” “had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar,” and “was born to ‘teenage parents’” who “split up” before he matured into adulthood leaving him to be raised by a single mother recall intensely racialized stereotypes and imagery about Black people as pathological in ways that expose Eligon’s intentions even in the absence of their explicit naming (Eligon 2014). No details about Wilson or his upbringing are included.

6 I use Man and Hu/Man throughout the article following Sylvia Wynter, who uses “Man” to gesture to an exclusionary humanism whereby white heterosexual men were ontologized into the paragons of personhood, while

the peoples of the militarily expropriated New World territories (i.e. Indians), as well as the enslaved peoples of Black Africa (i.e. Negroes), that were made to reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness—to be made into the physical referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other, to this first degodded (if still hybridly religio-secular) ‘descriptive statement’ of the human in history, as the descriptive statement that would be foundational to modernity. (2003, 266)

7 I invoke Christina Sharpe’s “the wake” in both language and spirit, as I not only find it an extraordinarily clarifying analytic through which to understand “the contemporary conditions of Black life as it is lived near death, as deathliness, in the wake of slavery,” but also a necessarily horizon for theorizing possibility. That is, although this is a paper that is deeply concerned with the ways (or scenes) Black mothers make; I endeavor also to insist that these are interventions always waged in and by the conditions of impossibility the longue durée of enslavement mandates. Indeed, “the ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people are normative and, for this so-called democracy, necessary; it is the ground we walk on” (2016, 7). My task as a scholar, then, is to tarry with the question of “what happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who know, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who care?” (2016, 7).

8 I am heavily indebted to Saidiya Hartman for this line of thinking. In particular, her ruminations on the futility of “focusing one’s appeal to the very state that has inflicted the injury” in response to Frank B. Wilderson, III’s query about reparations in “The Position of the Unthought” (2003) helps to clarify the contradictory nature of the integrationist impulse I see as insidious in the way that Black people killed by state violence often get animated in putatively progressive, even purportedly radical, political imaginaries. Getting true “justice” for Michael Brown, or for Breonna Taylor, or for Korryn Gaines, or for Trayvon Martin, would require nothing less than destruction of the calculus of value that undergirds racial capitalism in the afterlife of slavery. To imagine otherwise is to “reinscribe the power of the law and of the state to make right a certain situation, when, clearly, it cannot” (198).

9 I am indebted to my colleague and co-conspirator at Stanford, Casey Wayne Patterson, for helping me to clarify my contribution to thinking about the relationship between spectacularity and value, and for helping me to develop this language to do so.

10 To be sure, I am not suggesting that McSpadden’s grief is deceitful or insincere; rather, I am suggesting that she is not just passively represented. Partly because she is so adamant about distinguishing herself and her family from common pathologized tropes of Black representation, it is clear that she possesses an intimate knowledge of her own (hyper)visibility which she exploits to bring attention to her son’s death and the calculus of value that makes it possible.

11 I invoke “the repertoire” as the archive’s foil following Diana Taylor: “all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (2003, 20).

12 Jackson challenges the logic of “exclusion” that has animated critiques of Enlightenment’s racializing schema, particularly in the context of the human/animal distinction. Rather than to exclude Blackness, she argues that these discourses were invested in the “violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition—of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity” (3). Owing to her incisive contribution, I understand my discussion of the ways in which Black mothers have been categorically excluded from the discursive category of maternity to be an exemplary, though not exhaustive, account of how exactly the category gets mobilized on the register of ontology. This is to say that the exclusion of Black mothers from the discursive category of maternity is but a mode of their fundamental utility—a testament to the “fluidification of ‘life’ and fleshy existence” that Jackson describes (2020, 11).

13 I use Mamie Till-Mobley although she was Mamie Till-Bradley at the time of her son’s death because I mean to suggest that the labor of re-presenting her son continues well after 1955. Indeed, she was co-authoring an autobiographical account of her son’s death in honor of his memory and the ongoing fight for racial justice, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, at the time of her death in 2003. The book was published later that year.

14 Here it is worth noting that Margaret Garner was never actually tried for murder. Although she was indicted on murder charges (and the Garner men as accessories) and the abolitionists fighting on her behalf tried to see those charges through in hopes of ultimately challenging the Fugitive Slave Act’s constitutionality, the actual legal question adjudicated by the court was whether the Garners were enslaved or free. It was determined that they remained propertied (and that they would thus be returned to Kentucky). The federal government, in establishing the Fugitive Slave Act as federal law, establishes the terms by which a murder charge can collapse under the weight of a property claim.

15 I limit the number of case studies despite the capaciousness of the analytic because I endeavor to treat each of these narratives with nuance and care. I am particularly interested in the Black funeral and the Black wake as exemplary stages for the scenes Black mothers have made on behalf of children murdered by the U.S. state. But Black mothers can and have also “made a scene” in courtrooms, in corner stores, on red carpets, on the front lines, in the news and media, in memoirs, and in innumerable other spaces and places. My hope is that my provocations open lines for further inquiry about Blackness, mothering, and anti-Black state violence for others.

16 Importantly, state-sanctioned violence and death can take many forms, from lethal injection to toxic waste dumping (see Berlant, 2007).

17 Sharpe notes that “extraordinary sites of domination and intimacy, slavery and the Middle Passage were ruptures with and a suspension of the known world that initiated enormous and ongoing psychic, temporal, and bodily breaches. Monstrous Intimacies is my attempt to account for the long psychic and material reach of those passages, their acknowledged and disavowed effects, their projection onto and erasure from particular bodies, and the reformulation, reproduction, and recirculation of their intimate spaces of trauma violence, pleasure, shame, and containment” (2010, 4).

18 This reading is resonant with Jacqueline Goldsby’s framing of Emmett Till’s murder (and lynchings more broadly) as a “spectacular secret” (2006, 6). She suggests that “our fixation on the extremities of the practice,” particularly in historical accounts, have produced accounts of lynching that understate its formative relation to the modern (284).

19 In the most contemporarily cited accounts of the killing, which are that of Underground Railroad “president” Levi Coffin and historian Julius Yanuck, Garner’s age is variously given as 21, 22, or 23 at the time of her daughter’s death. That Garner’s age is contested in the public record is demonstrative of how institutions work to produce the enslaved as non-beings and the according precarious position of Black beings, especially Black women, in the historical archive.

20 Kimberly Juanita Brown compellingly writes about Sethe, Margaret Garner’s fictional analog, that she

reorganizes temporal order as she remembers events and emphasizes the intimate contingencies others may miss when, for instance, they focus on one aspect of her physical presentation (the tree on her back) as opposed to others that are less visible (her stolen milk, her missing husband, her dead child). (2015, 6)

I am especially interested in how Beloved mediates Brown’s elaboration of “the generational lineage of black pain, literally ‘written on the back’ of black female subjectivity” historically and generally in Beloved-as-archive. Indeed, scholarly and popular engagements with the novel have textured the historical landscape, not only of Margaret Garner’s narrative but also more broadly of slavery and its afterlives (2015, 5).

21 In particular, Taylor’s “Performance and/as History,” Muñoz’s “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” and Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” speak to the silences that attend dispossessed and ontologically negated populations (the primitive, the queer, the slave) in the historical archive.

22 Wahneema Lubiano’s “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,” which I reference in other parts of this essay, elaborates this argument. She writes,

categories like ‘black woman,’ ‘black women,’ or particular subsets of those categories, like ‘welfare mother/queen,’ are not simply social taxonomies, they are also recognized by the national public as stories that describe the world in particular and politically loaded ways—and that is exactly why they are constructed, reconstructed, manipulated, and contested. They are, like so many other social narratives and taxonomic social categories, part of the building blocks of ‘reality’ for many people; they suggest something about the world; they provide simple, uncomplicated and often wildly (and politically damaging) inaccurate information about what is ‘wrong’ with some people, with the political economy of the United States. They even stand for threats to ideas about what the relationship of the family to the state ought to be. (Lubiano 1992, 331)

23 I will certainly not make space for them or engage them critically as part of this argument, but I can recall the vicious attacks of McSpadden I would encounter in the comments sections of media relating to Brown’s death published online. Insofar as she was always already a “marked woman,” upon seeing her body, these commenters needed no further evidence of her putative pathology (Spillers 1987, 65).

24 Umniya Najaer was particularly instrumental in helping me to arrive at this point.

25 Jared Sexton’s chapter, “Origins and Beginnings: On The Blind Side,” from Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing, demonstrates how filmic representation, as an ideological state apparatus, functions to solidify the pathologized imaginative of “the Black mother” and usefully links her pathologization to that of the Black man, Black family and Black neighborhood. Central to the development of the film’s white savior complex is the profoundly disproportionate maternal ability of the Black protagonist’s white adoptive mother. At one point, she literally wrests him from the bowels of a trap house, which the film depicts through a foil character who is violently killed in Michael’s neighborhood as his and all other Blacks’ inevitable plight in the custody of his Black Mother and on the geography of that Black neighborhood. Michael’s Black mother is “not only unable to protect him from dangers in his home and neighborhood or the regular incursions of the state, not only unable to ward against the structural conditions of ghettoization; she is also in need of protection herself” (Sexton 2017, 110).

26 I am aware that neither these social and biological kinships nor mothering and maternity are neatly dichotomous under the conditions of anti-Blackness, a truth which has been explored in Black feminist work on mothering and that is explored in the “wake work” of Black women’s literature. What motivates this distinction is my critical (and ethical) desire to complicate what mothering must mean under the legal and social conditions of captivity. Angela Davis notes that

The designation of the Black woman as a matriarch is a cruel misnomer. It is a misnomer because it implies stable kinship structures within which the mother exercises decisive authority. It is cruel because it ignores the profound traumas the black woman must have experienced when she had to surrender her child-bearing to alien and predatory economic interests. (1971, 3)

For more work on Black feminism and mothering, see the Revolutionary Mothering collection edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams; Nancy Naples’s Grassroots Warriors; Jane Juffer’s Single Mother; Jennifer Nelson’s Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movements; Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body; and Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women, among others.

27 I elaborate my contribution to the question of reproduction and disappearance that has animated so much of the writing on performance since the publication of Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked later in this section. For now, suffice it to say that this paper follows Joshua Chambers-Letson in assuming that performance is characterized by “internal contradictions,” quintessentially “the paradoxical simultaneity of its ephemerality (its fugitivity from the sphere of reproduction and withdrawal from presence) and its inherent reproducibility (its capacity to reproduce the presence of that which has been absented or lost)” (2016, 127).

28 I am thinking especially of Black women as the objects of analysis foundational to the development of the human sciences, and of modern gynecology in particular, through medical experimentation J. Marion Sims performed on their bodies without consent or anesthesia. For more on the bioethical implications of science’s objectification of Black women’s bodies, see Karla F.C. Holloway's Private Bodies, Public Texts (2011) and C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides (2017), particularly its first chapter.

29 Saidiya Hartman and Joshua Chambers-Letson point out the predominance of “gestational language” and reproduction-as-metaphor in accounts of racial capitalism’s origins by theorists of slavery and performance respectively (2016, 166; 2016, 126). For both scholars, this appropriation of the language of reproduction falls short of sufficiently accounting for the material contributions of reproductive laborers—here those Black mothers who give birth to the paradigmatic human commodity.

30 There is a paradox—which is rather productive for my purposes—to be found in the fact that the Black mother both reproduces the foundational fodder for value under capital and, as Christen A. Smith so poignantly demonstrates, threatens the maintenance of that very order through her insistent challenges to the state’s constitutive anti-Blackness in response to spectacular acts of violence. My task here is to elaborate the centrality of performance to these challenges, or “scenes” that they routinely make.

31 My use of “propertied persons” is informed by Saidiya Hartman, who generatively writes about how the vulnerability of the enslaved to statutory law (the slave codes) inheres a recognition of humanity, while they acquire no protections or personhood in common law. She further writes, “The dual invocation of the slave as property and person was an effort to wed reciprocity and submission, intimacy and domination, and the legitimacy of violence and the necessity of protection” (Hartman 1997, 80). In this way, the enslaved were rendered propertied persons, and not merely property, in the law, insofar as the law worked to both liberate and subjugate the enslaved according to its contradictory aims. This is part of the disorderliness of enslavement and anti-Blackness I reference throughout this paper, a disorderliness institutions work to disappear.

32 Although I do not have the space here to elaborate, there is considerably more to be said about the Emmett Till display in the NMAAHC in light of the ongoing debates around memorialization, archives, and spectacle I am engaging in this paper. During my last visit to the museum, I was struck (and somewhat horrified) by the exhibit’s popularity with visitors of all races (there was a line to get in to the room where the casket is kept), and the way in which the display seems intentionally curated to stage a kind of psychosocial encounter with its visitors. The room is designed so that its visitors encounter the casket just as they would at a funeral: the very shape of the room is such that you must march around in a line, there is a mock pulpit and there are mock “pews,” and the lighting and sound effects in the room produce an atmosphere of sorrow. Many of the visitors I saw left the exhibit weeping. Among the questions worth exploring are: what effect does the display of Till’s casket absent his body produce? How do we properly assess the ethics of the display given that neither the curator nor the visitors are his mother, and she is no longer alive to make the choice? What does this exhibit reveal about the possibilities and/or limitations of “proper” historical representation?

33 There are numerous other examples, I think, of people who have spectacularized Emmett Till’s image. One notable example is the white artist Dana Schutz, whose Open Casket painting sparked a huge controversy after its inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Aruna D’Souza thoughtfully analyzes the workings of culture and commodity in the scandal that ensued in Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. Although I do not pursue it here, I am fixated by a question that occurred to me upon reading it: is Mamie Till “responsible” at all for how her son’s image is spectacularized after his funeral, given her role in making his open casket photo widely available?

34 Though it is not my endeavor here, there is more to be said about the symbolic labor the Black dead are called upon to do, particularly in the name of social justice. I appreciate Jameelah Imani Morris for helping me to discover the prevalence of this undercurrent throughout the scenes considered here. I also appreciate Abdul R. JanMohamed for the clarity that engaging his observations about physical death lent my analysis as I arrived at this point. He argues, “the road to freedom is revealed precisely by the slave's ability to recognize that while the master can appropriate the value of his labor and, by confining him to the realm of social-death, even the value of his life, the only thing that the master cannot appropriate is the use-value of his actual-death” (2005, 18, emphasis in original).

35 Here I am alluding to the decades long debate about the exact nature of the supposed transgression that resulted in his death. Of course, his very being was enough. In an interview with historian Timothy B. Tyson for his 2017 book The Blood of Emmett Till, the woman he had been accused of flirting with admitted that he never did. My slight ambiguity about this in the body of the text has to do with the frustration I articulate in my earlier point about the way Michael Brown is narrativized post-mortem, toward the insinuation that one’s access to freedom should depend on strict adherence to a set of intensely racialized social codes.

36 The aforementioned dimension of “submission,” which registers the gendered power relations and libidinal economy of anti-Blackness under slavery and in its wake, is also resonant here. Emmett's legibility as a simultaneous object of fear and fetish is important context for the acts of violence done to him and their legal authorization. This is, of course, why the disproven myth that Till was castrated was so believable. For more on this, see Alexander G. Weheliye's extension of Spillers's notion of pornotroping to consider the violent homoerotic impulses of white masculinity in Habeas Viscus, particularly pages 93-96.

37 “Cheating out” in theatre performance means to readjust one’s blocking or placement on a stage in order to ensure maximum visibility for the audience. It is common practice for morticians to turn the head of a decedent before public viewing. It is evident that this was done to Till in photos of his casket.

38 Ruth Feldstein and others also note that Mamie Till-Mobley continued to share her son’s story and advocate for justice on his behalf. She testified at the trial of his killers, and became a sought after orator for the civil rights struggle, even touring with the NAACP for a time (2000, 103).

39 I had a conversation with Dr. Holloway, who is a dear personal mentor, about her scene-making in my preparation of the article. Despite her ongoing commitment to honoring the memory of her son, she expressed having always had apprehensions about public enlistments of his story as evidence of the horror in state-sanctioned, anti-Black violence. Her legitimate fear that her son’s imperfections might threaten the legibility of the force that anti-Blackness exerted in his life to hasten his death (and that that illegibility would cause his inclusion as part of a narrative of anti-Black struggle to threaten the integrity of that struggle's political claim) should raise questions about what it actually means for Black lives to matter.

40 Saidiya Hartman has wrestled with the limits of the archive throughout her scholarly career. I quote Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in this particular instance because in that text, Hartman self-consciously enacts a critical mode that she calls “close narration,” which she characterizes as “a style which places the voice of the narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text” (Hartman 2019, xiii–xiv). Hers is a distinctly performative method that, like Holloway’s methodology of personal narration about her son, not only attempts to give voice to the now tragically voiceless but also dramatizes the persistence of Black, and especially Black female, waywardness. Although there is not room to elaborate this idea in this paper, Hartman enacts a kind of archival scene-making, using performance as a mode to birth otherwise knowledges that grant ex-slaves a claim to their history.

41 Holloway’s own Private Bodies, Public Texts elaborates how Black people and women are systematically denied rights to privacy in medical and legal contexts.

42 Although I think it important that I indicate the ways in which this representational project is gendered, the scope of this paper does not allow me to delve too deeply into the history of Black masculine representation. A few relevant works are Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, Marlon B. Ross’s Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era, and Maurice O. Wallace’s Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995.

43 Of course, my reliance on ellipsis here dramatizes the inevitable failure of textual re-presentation to document live and recorded events. But I am also drawn to the ellipsis as a signifier for Wilson's violent silence in light of Jennifer DeVere Brody's observation that ellipses perform by “[forming] a corollary between the different and yet analogically related experiences of silence and invisibility. They supplement experience and call attention to the scripted-ness and excess ascribed to black performance” (2008, 76). I follow the impulse Brody locates in Ralph Ellison's fiction, then, in invoking the ellipsis as a way to call attention to the excessive meaning-making practices Wilson activates in his account of Brown's killing by virtue of what he says and what he does not say. Yet the ellipses also announce absences that Brody notes are full of, rather than absent of, meaning; these are moments that emerge as “signposts and signals that provide viewers with opportunities to scrutinize” (2008, 68).

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Henry Washington

Henry Washington, Jr. is a PhD candidate in the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. His research interests include African American literature, Black feminist and queer theory, performance studies, and the law. He is at work on a dissertation that investigates murder mystery in the post-slavery imagination.