Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race: Towards a Critical Black Politics of Vulnerability

Abstract

Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies how race exploits bodily and enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of race which expand the horizon of the human.

Keywords:

• vulnerability
• race
• injury
• critical race theory
• black studies
• Frantz Fanon
• Y a bon banania
• Judith Butler
• misappropriation
• politics of the human

Acknowledgements

For their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank Estelle Ferrarese, the participants of the workshop “Risquer la Vulnérabilité: Risking Vulnerability” at the Graduate Center, CUNY, the participants of the KOSMOS workshop “Beyond Methodological Eurocentrism: Postcolonial Perspectives for Political and Social Theory” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the participants of the Geneva Political Theory Colloquium at the University of Geneva and Bel Parnell-Berry.

Notes

1 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, [1952] 1986), 85 [my emphasis].

2 Rocé, “Besoin d'Oxygène,” in Identitès en Crescendo (Paris: No Format, Universal Jazz, 2006) [translation and emphasis are mine].

3 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Paperback Book Club, [1984] 1993), 148 [my emphasis].

4 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51.

5 Following discursive approaches, I associate the modern idea of race with a complex articulation of discursive elements: rules, norms, practices, resources and subjectivities. Race gives meaning and classifies and hierarchizes subjects, practices and social relations according to a set of naturalized “endogenous” attributes such as hair texture, phenotype, form of lips and cultural ability. It is important to note that discursive approaches insist upon the ability of racialized discourse to change across contexts and time, as well as to interact and adapt with other modern discourses of difference such as gender, class and sexuality. See Stuart Hall, Identités et Culture II, Politique des Différences (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2013); David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); Noémi Michel and Manuela Honegger, “Thinking Whiteness in French and Swiss Cyberspaces,” Social Politics 17.4 (2010).

6 Estelle Ferrarese, “‘Gabba-Gabba, We Accept You, One of Us:’ Vulnerability and Power in the Relationship of Recognition,” Constellations 16.4 (2009): 604.

7 The early Butlerian writings include works between the publication of Gender Trouble in the early 1990s and the publication of Precarious Life in the early 2000s. Precarious Life is indeed often associated with what some commentators have called Butler's ethical turn – a turn which is marked by a progressive favouring of precariousness over vulnerability. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004).

8 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997a), 28.

9 Judith Butler, “Excitable Speech:” A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997b), 5.

10 For critiques of this ontological focus see Moya Lloyd, “Radical Democratic Activism and the Politics of Resignification,” Constellations 14.1 (2007); and Noémi Michel, “Equality and Postcolonial Claims of Discursive Injury,” Swiss Political Science Review 19.4 (2013).

11 Wendy Brown, State of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 27.

12 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 91.

13 Brown's genealogy apprehends politicized racial (as well as gendered and sexualized) identities as “both a production and contestation of the political terms of liberalism, disciplinary-bureaucratic regimes, certain forces of global capitalism, and the demographic flows of postcoloniality that together might be taken as constitutive of the contemporary North American political condition.” See Brown, States of Injury, 54. In contrast, within critical race and black perspectives, subject positions marked by racial difference emerge through diasporic spaces as well as diffuse and non-linear temporalities. See, for instance, Achille Mbembe, “What is Postcolonial Thinking? An Interview with Achille Mbembe,” Eurozine 2008-01-09 ([2006] 2008); and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003).

14 Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 20.

15 Note that my use of “exploitation” and “exploitability” departs from a Marxist approach and emerges at the crossroads of Foucauldian and critical race and black understandings of subjects’ relations to productive power. From such a perspective, the “subject” is a discursive site constantly reproduced by historical and socio-political forces. Exploitation designates any operation which takes advantage of the subject's dependence on discursive conventions of survival and intelligibility in order to materialize their near death or being at the limit of intelligibility.

16 On the importance of Fanon for anglophone postcolonial studies, see Pal Ahluwalia, Politics and Post-Colonial Theory: African Inflections (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, [1994] 2004). On the importance of Fanon for the emerging and consolidating francophone critique of postcoloniality and race, see Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique Décolonisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2010); Achille Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre (Paris: La Découverte, 2013); and Françoise Vergès, “Approches Postcoloniales de l'Esclavage et de la Colonisation,” Mouvements 3.51 (2007). On Fanon's contribution to black studies, see Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

17 The expression can be translated as a “Banania-type N-.” Banania is the label of a famous French product: a beverage with a chocolate and banana flavour that was first commercialized in the wake of World War I. See Anne Donadey, “‘Y'a Bon Banania:’ Ethics and Cultural Criticism in the Colonial Context,” French Cultural Studies 11.31 (2000); and Sylvie Chalaye, Nègres en Images, La Bibliothèque d'Africulture (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002). The advertising and customizing of this product represent a caricatured Senegalese trooper smiling over the product while exclaiming “Y a bon!” In French, parler petit-nègre is the equivalent of “Sho’ good” in pidgin. It is important to note that the Nègre type y a bon banania as well as the evocations of Banania disappear in the English version as the translator has replaced their occurrences with Anglo-American equivalent figures. The reading presented in this section is thus based on the original version: Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952).

18 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 22.

19 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 22.

20 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 34–5 footnote 7.

21 The tirailleur sénégalais is the Senegalese trooper who was enrolled as a French soldier during both World Wars. For an account of the historical conditions that constitute the tirailleur sénagalais as a national mascot after World War I, see Chalaye, Nègres en Images; Donadey, “Y'a Bon Banania;” Pap Ndiaye, La Condition Noire: Essai sur une Minorité Française (Paris: Gallimard, 2009); Cécile Van Den Avenne, “‘Les Petits Noirs du Type y a Bon Banania, Messieurs, C'est Terminé,’ L'usage Subversif du Français-Tirailleur dans Camp de Thiaroye de Sembène Ousmane,” Glottopol 12 (May 2008).

22 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 77.

23 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 155.

24 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 128.

25 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 128.

26 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 79.

27 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 21.

28 Other episodes and figures in Black Skin, White Masks have been widely commented on. One of the most famous and quoted scenes – “Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!,” “Kiss the handsome Negro's ass, madame!” constitutes a topos within critical discursive approaches to race. See, for instance, analyses by Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. R. Gooding-Williams (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993); Raka Shome, “Whiteness and the Politics of Location: Postcolonial Reflections,” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed. T. K. Nakayama and J. N. Martin (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); and Elsa Dorlin, “‘Performe ton Genre, Performe ta Race!:’ Re-penser l'Articulation entre Sexisme et Racisme à l’Ère de la Postcolonie,” in Soirées de Sophia, 2006–2007, ed. Réseau Sophia (Bruxelles: Sophia, 2007) (2007).

29 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84.

30 In Racist Culture, 54, Goldberg insists upon the unifying function of the “body:” “[The body] is a symbol of a ‘bounded system,’ a system the boundaries of which are formed by skin at once porous but perceived as inviolable and impenetrable. Body parts and functions are accordingly related in a complex structure, their substance confined by boundaries and limits that are fragile, vulnerable, and threatened.” In the same vein, Stuart Hall contends that anyone who is interested in modern classifying and hierarchic systems of differentiation needs to understand the body as a “text.” See Hall, Identités et Culture II, 107.

31 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 144.

32 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 22.

33 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 23.

34 Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre, 67 [my translation].

35 Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre, 67.

36 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 85.

37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83.

38 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 85.

39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84.

40 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 86.

41 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 86.

42 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87.

43 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82, 99.

44 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 17.

45 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83.

46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 116.

47 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 88.

48 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 88–89.

49 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 86 [my emphases].

50 Rocé, “Besoin d'Oxygène.”

51 I emphasize the similarities at play in these various accounts of injury. However, one should also note important variations: for instance, black feminist accounts tend to put a greater emphasis on gendered dimensions of injurious materializations as exemplified by the natal alienation of the enslaved “mother.” See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; and Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (1987).

52 Aletta Norval, “Democracy, Pluralization and Voice,” Ethics & Global Politics 2.4 (2009).

53 Norval, “Democracy, Pluralization and Voice,” 303.

54 Norval, “Democracy, Pluralization and Voice,” 304.

55 Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre, 51–2.

56 I translate from the following extract: “A travers ce texte, le Nègre dit de lui-même qu'il est celui sur qui on n'a pas prise; celui qui n'est pas là où on le dit, encore moins là où on le cherche, mais plutôt là où il n'est pas pensé.” Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre, 51–2.

57 Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 29.

58 Butler, “Excitable Speech,” 100.

59 Butler, “Excitable Speech,” 100.

60 Butler, “Excitable Speech,” 99.

61 Brown's initial critique mainly targets legal codification of injury. According to her, “[w]hen ‘social hurt’ is conveyed to the law for resolution, political ground is ceded to moral and juridical ground.” See Brown, States of Injury, 27. I share Brown's concerns about the limiting reach of demands expressed within the judicial framework. However, I wish to stress that, even when they are conveyed through legal channels, public accounts of injury always hail a broad and complex community of publics and counterpublics – a community which Nancy Fraser would call a “multiplicity of publics.” See Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 84. It is in the context of such a multiplicity that I read and analyse the misappropriative power of accounts of injury.

62 Butler, “Excitable Speech,” 100.

63 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 178.

64 Translation by Rosello quoted in Jana Evans Braziel, Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 48.

65 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 179–80.

66 Quoted in Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 33 [my emphasis].

67 For a study of the various political and poetic trends of the Negritude movement see Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora; and Lucie K. Mercier, “Négritude,” in Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, ed. S. Maty Bâ and I. Ness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

68 Philippe Chanson, La Blessure du Nom: Une Anthropologie d'une Sèquelle de l'Esclavage aux Antilles-Guyane (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-Bruylant, 2008), 93.

69 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre.

70 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58–9.

71 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 67.

72 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 71.

73 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 71–2.

74 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 59.

75 Goldberg offers us a comprehensive review of the different waves and movements of antiracism, see David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race; Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). However, his narration must be completed by Cedric Robinson's emphasis on the pre-colonial dimension of the struggle against colonialism and racism. While accounting for the first revolts of the enslaved, the latter stresses: “the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality … These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks–men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.” See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1983] 2005), 121–2. The fact that practices such as secret naming are encountered in the Caribbean region as well as on the African continent highlights the need to read misappropriative practices as inventive assemblages which articulate elements that pre-date modern slavery and colonial power. I thank Robbie Shilliam for having brought this important issue to my attention.

76 Brown, Edgework, 91.

77 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 14. Weheliye relies on Abbas's following call: “Constituting a historical and materialist politics of suffering centered on the labors of those who suffer requires intervening on the side of the experience of suffering, before and beyond considering it merely an object of the agency that causes it or that solves the problem. In this process, the subjectivity of sufferers, their ‘health,’ their deaths, their presence, their absence, their love, and their hope all stand to be rethought in light of the continuing legacy of colonialism in the cartographies of global suffering and the gaping rosters of the wounded ranked according to the most valuable and visible injury.” Asma Abbas, Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 15.

78 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotions, 33.

79 Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, “Injury by Design,” Cultural Critique 40 (Autumn 1998): 98.

80 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 19.

81 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 14.

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Noémi Michel

Noémi Michel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in political theory at the University of Geneva, where she also coordinates the research group Post It – thinking racial and postcolonial difference. She works at the crossroads of poststructuralist and feminist theory and postcolonial, critical race and black studies, with a focus on equality and difference and the politics of (anti)racism. Her recent work has been published in Social Politics, the Swiss Political Science Review and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.