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What the state cannot tolerate in any way . . . is that the singularities form a community without affirming identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (86). —Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community I began by asking whether it was possible to found community on a recognition of our infinite difference. Giorgio Agamben’s dream of a community that would not be dependent on the affirmation of identity or sameness is echoed by Jean-Luc Nancy’s vision of a “community of others,” a community perhaps only truly realizable in death: “Community is what takes place always through others and for others. . . . If community is revealed in the death of others it is because death itself is the true community of others” (15). Community is the impossible destination of postcolonial narrative, signaled not only by Harris’s celebratory vision of communion at the end of Palace of the Peacock but also by the lonely after-texts at the end of Foe and Beloved, which provide negative images of the coming community, gesturing toward the need for a more inclusive collectivity by indicating what still remains excluded. Harris’s vision of community is a presentiment or promise rather than a fully realized representation or resolution, a promise that must be infinitely renewed. Like mourning, the attempt to redraw the boundaries of community must remain incomplete, unsuccessful; its success is measured precisely by its failure to complete itself, its capacity to remain perpetually open to the difference of the other, to the possibility of different others and not yet imagined modes of being. CONCLUSION Some Kind of Community 111 In 1992, Stuart Hall announced “the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject” (443), a demise brought about by “the recognition that ‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature” (443). Hall proposes that we understand blackness as a cultural rather than a biological category, as an ethnicity rather than a race, although he warns that the term ethnicity must be “dis-articulated from its position in the discourse of multi-culturalism” where it is often used as a means of “disavowing the realities of racism” (446). He calls for an “ethnicity of the margins . . . a recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience , a particular culture, without being contained by that position. . . . We are all, in that sense, ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are” (447). Like many other formulations of cultural difference, Hall’s redefinition of ethnicity risks losing sight of the realities of racism because it assumes that we are all able “to speak from a particular place,” that there is no place from which it is impossible to enter into the cultural conversation. It loses sight of those bodies that acquire a certain materiality precisely because they have been denied access to the discursive realm of culture. So called antiessentialist theories of the subject that emphasize the provisional and constantly shifting parameters of identity fail to account for this extradiscursive materiality of the racially marked body. I have argued for an antihistoricist ethics of remembrance in an attempt to show how the racially marked body is never fully identifiable; like Fanon and Spivak’s excessive, hemorrhaging corpses, it is never fully locatable in history. As Charles Shepherdson argues, the body cannot be exclusively accounted for either as a biological or cultural phenomenon, either in terms of sex and race or gender and ethnicity. His argument is similarly directed against the ascendancy of historicism in contemporary debates over culture and identity. If we question the limits of historicism, then, we do so not to propose a return to the reality of empirical facts or in the name of biological truth, but because the historicity of various phenomena—what we might call their modes of temporalization—has often been prematurely reduced to a single form by the discourse of social construction. In this sense the body—perhaps like race itself—cannot be adequately grasped if it is regarded as a discursive effect or a purely symbolic formation. (44) In our desire to move away from genetic theories of race and the vicissitudes of biological essentialism, we have perhaps fallen prey to a form of cultural essentialism in which the subject is the sum...

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