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95 2 “A Race That Could Be So Dealt With” Terror, Time, and (Black) Power The Black Male Body Abject The figure of the Negro, Fanon says, is “woven . . . out of a thousand details , anecdotes, stories.”1 Blackness is lived, but it is a representation. Even if, as we believe, all identities and subjectivities are falsities of this sort, imagos as hollow as old bones that language or father or the forces of economic production generate, blackness is a representation of rather recent historical vintage, unlike far older and presumably transcultural representations such as “woman.” The historical proximity of its provenance makes tangible to us, visible, the operation of sociogenesis by which all of our human world comes into being. If blackness functions as the dark distorted mirror of the (thus whitened) Western self, reflecting its fears and obsessions concerning the body, sexuality, and mortality, then that blackness exists and that it is possible to historicize it mirrors for us the process by which the terms of self and socius have been constructed. In this way we can read blackness as a patchwork of narratives condensed on the skin of the blackened and referenced in the images ascribed to them, an articulation of meaning to image, the circulation of which occurs in the symbolic, a realm both collective (as all that we might call culture) and idiosyncratic (as what we deem the individual unconscious). What emerges most forcefully from Fanon’s ruminations in Black Skin, White Masks is the idea that blackness is an artifact of the symbolic, one of the clever deceptions of language as it attempts to give substance to the void that it is and as it vainly attempts to impose order on the riotously excessive world with which it is confronted. Like all language, then, blackness is code. And as with all language, this encoding can by its proliferating processes of abstraction and association virally replicate itself; it generates more encoded language—and thus more knowledge, more of a something which it codes—otherwise unavailable. Artistry that makes language its primary medium of creation explores and exploits language’s essential coding: it does so through 96 “A Race That Could Be So Dealt With” metonymy. Such art generates “insight” (or, strictly speaking, a new or different idea) by combining, collapsing, conflating in some jarring or beautiful or shocking way things, ideas, memes, that were heretofore not in contiguity or not placed in contiguity in that way. Thus, language art— trope work—routinely conducts a thought-experiment in the manner we ascribe generically to speculative fiction, by creating seemingly impossible , or at least difficult to imagine, conjunctions: conjunctions not unlike those troublesome “contradictions” we find lurking in Fanon’s corpus, such as the paradoxes of the rigid black(ened) body that is both living and dead and both inert and in movement, the facticity of human freedom as its imprisonment, the decidedly nonlinear temporality that folds a past as future anterior under and over a future as past posterior. This is why at the conclusion of the preceding chapter I said that a literary imagination is required to enumerate the powers of blackness at the point of its defeat; a literary imagination can locate abilities and “power” at the point of the apparent erasure of ego-protections, the point at which the constellation of tropes that we call identity, body, race, nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated, without defensible boundary. What Fanon epigrammatically refers to as muscle tension or rigidity, and what he considers significant only insofar as it is inchoate revolutionary action, the literary imagination, sporting the kind of dramatic license with temporality that we allow to opera, can expatiate upon at length and sound to its depths on its own terms. If blackness is metonymic, or is a metonym that demonstrates for us the associative coding and translation that constitutes all our individual and social categories of meaning, then the literary—by one definition, metonymy elaborated and exploited—is a mode that can demonstrate the operation of blackness, both how it is lived and how it might be. The literary is an apt mode of theorizing blackness . In this and the chapters that follow, then, I want to link arms between my appropriative literary reading of the muscle tension metaphor in Fanon’s theoretical text and a derivation of theoretics from literary representations of blackness. The first text I examine predates Fanon by half a century, but in James Weldon Johnson’s The...

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