After Slavery

That fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially—poor but extravagant, as opposed to frugal—is blackness, which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under) privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Blackness and Governance”

A man is no longer a man confined, but a man in debt.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

Perhaps it is the blackness to which Moten and Harney point that permeates the life experiences that Toni Morrison’s writings witness and to which she has given a quality of universality. It is, however, a universality from the (under)privileged perspective of those “who are owed, the ones who bear the trace of being owned” and who are in a world of poverty and extravagance, a world of “a debt unfairly imposed and untold wealth unfairly expropriated” (Moten and Harney 2011, 351). No less for Morrison than for Moten and Harney, blackness is an “anoriginary drive,” a force that brings regulation into existence at the very same time that criminality, fugitivity, waste, and debt come into being. This is a regulation of populations, submitted to calculation, in a biopolitical governance about which we speak now but which has its roots in slavery.

After all, it is the slave trade, as Stephanie Smallword argues, that provides “not only a new economic moment for modern Western nation states but a new regime of calculation by which to measure and utilize human life” (qtd. in Ferguson 2012, 91). Africans were placed at the center of calculation in order to put to exchangeability the life capacities extracted from the species—through the extraction of living labor from slave populations. Drawing on Smallword’s argument, Roderick Ferguson proposes that in the post–World War II years, this calculation for the exchangeability of physical capacities would come to an end as the site for calculation of life capacities shifted. With the entrance of minorities into the academy, their mental or intellectual as well as bodily capacities would be “evaluated in terms of their fitness for standards of excellence and merit” (2012, 91). While excellence promised a new beginning, it would, however, “betray its kinship to prior and emerging regimes of calculation and alienation” (92). Minorities would find themselves again and again to be those who bear the trace of being owned as they would come to bear an incredible amount of debt, circulating along with the drive to institutionality inhering in minority studies themselves, all part of a neoliberal biopolitical governance.

And over those decades of the postwar years, from the entrance of minority students into the academy to the establishment and institutionalization of minority studies, Toni Morrison’s writings would hold up a mirror into which all are invited to gaze, shining a light on the “fugal, internal world theater” of poverty and extravagance. Whereas The Bluest Eye (Morrison 1970) reformulated the Dick and Jane primer to teach us how to read from an (under)privileged perspective, Beloved (1987) gave us an epic of magnificent survival—yes—but a cautionary tale as well. Morrison would ask us to be cautious in seeking answers to the very questions Beloved raises: How can the story of slavery be told? How can history be rewritten? How can you institutionalize a desire for recognition? How can the loss be mourned without one’s turning to melancholy? How can the debt be calculated and paid?

While what is to be read—the content of Beloved—is a love story of mother and child, of man and woman, its form is the haunted realism of an impossible history. As Morrison puts it, “It was not a story to pass on” (1987, 274). Instead, it is a story in bits and pieces, not a unifying memory but the starts and stops of rememory, a reconstruction of a story that cannot be completely narrated, a story that instead makes visible the erasures, the forgetting, the disremembering. As such, is a history-with-holes, to use Fredric Jameson’s terms, “a kind of bas-relief history in which only bodily manifestations are retained...