Touqan begins “From Behind the Bars” with “A salute to our sons and daughters, the fighters that have been swallowed up by Israeli prisons,” immediately emphasizing the depths of Israel’s detainment of political prisoners and its predication on phantomizing them to the broader world.^[2] Under an administrative detention, the Israeli military can hold a detainee for up to six months without a charge, and, as a result, Israel has detained over 800,000 Palestinians since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.^[3] In Israel’s perspective, these are peoples that must disappear for the sake of their settler colonial project and, as such, an essential part of Palestinian resistance literature is refusing this act of disappearance and re-narrating the phantoms left in the shadows of these detention centers, regardless of whether their physical bodies are still there or not.

In “3. From the Diary of “_,”” Touqan begins with a note in parentheses, stating, “(There in Israel, our prisoners whom we know nothing about).”^[4] In this moment, I understand Touqan enacting what Saidiya Hartman coined “critical fabulation”: the creation of a counter narrative that is not technically factual but is informed by the author’s interpretation of historical records and archival materials.^[5] What is absent in those records? What has been discarded or not entered? How has a colonial and racialized archive impacted the material available, and the histories told within those documents? In the poem, Touqan embodies an unknown and unnamed phantomized political prisoner and critically fabulates an affective image of what their detention does to their mental and physical state. Touqan writes:

From the ravine pours silent angry darkness
and night spreads its large sails here
the light of the stars and the dawn
cannot sneak in
A night without light
where our voices are lost
and the echo dies
and time cannot move (lines 1-8)^[6]

Touqan’s imagery in this stanza places the audience into a negative affective space through her embodiment of the phantomized political prisoner in solitary confinement. A common torture tactic by the Israeli military, political prisoners are detained in a cell as narrow and dark and silent as a ravine, where any access to the light of the day and the night are denied, which in turn denies temporal regularity to them. As Touqan emphasizes at the end of this stanza, the detainee is completely isolated. There is no one to talk to or listen to, and so the physical loss of the detainee’s voice can be the literal loss of their voice gone hoarse attempting to fill the void through their speech which echoes back at them, mimicking a conversation that mitigates their feelings of isolation and reaffirms their sense of identity and time in space until their voice was lost. The lost voices of the detainees can also represent the metaphorical loss of their voices, in that, though they do not lose the physical ability to speak, the emotional toil of being detained and isolated leads them to losing their sense of purpose. They do not have the mental voice nor emotional strength to voice themselves in ways that affirm their existence in a space that wants them to become a permanent phantom and disappear. Touqan’s embodiment of this voice, be it a layered amalgamation of multiple phantomized political prisoners in different spaces or one meant to symbolize the many, offers a mode of re-narrating and revitalizing the detainee’s personal and political identity in the face of the temporal constraints of the detention center.

Touqan continues to illustrate this theme of temporality in the second stanza, writing:

Time has lost its shoes here
Its stood still
turning around the axis of the stillness and boredom
Confusing days and seasons
Is it the season for planting?
Is it the season for harvest?
Is it — who can say? No news
and the jailor stands, his face a stone
his eyes a stone
Robbing from us the sun, robbing the moon (lines 9-18)^[7]

Time is frozen in this cell, just as the detainees are; there is nowhere to go and nowhere to hide from the mental and physical violence that defines their detention. There is no way to know or keep track of the seasons, which also means there is no way to keep track of the outside world, and what stage the families, friends, partners, etc. of the detainee are at in their life. Are they getting ready to plant or to harvest? These questions, just like all questions would be, are left unanswered. No news is ever received, furthering their isolation from the real world and what life outside of the cell can look like; pushing them further into the darkness and further into becoming a disappeared phantomized political prisoner as the physical space and temporal limbo of the cell consumes them. This consumption is completed by the Israeli jailor who only extracts from the detainee and is responsible for his entrapment in the cell, and subsequently, his loss of the light of the sun and the moon.

While the poem does not include a miraculous escape or direct affirmations of the detainee’s strength, Touqan’s critical fabulation and embodiment of this narrative begins to re-narrate and revitalize the image and tangible actor of the phantomized political prisoner in Palestine whose life is similarly constricted by space, temporality, light, touch, smell, etc. in reality. The re-narration and revitalization embodied in Touqan’s revolutionary poetics hails us to bear witness to these colonial violences and search for the absences of these disappeared and obscured lives in the archive and the current moment, both for the sake of the originary life itself and also what can be learned when community sources of knowledge, strength, and steadfastness are recovered alongside the phantomized political prisoner.

^[1]Basil Farraj. “Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing from Captivity.” CLCWeb, vol. 25, no. 1, 2025, pp. 14. ProQuest, https://libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/palestinian-prisoners-smuggling-freedom-writing/docview/3270298356/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4877.

^[2] Fadwa Touqan. “From Behind the Bars” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[3] Yara Hawari, “The Systematic Torture of Palestinians in Israeli Detention,” Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, 2019. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-systematic-torture-of-palestinians-in-israeli-detention/

^[4] Fadwa Touqan. “From Behind the Bars” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[5] ​​Saidiya V. Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019.

^[6] Fadwa Touqan, “From Behind the Bars,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[7] Touqan, “From Behind the Bars,” in Enemy of the Sun, pp. 40.

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When he reunites with Marina, Pericles requests that his royal advisor, Helicanus, “strike” him:

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me in their sweetness.[2]

To maintain his composure and, concomitantly, his masculinity, Pericles rhetorically begs Helicanus to wound him, to penetrate his flesh and produce an orifice through which to vent the mighty excess of his emotions. Such affective too-much-ness recalls Gloucester’s death in King Lear, as Edgar tells audiences that his father’s weak heart, on reconciliation with his eldest son, was “too weak the conflict to support / ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / [and] Burst smilingly.”[3]

Under the duress of excessive albeit pleasant affective energies, a similar kind of bursting threatens Pericles. But unlike Gloucester, whose excessive, oppositional feelings erupt him, Pericles calls for a curative bodily modification which registers as a metaphoric invagination. Put differently, Pericles seeks to regain and reassert a “Neostoic,” masculine self through a temporary feminization, figured here as the “gash” that would enable him to evacuate the waste of his excessive affect and purge himself into a purified state of rationality. His goal, moreover, figures as anti-queer; he attempts to tidy what Martin F. Manalansan IV calls “queer mess,” which refers to “material and affective conditions of impossible subjects as well as an analytical stance that negates, deflects, if not resists the ‘cleaning up’ function of the normative.”[4] But prior to this “cleaning up,” Pericles is a liminal, queer subject, defined both by masculine rationality and feminine excess.

In seventeenth century Europe, Neostoicism, or the so-called “new humanism,” rose to prominence and filtered into literary texts by discursive osmosis. Not to understate its significance, Richard Tuck writes that Neostoicsm, which is a blend of “skepticism, Stoicism[,] and Tacitism,” became “as all-pervasive as the Ciceronian humanism and the Quattocentro had been.”[5] This ordering philosophy grew in large part out of the sixteenth century writings of Michel de Montaigne, author of Les Essais (1580), and Justus Lipsius. Lipsius published his most famous Neostic text, De Constantia, in two parts in 1583. In it, he blends Stoic ideals with Christine doctrine, yielding a text which, according to Tuck, touts the following tenet: “wisdom comes not through the repression of emotion by reason, but through the cultivation of helpful passions, like plants and a garden.”[6] Therefore, as a man guided by Neostoic principles, Pericles aims not to excise himself of all emotion but to practice a kind of emotional temperance to maintain his composure and, inextricably, his masculinity. For as Lipsius extolls, the “true Mother of Contancy, is Patience / and lowliness of the Mind”:

As for Virtue she ever
marches in the middle path, and is
cautiously heedfull lest there should
be any thing of Excess or Defect in
any of her Actions. For still she directs
her self by the Ballance of right
Reason, and hath that alone for the
rule and square of her Test.[7]

To Lipsius, the ideal Neostoic bears a measured and relatively stable disposition. “Excess” literally has no part in such a body-mind. Rather, it is a weed, like Pericles’s overabundance of joy on reunion with Marina, to be yanked out by the root. Within this philosophical framework, when Pericles is overcome by feeling—nearly drowned by it—he is a queer subject, liminally suspended between Neostoic masculinity and excessive femininity, between total order and senseless chaos.

During the reunion scene, Pericles firmly situates emotive excess within the realm of the feminine, a category that early modern culture constructed as oversexed, irrational, and vulnerable to penetration by external forces. Prior to discovering that she is his daughter, for instance, Pericles’s first look at Marina overcomes him. He figures his surplus joy as a gestational burden that must be delivered, bemoaning, “I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping.”[8] The physical similarities between Marina, a perceived stranger, and Thaisa seem to him an impossibility. Because he cannot reconcile it, and because it likely assaults him with complex feeling, the knowledge must be labored and he, a figurative mother, must lachrymosely deliver it. Likewise, when Pericles learns that Marina is his daughter and asks Helicanus for a “gash,” he figures his emotional surfeit as a superflux of blood that must be painfully let. This image of bloodletting also recalls the purgation of menstrual blood from the uterus, a process understood by early modern culture to maintain humoral balance within the female (i.e. uterus bearing) body. In each case, Pericles figures “too-much-ness” as a feminine something that must be released from the body to arrive at Neostic, masculine stasis.

[1] William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Third Series (New York and London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004): 1.1.131. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition.

[2] 5.1.181-4.

[3] William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Third Series (New York, London, and Ireland: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997): 5.3.197-8.

[4] Martin Manalansan IV, “The Messy Itineraries of Queerness,” Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, July 21, 2015, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-messy-itineraries-of-queerness: n.p.

[5] Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), https://hdl-handle-net.libezproxy2.syr.edu/2027/heb32217.0001.001: 62-3.

[6] Ibid., 54.

[7] Justus Lipsius, A Discourse of Constancy in Two Books Chiefly Containing Consolations Against Publick Evils, 1679; trans. Nathaniel Wanley, p. 21-2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A48621.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

[8] 5.1.97.

The post Excess Emotion and Queer Subjectivity in Pericles appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

The exact term has murky origins in early 2000s social media, but it can be traced back to a 19^th century literary trope which allowed queer storytellers to make queer stories visible in historical and social contexts hostile to queerness. Haley Hulan’s genealogy of the trope marks Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray as an early example of this form of Bury Your Gays as “refuge,” in which queer storytellers used the trope to protect “themselves, their publishers, and readers from laws and social mandates against the ‘endorsement’ of homosexuality,” making it a mode of queer survival and resistance (24). Hulan argues that our context, unlike Wilde’s, is no longer hostile to queerness, so we no longer have to bury our gays as Wilde did.

However, though queer storytellers today face less risk than in Wilde’s time, and we should celebrate gains in LGBTQ+ rights, grand narratives of progress are dangerous. As current book-banning and anti-transgender legislation makes clear, queer stories and bodies are still threatened (“HRC”; Monteil). To turn away from queer death in our storytelling now would be to ignore reality. In fact, many queer authors are still telling stories of queer death, including Tamsyn Muir in her 2019 novel Gideon the Ninth, which I read here alongside The Picture of Dorian Gray. I reject contemporary usage of Bury Your Gays for shock value by straight storytellers. However, I argue that in reclaiming our buried gays, queer storytellers can deconstruct and “queer” the Bury Your Gays trope with queer voices that speak and act beyond the grave in order to pave a path for queer futurity, whether in 1890 or 2019.

This venture is a big one, so this excerpt is one tiny part of a much larger whole. First, a disclaimer: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gideon the Ninth are very different texts: one is a Victorian fin de siècle novel about a beautiful man who exchanges his soul for eternal youth and the other is a sci-fi epic fantasy novel about lesbian necromancers in space. However, I read Dorian and Gideon as what Jacques Derrida calls “phantom texts,” in which “no text is an independent entity since all are intertextually haunted by others” (Palmer 14). This resonance can be especially relevant for Victorian/contemporary textual comparisons (Mays 446). Dorian and Gideon’s intertextual haunting begins with the unburied gays in both texts—queer figures who appear to die or “be destroyed” but actually transgress and resist the trope by creating rather than erasing queerness, leaving the text queerer than they found it. That is, if they truly leave at all…

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the central queer figure is The Picture, a portrait that Basil Hallward paints of Dorian Gray which seems to take on Dorian’s sins and age after Dorian declares he is jealous of the portrait’s eternal youth and beauty and makes the wish: “Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now!” (Wilde 26). The second, in Gideon the Ninth, is the Lyctor, a saint-like necromancer who is “not born immortal” but “ascends” and is “given eternal life” through a series of challenges which require the teamwork of a necromancer adept, Harrow, and her cavalier,[ii] Gideon (Muir 83).

A key aspect the Picture and Lyctor share is that their immortality is a matter of merging and continued haunting. Dorian is the Picture’s subject, but Basil is its creator. Though both are dead by the end after Dorian kills Basil, and then himself when he tries to destroy the Picture, the Picture remains, lovely and undying. The Picture is both a representation of Dorian’s soul and Basil’s body through the materiality of the painting’s brushstrokes, which Basil recognizes as his own even after the Picture changes (131). Similarly, though Gideon dies at the end of her respective book, she sacrifices herself to save Harrow by offering up her soul to give Harrow the powers of both a necromancer and a cavalier, as well as immortal life and immutable form. The ghost in the Picture and the Lyctor is a promise of what could have been, what could be, and ultimately, that death is not the end of queerness in these stories.     

It is the aesthetic ghost of “that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream” which draws Basil to Dorian in the first place, and Basil says that Dorian “became to me the visible incarnation” of this ideal, embodying this ghost (Wilde 95). Basil lays bare the ghost when he confesses why he never wanted to display the Picture, telling Dorian, “I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it” (96). In returning to the “ideal” Basil originally had for the Picture, Basil emphasizes the honest, vulnerable feeling and beauty originally intended in it. In his confession and desire not to display the Picture, the Picture is also a site of intimacy: its original secret was not that it was hideous and sinful, but that it was too full of Basil and Dorian, too “haunting” and “exquisite” to be seen by others. Yet Basil continues speaking of the ideal, reanimating it in the text and suggesting it may not yet be lost. Even after Dorian kills Basil, this presence lingers as Dorian turns to sketching in order to distract himself from Basil’s murder, unexpectedly channeling Basil’s ghost: “every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward” (136). This suggestion of a ghostly painter lingering after the mortal painter’s death, along with the Picture which remains after both of their deaths, is a refusal of The Picture of Dorian Gray to neatly, fully bury its gays.

Basil and Dorians’s ending is wrought with things left unsaid, but at the end of Gideon the Ninth, Gideon says exactly why she must sacrifice herself to save Harrow when they both find themselves in mortal peril, creating a clearer case of ghostly lingering. Before her sacrifice, Gideon reaffirms their enmeshed queerness with the promise, “There is no me without you. One flesh, one end” (432). “One flesh, one end” is the Lyctoral vow that cavaliers and necromancers make to each other, but in this moment it is also an affirmation that Gideon will not let Harrow die, and as their end will be “one,” Gideon won’t truly die either, but will live on in her in some form, immortally joined. Like Basil and Dorian, this is a messy process, and Harrow’s initial response is one of stunned grief: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” (437). But the Gideon who lingers with her afterwards in ghostly form guides Harrow to take up her sword in a “strange embrace” and drives Harrow to active resistance, retorting, “Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” and promising, “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then” (437). Gideon tempers Harrow’s grief with her signature bad sense of humor, but she also offers a further suggestion of queer death not being an end to, but an extension of, queer relationality. Lyctors are immortal and powerful but not invulnerable, and by framing mutual death as an inevitable state where they will be fully together again, Gideon queers it.

Ghost Gideon continues this promise of death as just part of their journey together with a Bible verse: “The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee” (438). This verse is Ruth 1:17, when Ruth swears loyalty to Naomi. Her loyalty extends beyond death, as she swears they will find each other in Naomi’s familial burial place, where Ruth wants to be buried, and will live in the underworld together. The verse is a resolution to be together in death, but it is first and foremost an oath to be together in life, as Ruth promises she will remain by Naomi’s side. This verse, coupled with Gideon’s following final words, “See you on the flip side, sugarlips” (438), leaves the reader with the promise that Gideon isn’t gone, and death has done the opposite of parting them.

Gideon the Ninth is just one of many contemporary examples of queer storytelling that seeks a “strange embrace” with queer death and, just as importantly, what comes after. Stories of queer happiness and life are, of course, also important. But let us not forget our ghosts, new and old, for these phantom texts have much to say in their shared echoes and powerful rejection of a trope that, at its inception in Dorian Gray, was about a queer refusal to accept that being buried meant being silenced.

[i] The word “queer” as I use it has a variety of meanings. In part it refers to identities under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, in which the state of “being queer” can represent both an orientation and a community. But to be queer is also to be beyond binaries (i.e. alive/dead), to embrace intersections and fluidity, and to provoke a critique of hegemonic ways of being.

[ii] A cavalier is a necromancer’s knight or bodyguard, essentially serving as the muscle to their magic.

Works Cited

Deshler, Kira. “Not Another Dead Lesbian: The Bury Your Gays Trope, Queer Grief, and The 100.” Honors Theses, Whitman College: Accessible Research Materials in Digital Archives. (April 28, 2017). 1-89.

“Human Rights Campaign Working to Defeat 340 Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills at State Level Already, 150 of Which Target Transgender People – Highest Number on Record.” Human Rights Campaign, https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-working-to-defeat-340-anti-lgbtq-bills-at-state-level-already-150-of-which-target-transgender-people-highest-number-on-record.

Hulan, Haley. “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context.” McNair Scholars Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 2017, pp. 17-24. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1579&context=mcnair

Mays, Kelly. “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Victorians in the Rearview Mirror of Future History.” Victorian Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, Spring 2011, pp. 445-456.

Monteil, Abby. “4 In 10 Books Banned in 2022 Are LGBTQ+-Related.” Them, Condé Nast, 20 Sept. 2022, https://www.them.us/story/banned-books-lgbtq-2022.

Muir, Tamsyn. Gideon the Ninth. Tom Doherty Associates, 2019.

Palmer, Paulina. The Queer Uncanny : New Perspectives on the Gothic, University of Wales Press, 2012, pp. 1-22. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/seattleu/detail.action?docID=1889097.

“Ruth 1:17 Commentaries.” Bible Hub, Bible Hub, biblehub.com/commentaries/ruth/1-17.htm.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism. Edited by Michael Gillespie, W.W. Norton and Company, 2020.

The post “Unbury Your Gays”: Queer Phantoms in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gideon the Ninth appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

The American flag, in its original form, presents a highly organized design. The horizontal and alternating red and white stripes provide the visual foundation for the flag and the symbolic foundation for the nation, supporting fifty white stars housed in a field of blue. Red symbolizes hardiness and valor; white, purity and innocence; and blue, vigilance, perseverance, and justice.[ii] In her haunting reinterpretation, Clarke complicates this ordered visual in terms of reconfiguring the composition along with the mental image, or idea, that the American flag evokes.

The American flag is a sacred symbol that signifies the country’s past, present, and future. It forces one to recall her battles for independence, the birth of a liberal democracy, the countless lives lost in her defense, our inalienable rights, ceaseless fights for equality, the formation of established values and traditions, and the culminating of a fully formed nation that promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all her inhabitants. The “desecration” of this sacred symbol—a contentious issue dating to the early 20^th century that still holds relevancy—displays an act of symbolic speech. Clarke’s symbolic act signifies a provocative, yet beautifully poetic gesture admissible by the very symbol she redesigns. 

Compositionally, the quilted flag is predominantly white. Modest geometric fragments of blue resemble shattered glass while feeble red stripes convey an equally disquieting note. “This quilt,” Clarke states “represents the (lack of) gender and racial diversity in the US Senate during the 116th Congress” (2019-2021). Every blue triangle in the star field represents a female senator; the red stripes represent the proportion of non-white senators.”[iii] Red and blue, once equally prominent and offering a sense of harmony within the original, lose their sense of vitality in Clarke’s interpretation. In their diminished state, these colors reflect the marginalized and the unheard, which serves to underscore the work’s uneasy tension.

Perpetuating further tensions is the frieze-like pillowed fabric resembling an oozing discharge from that of a wound, which contrasts sharply with the quilt’s uneven horizontal bands. Running from weakened, yet taut red strips of fabric, one can infer that the white discharge not only references a predominantly white male run Congress, but stems from a wounded, bleeding nation, a nation that has witnessed a rise in white nationalist groups, the emergence of a Black Lives Matter movement, an insurrection on our nation’s Capital, an overflow of disinformation, a floundering educational system, harrowing numbers of mass shootings, a widening wealth gap, increased polarization, and a misremembering of America’s past that has perpetuated a fictionized post-racial present. If one were to consider the works’ aliveness and predict the outcome of its continuous seepage, the white discharge would soon engulf the few red stripes that remain, erasing one of the very elements that lends the work its alluring magnetism. The work’s transformation into a dull homogenous whole would coax an infectious and uniform way of seeing with no alternative subjectivities to complicate or supplement the composition’s projected worldview.

But not all is lost, for the act of quilting is a delicate one, one that—like all art forms— requires tender patience and an understanding of the medium. Clarke’s stated “aim” is “to further blur the line between art and craft, old and young, science and emotion, and the individual and the community.”[iv] Through quilt making, Clarke offers a unifying and reparative gesture. Notwithstanding heart ache, the “tangible” and functional qualities of her work convey the comfort of reassurance and affectionate warmth, bringing a sense of calm to uncertain times. The critical message of These Colors Should Run, thus, not only illuminates Congress’s unacceptable lack of diversity, but suggests a process of healing, where the metaphor of stitching symbolically mends a divided nation.

Aside from Clarke’s role as artist/practitioner, her current profession aligns with that of a facilitator. At the heart of her work is a librarian’s spirit to organize and disseminate information. “Motivated by the juxtaposition of modern themes with traditional textile techniques,” Clarke wishes “to provoke viewers and users into seeing new and alternative perspectives,” in turn, creating new ways of understanding.[v] The creative transformation of “hard data” to “soft textiles,” enables Clarke “to visualize information in a tangible, visceral way with the ultimate goal of introducing­ quilting to digital natives and technological provocations to quilters of traditional demographics.”[vi]

Yet, her work extends beyond mere instruction. As an ominous forewarning of threats to democracy, These Colors Should Run offers an alternative narrative of patriotism in material form, asking us to partake in critical reflection. Albeit at times unwelcome, her quilt acts as a sympathetic and helpful guide to a more equitable and accepting future while acknowledging it a painful process. In a nation whose dissatisfaction with democracy grows, her work, however, brings a softness to the “visceral” tensions on display, tensions that recall the emotive rationale behind the recent acts of iconoclasm against Confederate monuments [vii]. As an allusion to hope and possibility, These Colors Should Run emanates an elusive sensibility that awakens an array of sensations from melancholy to revelation, thereby presenting a palpable visual rhetoric that embodies affective politics and rekindles one’s sense of civic duty. The quilt forces us to constantly question, rework, and re-define what our mental image of America is and what we want it to become. The “desecration”—or rather, a skillful reimagining—of the American flag paradoxically reflects a re-sanctification of a sacred symbol, one that we all wish to see uphold its founding principles. Reaffirming this lofty aim is the work’s loaded title; terminating in the word Run, which extends itself to the directional flow of a liquid, a form of physical exertion, management, and the political arena, the implied communal nature of These Colors Should Run demands that we—colors—run together in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness to create a better, less pernicious world.

[i] Rachel Ivy Clarke, “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship,” The Library Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2018): 41–59, https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.

[ii] “History of the American Flag,” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, June 27, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth/history/old-glory/.

[iii] “Art Quiltsgoing Forward – Paqa-South,” PAQA, accessed January 19, 2023, https://www.paqa-south.org/artquiltsgoing-forward.

[iv] Rachel Ivy Clarke, “Art and Design.” Accessed January 19, 2023. http://archivy.net/ivywp/art-and-design/.

[v] Clarke, “Art and Design.”

[vi] Clarke, “Art and Design.”

[vii] Richard Wike, et. al., “Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, but U.S. is a Major Outlier.” Pew Research Center. December, 6, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/PG_2022.12.06_Online-Civic-Engagement_REPORT.pdf

Works Cited

“Art Quiltsgoing Forward – Paqa-South.” PAQA. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://www.paqa-south.org/artquiltsgoing-forward.

 Clarke, Rachel Ivy. “Art and Design.” Accessed January 19, 2023. http://archivy.net/ivywp/art-and-design/.

Clarke, Rachel Ivy. “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship.” The Library Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2018): 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.

“History of the American Flag.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. June 27, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth/history/old-glory/.

The post A Patriotic Reflection of a Broken Image appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire,  which she  ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal caregiver who embodies the trope of the “bawd,” or one who prostitutes others. While Myrrha’s mother is away participating in a fertility festival (oh, irony of ironies), Myrrha’s nurse leads her to Cinryas’s bed, lying by omission by telling him that someone “about / The age of Myrrha” wishes to lie with him (10.504-5). There, under the obfuscating guise of night, taboo becomes actualized.

Ultimately, Cinyras discovers the truth, leading Myrrha – heavy with her father’s child – to flee. After wandering far from home, she is stricken with indecision, “Not knowing,” the poet tells us, “what she might desyre, distrest between the feare / Of death, and tediousnesse of lyfe” (10.552-3). In kind, I suggest, with her irreconcilable desire to be a daughter-lover, she prays that the gods place her in an equally liminal state of life-death:

O Goddes, […]
How bee it to th’ entent
That neyther with my lyfe the quick, nor with my death the dead
Anoyed bee, from both of them exempt mee this same sted,
And altring mee, deny to mee both lyfe and death.     

(10.552-9)

Just as her desire for Cinyras contains both eros and storge (i.e. familial love), Myrrha aims to atone for her transgressions by becoming something similarly in-between. Thus begins her “Ovidian petrification” into a Myrrh tree (Bate 187). I argue that, as an in-between subject/object, Myrrha is able, for the first time in her episode, to truly express herself. Paradoxically, she becomes freed from the constraint of either/or – of words or silence – gaining more expressive power than ever before.

To this point, in Arthur Golding’s (1567) and Frank Justus Miller’s (1916) translations of the Metamorphoses as well as in the original Latin (circa 8 AD), Myrrha’s metamorphosis is marked with two identical linguistic shifts. In the first case, despite the total restriction placed on Myrrha’s speech after becoming a tree, Golding’s translation concedes “[y]it weepeth she” (my emphasis 10.574). A few lines later, the poet begins,

But woordes wherwith to tell
And utter foorth her greef did want. She had no use of speech
With which Lucina in her throwes shee might of help beseech.

But then, he concludes,

Yit like a woman labring was the tree, and bowwing downe
Gave often sighes, and shed foorth teares as though shee there should drowne.

(my emphasis 10.580-4)

In both instances, the poet explicates Myrrha’s inability to express herself as she used to due to a loss of “senses” (10.573). What the poet means by this word, however, is appropriately unclear, as Myrrha is still in possession of her mind and sensory apparatuses – she feels “greef,” gives “sighes,” and sheds no end of “teares.” However, through such pained bows and grievous sighs – actions that are at once gendered (“like a woman labring”) and vegetal-kinesthetic – Myrrha successfully beckons Lucina, who then supplies “woordes of ease” and facilitates her labor (10.586). In this moment, the ineffable finds its venting place not through language but through a “repertoire of embodied practice,” including bodily gesture and fluids (i.e. myrrh-tears) (Taylor 18). I argue that Ovid’s Myrrha episode makes a case not for the power of speech or silence but of a third, liminal mode of communication: non-verbal, bodily self-expression. This is but one of several ways that the episode gestures toward ways of living and being otherwise when we attend to liminality.

In nearly all of the metamorphoses illustrated throughout Ovid’s poem, as Heather James summarizes, the “absolute powers” that instigate them “repeatedly visit one special punishment and torture on their victims: that of silence” (7-8). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, silence is frequently defined in relation to human speech – silence strips one’s ability to vocalize and, specifically, voice the ways in which they have been wronged. Given that Ovid was ultimately exiled from the Roman empire (ostensibly as a reaction to his publication of sexually explicit poems), his ruminations on speech and silence have immediate social and political significance. James argues that his major contribution to political thought during the English Renaissance was “his conception of poetry as a site in which parrhesia [i.e. bold, open, ‘free’ speech]could persist even within the limiting structures of empire and […] insist on the liberties of citizen-subjects” (7). However, I suggest that Ovid’s poetry, particularly his Myrrha episode, develops a rather more capacious sense of self-expression wherein speech and silence occupy either ends of a spectrum whose middle zone teems with potential.

Following Myrrha’s incestuous scelus nefas, or “crime of indescribable dimensions,” she is metamorphosed into a myrrh tree and thusly “silenced,” but she is not simply disempowered (Lehmann 104). Rather, her transformation makes it necessary for her to rely on different methods of self-expression – something in between the utterance of “woordes” and stark silence – akin to what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire.” Where the Metamorphoses most explicitly binarizes speech and silence, Taylor’s study charts Western hierarchizations of the archive (i.e. supposedly permanent materials, such as writing) over the repertoire (i.e. ephemeral forms of knowledge such as dance or ritual). Where her work overlaps with the present argument is in its assertion that the archive and repertoire, though often thought of as such, do not actually constitute a binary:

The relationship between archive and repertoire […] is certainly not sequential (the former ascending to prominence after the latter, […]. Nor is it true versus false, mediated versus unmediated, primordial versus modern. Nor is it a binary. […] We need not polarize the relationship between these different kinds of knowledges to acknowledge that they have often proved antagonistic in the struggle for cultural survival or supremacy. (22)

As is true of any dichotomy, uncritical endorsement of a speech/silence binary eclipses the force of tree-Myrrha’s repertoire, namely her vegetal-bodily movements and material secretions. Beyond simply calling Lucina’s attention, tree-Myrrha’s liminal expression even elicits the goddess’s pity, inspiring her to alleviate her pain. These expressive forces are not only powerful, proving just as efficacious for Myrrha as words (if not more), but they can be recuperated by sensitive reading practices which, in turn, can yield new insights about the world. To contend with these forces, the Metamorphoses asks us to linger with liminality – that which crops up in between the clearly defined zones of binaries – and attend to the ontological possibilities to which I believe it gestures.

 Ovid, Publius Naso. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567. Edited by John Frederick Nims, Translated by Arthur Golding, Paul Dry Books, 2000.
*All forthcoming references to the poem will be to this edition.

 Bate, Jonathon. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183242.001.0001.

Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 1–52, https://doi-org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/10.1215/9780822385318.

James, Heather. Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theater. Translated by Erik Butler, Routledge, 2016.

Image:

Marcantonio Franceschini – The Birth of Adonis, 1690 public domain image

MLA Citation (I think?): ‘Birth of Adonis’, oil on copper painting by Marcantonio Franceschini, c. 1685-90, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.jpg

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Not only do I think Citizen is simply a beautiful collection of work, but it is also a fantastic pedagogical tool for teaching students the imperatives of race and racial projects. This semester, I’ve been teaching the English department’s 100 level course on Race and Literary Texts. For many of my students, my class is the first time they’ve explicitly discussed race in an academic space. We’ve spent much of the semester discussing the ways that anti-blackness is an ongoing project in the United States. We’ve looked at films such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and even The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. I think Citizen has been impactful for connecting the institutional and structural dimensions of racial discrimination to the isolated moments, conversations, and interactions that students see in their own lives.

One of the reasons why I think Citizen is so effective as a teaching tool is because it is a multimedia experience. Claudia Rankine collaborated with her husband John Lucas on a number of  “Situation Videos,” to accompany the text. In the classroom, the situation videos are equally instructive, if not more so. For example, Situation 6 “Stop-and-Frisk” visually and sonically demonstrates how anti-black racism shapes the everyday lives of Black people. In the video, we view two Black young men shopping for clothing. The footage of them trying on clothing is overlaid with red and blue police lights. As viewers watch the Black men move through the store viewing and purchasing items, they also hear police sirens, as well as Rankine reading her poem “Stop-and-Frisk.” Upon showing the video to my students, they told me that they expected to see something much worse in the video, such as a display of police violence, and were surprised that the video simply depicted the young Black men shopping. My students were surprised by the melancholy, monotone tone Rankine employs to recite the words. This wasn’t the affect they expected from a poem detailing a violent encounter with the police. In the short film, they took note of Rankine’s repetition of the lines “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description / because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description” (Rankine 106). All these elements together solidified for my students the ways in which criminalization, policing, and surveillance are integrated into the everyday lives of Black people. As they articulated to me, Situation Video 6 demonstrates that Black people can become subjects of violence at any moment. Our conversation about these elements was incredibly generative.

However, as a Black woman, reading and teaching Citizen is difficult. It’s hard, and it’s wearing. When I read, I feel the narrator’s exhaustion, or, perhaps, become increasingly aware of my own. I find myself attempting to breathe along with the narrator’s every “sigh.” (Rankine 59). I’ve read the book four or five times, and the more I read it, the more I struggle to get through it. The microaggressions described in the book are numerous, yet nearly every situation mirrors moments in my own life. The poems are reminders of the racist actions and comments I’ve received for simply existing in primarily white spaces. Every time I read the book, I’m confronted with just how invisible I can be in many spaces I inhabit. How much anti-blackness I’ve been made to brush off and how much I’ve internalized despite my best efforts.

In reading Citizen, confronting my own deep sadness for the innumerable lives lost due to anti-black violence is unavoidable. Each time I’ve sat down to read the book in full, Rankine’s poem, “July 29-August 18, 2014 / Making Room,” increases in length. This is a poem which ends by repeating “In Memory of,” listing numerous, recognizable names of Black men and women who have been murdered by police. And while this list only consisted of Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown’s names when I read it in fall 2014, the book has continually been reprinted to include more and more names. When we discussed the poem in class, my students were in awe of the fact that this list now includes over 30 household names. The list of those we must mourn only keeps getting longer.

This time around, the difficulty with reading Citizen is compounded by another anxiety: While the book has been generative and eye opening for some students, I worry that reading the book may be an added burden for my most vulnerable students. I worry that that they too struggle to get through the book. I worry that rather than affirming my Black students and other students of color, reading Citizen instead requires them to confront the racism they experience every day. I worry that while discussing Citizen offers white students an opportunity to exercise and explore their capacity for empathy, it only demonstrates to my Black students insights they already knew.

In my last Broadly Textual post, I began to question how we handle Black trauma inside cinema’s depictions of enslavement. This week, I question the best way to manage and negotiate the circulation of Black trauma in our classrooms. I think that our conversations around Citizen must always keep in mind the intersecting racial and gender dynamics of the classroom. Engaging Citizen requires holding space for our most vulnerable students, without putting them on the spot, or positioning them as objects of study. Teaching Citizen might require us to reach out to students and offer words of encouragement. It might even require sharing our own reservations and struggles with the subject of the text. While I’ve outlined here how Citizen can be an effective means to engage students on the topic of anti-black racism, teaching it involves a certain amount of precarity. While I’m still working out answers to my question, what I do know is that educators should always listen carefully to responses from their students of color, never taking for granted how closely Citizen might mirror their everyday lives.

^[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpREs2WTbWA

^[2] Still from Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situation Video 6, “Stop-and-Frisk” https://vimeo.com/157537847

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 However, in June 2021, at the request of Wright’s estate, the nonprofit Library of America published the novel in full which gives readers a look into circumstances that preceded the protagonist’s escape. He is not simply a mysterious and unnamed man on the run; rather, he is Fred Daniels: a devoted husband and soon-to-be father, a devout Christian, and above all, an innocent man. This full release, titled The Man Who Lived Underground: The Novel,follows Fred’s journey as he flees into the sewers after the police violently coerce a false homicide confession from him. Deprived of light and social contact, Fred’s sensory disorientation opens the possibility for a reevaluation of conventional meaning making systems. The absence of the white gaze allows Fred to occupy and move through otherwise inaccessible spaces such as the vault of an insurance office and behind the counters of a jewelry store. This new mobility reveals the arbitrary nature of socially constructed symbols of value such as money, jewelry, time, and, most centrally, the notion of freedom as an American ideal.

The novel troubles the meaning of freedom, in and of itself a vexed term. Many American studies scholars have worked to complicate abstract understandings of American freedom by tracing its genealogy from the nation’s founding. The possessive individualist conception of freedom is predicated upon racialized, gendered, and classed systems of exclusion and domination that are structurally embedded into our legal system. This leaves some subjects hyper-vulnerable to injustices on both the individual and structural levels. Legally vulnerable subjects are not simply excluded from the protections of the legal system, but rather, as Lisa Marie Cacho argues “form the foundation of the U.S. legal system” and are “imagined to be the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists” (Cacho 5). That is to say that freedom, as it is understood in the context of the United States, was never meant to be extended to or exercised equally by all citizens. Wright explores the material reality of how freedom comes to be understood by legally vulnerable subjects, such as Fred, whom the law was not created to protect.

 Once he reemerges, Fred implores the officers to see his underground cave papered with money and jewels as proof of his activity underground. Officer Murphy comments that “colored boys sure go off their nut easily,” and Officer Johnson replies knowingly that it is because “they live in a white man’s world” (Wright 154). As Fred frantically tries to get the officers to come underground with him, Officer Lawson shoots him and lets his body fall into the sewer and get swept away by the water, claiming that “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They would wreck things.” (Wright 159). The “things” the officers are bent on protecting are clearly not any kind of justice, but rather the established order of society that is threatened by Fred’s vision of freedom. Executing Fred and relegating him underground puts a stop to the potential for ideas like his to spread.

This is where the narrative ends, and it is usually read as Wright’s eviscerating critique of the structural injustices of society. While it is surely critical of the inequalities embedded into our supposed “justice” system, the ending does not foreclose upon the possibility for change. As Rebecca Fisher writes, Wright attempts to move “the reader toward a sense of moral outrage that would ideally extend beyond the act of reading and compel the reader toward constructive social action” (162). I agree with this reading and want to add that not only does Wright hope for readers to feel pushed towards taking constructive social action, but that they should move forward collectively when confronting systems of power. Fred attempts to confront the legal system alone, as one man with an enlightened vision, which ultimately fails. However, as he established at the beginning of the novel, he is not without kinship networks or community connections. His family, church, and employers, those who would have attested to the police of his character and innocence, may also have been allies in his struggle against such an unjust system. This is not to condemn Fred’s choices, as his trauma and positionality stack the odds so significantly against him in this larger societal conflict. Nor is it to suggest that working collectively is a utopian solution to issues of oppression, violence, and marginalization. The addition of the previously unpublished passages prompts a reconsideration of the entire text as an assertion of Black futurism rather than futility in the face of structural inequality. While these systems of power and domination work to create feelings of isolation and powerlessness, there are ways to work against these aims towards positive social change.

Works Cited

Cacho, Lisa M. Introduction: The Violence of Value. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, by Cacho, New York University Press, New York, 2012, pp. 1-34.

Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge. “Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire and Doing” in Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century, ed. by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi. Liverpool University Press, 2013, pp.158-176.

Literary Classics of the United States. Note on the Texts. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel, by Richard Wright, Library of America, 2021, pp. 220-228.

Wright, Richard, and Malcolm Wright. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel. Library of America, New York, 2021.

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Act One of the play introduces audiences and readers to the Nurse, Juliet’s caregiver, confidant, and former wet-nurse. In the play’s third scene, the Nurse recalls a moment in time that is etched in her memory. She recalls when she weaned an infant Juliet from her breast:

“But, as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,
That shall she, marry, I remember it well.
‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,
And she was weaned – I never shall forget it –
Of all the days of the year, upon that day;
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.
My lord and you were then in Mantua –
Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see if techy and fall out with the dug! (1.3.21-34)[2]

In her own words, she retrieves this information from her “brain,” the Cartesian site of rationality. However, as her diction reveals, her body is doing just as much of this retrieval work. Here, Diana Taylor’s concept of the “repertoire” is useful, a term which refers to “embodied practice[s]/knowledge[s]” such as spoken communication, ritual ceremony, and choreographed movements. Unlike archival records, which Taylor describes as “supposedly enduring materials” like “texts, documents, buildings, [and] bones,” the Nurse engages her bodily senses – those fleeting, unprocessed impressions that Cartesian dualism diametrically opposes to impartial rationality – to recall Juliet’s age.[3] Without necessarily intending to do so, she catalogues the sensory inputs that permeate her body during this blip in time, inviting us to inhabit her flesh, if only for a moment. She conjures the warmth of the “sun,” the cooing of the “dovehouse[’s]” inhabitants, and the steady pressure induced by Juliet’s suckling – made discontinuous by the bitterness of wormwood – to access her memory of Juliet’s age.

In contrast to the Cartesian and, thus, heteropatriarchal claim that bodies are sites of illogical disorder, the Nurse’s body produces and stores knowledge in this passage, operating on the same level as comparatively privileged archival information, such as birth records and geological reports.[4] In this moment, both archive and repertoire corroborate one another. Not only does Juliet’s factual age align with the Nurse’s corporeal memory, but the “earthquake” also offers a material trace of that day, whose memorial marks otherwise reside on/in the flesh.

Beyond functioning as an archival counterpart to the Nurse’s repertoire, however, the earthquake also signals the cosmic import of this ephemeral moment. As a play centered on the operations of destiny, perhaps the earthquake presages the doom that will result the next time Juliet’s body unites another’s, namely her “star-crossed lover[’s]” (Prologue.6). In another sense, this pairing opposes the heteropatriarchal binaries that stem from Cartesian dualism – such as mind/body, man/woman, political/domestic, and cosmological/earthly – elevating a moment defined by the female body and domestic care to a level of cosmic significance.

Moreover, the destructive earthquake literalizes the turmoil that an infant Juliet likely feels as her wonted source of comfort transforms into a loathed object. Here, Juliet’s passions, conceived of by Cartesian dualism as unrefined and unproductive, are expressed, whether intentionally or not, in the natural world. They are expressed sans language, the dominant mode of Western knowledge production that Taylor claims “has come to stand for meaning itself” (25). Perhaps the earthquake tells us something more about the Nurse’s feelings, too, who otherwise expresses fondness over her “pretty fool’s” maturation.

The Nurse’s performance harbors all of this and more, if only one takes the time to sense it. However, at the end of her speech, Lady Capulet tiredly commands, “Enough of this. I pray thee, hold thy peace” (1.3.50). Lady Capulet, Juliet’s biological mother, does not perceive the sensuous knowledges contained in the Nurse’s speech, or if she does, she values it as much as heteropatriarchy, the play’s dominant power-knowledge system, does. Of course, the Nurse propagates heteropatriarchal values herself, engaged, as we all are, in the “oppressing resisting”[5] dialectic theorized by Latinx feminist philosopher María Lugones (7).[6] However, the passage quoted above contains multitudes that heteropatriarchal epistemes are blind to, compelling us to attend more sensitively to the Nurse and sensuous knowledges in the play.

Image citation: Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, performances by Pat Heywood and Olivia Hussey, Paramount Pictures, 1968.

[1] Lloyd, Genevieve. “The Man of Reason.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 1979, p. 23.

[2] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Dympna Callaghan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

[3] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[4] Contemporaneous British writers such as Gabriel Harvey wrote about an earthquake around the same time that the Nurse would have weaned Juliet, meaning that historical British documentation also supports the Nurse’s sensuous, fictional knowledge.

[5] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[6] In other words, we are always engaged in a tense relationship between resisting oppressions and propagating them.

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Avery Gordon’s work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008) calls for other sociologists to take up haunting as a serious critical analytic. Engaging with this haunting necessitates us to not think of history as a series of completed discrete events, but to rather look for how past social traumas find themselves reappearing long after the initial traumatic event has passed. Sometimes subtle, often explicit, these violent histories create ghosts that demand attention and redress. This phenomenon differs from trauma because it “produc[es] something-to-be-done” (Gordon xvi). This “something-to-be-done” operates on individual, social, political, and historical levels. To employ haunting as an analytic means questioning our traditional modes of knowledge production that value distinct binaries (past/present, subject/object) and look towards what Foucault calls subjugated knowledges –d knowledges that are repressed within these traditional modes of production (Gordon xviii).

While Gordon explores how both psychoanalytic and Marxist analysis engage with haunting to varying degrees and may be applied towards haunted archives, she posits that looking at haunting through literature allows for a greater flexibility in methodology; the literary does not have to abide by the restrictions of history, sociology, or other social sciences. These restrictions are often arbitrary and misleadingly so. Gordon writes:

the division of the disciplines separates literature (story/fiction) and social science (fact) … [the division] is an uneasy one, however; the border is not quite as secure as institutional mandates presume. Not only is the origin of sociology as a unique discipline bound up with its relationship to literature (see Lepenies 1988), but sociology’s dominant disciplinary methods and theoretical assumptions constantly struggle against the fictive (25).

The dismissal of the fictive denies the role that narrative plays in constructing history and our understandings of social and cultural analysis. Dealing with ghosts, the repressed, and the traumatic histories they carry requires going beyond what is readily accessible to scholars working in conventional archives. As haunting calls us to consider the imbrication of the personal, the social, and the political, we must reconsider the types of questions we ask when confronting capital letter topics such as Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Poverty. How do these change when we consider ghosts, those invisible forces, as empirical evidence? As a pioneering text of its time, Gordon’s work leaves us with as many questions as answers. However, other scholars have answered her initial call to rethink disciplinary bounds.

Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (2008) can be read as Grace Cho’s contribution to that call. She looks particularly towards the transgenerational haunting of the Korean diaspora, examining what conditions made such ghosts like the figure of the yanggongju[1] possible and proposes ways we may work to name and release the han[2] she embodies. Cho extends Gordon’s work by turning to the “hallucinatory” and “schizophrenic” as modes of interacting with and trying to understand these archives. Gordon’s work serves as a touchpoint for Cho to apply a haunting framework across various media forms and disciplines to understand a history that operates beyond conventional archival bounds. Cho’s engagement with trauma through diasporic Korean media and sociological data foregrounds the need to be attentive to the gaps within both American and Korean official histories of the Korean War since these gaps require a new mode of seeing. This new mode of seeing deals with the excesses of trauma, of repeated violence, and of systematic erasures that render subjects voiceless and their stories unnarrativizable. Cho also engages with the body as it manifests in the ghostly figure of the yanggongju whose specter continues to haunt the Korean diaspora in narratives about the American Dream and the resultant model minority myth surrounding Korean Americans. Her body has taken on many iterations and connotations from her “comfort woman” predecessor to the Yankee whore, UN lady, and GI bride. Her body acts as the geopolitical battleground for US and Korean relations, the traumas of military occupation, and militarized sex work. She is characterized by her present absence where she is simultaneously the “invisible backbone of the Korean American community” that made immigration possible for many of her relatives and the figure pushed to the shadowy margins by that same community for her deep social stigma (Cho 140).

Cho’s understanding of haunting acknowledges that seeing in the conventional sense, along with archival methodologies that rely on said type of sight, would be insufficient in approaching such ghosts. She challenges us to question our perceptions and engage critically with hallucinations, “performing a phantomatic return, through a multiplicity of voices and altered repetitions of past experiences” to better see trauma (Cho 167). The word repetition is crucial here as a characteristic of haunting and traumatic experiences more broadly. The repetition of the past in the present and of the past into the future dislocates these diasporic subjects, rendering them outside of time and constantly wandering but never arriving. Along with listening to the voices, Cho also asserts that a “schizophrenic” mode of memory is normal “for a diasporic memory that is in constant displacement and that reverberates with the voices of haunted histories” (186). She takes on this schizophrenic mode of memory and meaning making through her own writing style. By seamlessly combining multiple forms of evidence such as sociological data, autobiography, testimony, literature, and other media productions, she engages with the haunting of the Korean diaspora. She purposefully obscures the sources of the vignettes sprinkled throughout the chapters to demonstrate the porosity of diasporic memory and to protect the anonymity of those sharing their experiences of militarized sex work. While this point is only briefly touched on, it is important to highlight, as the question is often asked of how we can engage with the archive without reproducing its violence. Cho’s decision to secure the anonymity of her contributors prioritizes the wishes of those whose experience is being archived. As a writing experiment, her book recreates this porous and fluid diasporic consciousness through its imperfect and reconfigured repetitions, from the stories without identified authors to her own experiences being told through other voices. This occurs both through the content and through the book’s visual presentation, as the vignettes are sometimes framed in gray boxes and at other times, float freely on the page interspersed with historic photographs and art exhibitions from diasporic subjects. Cho creates an intelligible whole from the fragments that may otherwise be illegible on their own.

Archives are tools that can produce narratives that have material effects. The harm of traumatic social events may propagate into the present if the official archives and histories surrounding those events suppress the victims of both physical and psychological violence. These texts are two examples of a growing body of work that seeks to address difficult histories that elude traditional research methodologies and implore us to ask what it means to look at haunted archives, which may mean transgressing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these archives both ethically and empathetically.

Works Cited

“archive, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/10416.

Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.

[1] Literally “Western princess,” but Cho explains that it “broadly refers to a Korean woman who has sexual relations with Americans…most often used pejoratively to refer to a woman who is a prostitute for the U.S. military” (Cho 3).

[2] Unresolved grief and rage (Cho 16).

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Sharpe’s work is firmly grounded in the Black feminist theoretical tradition as she engages in conversation with Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Rankine, and Dionne Brand, among others, to lay bare the intricacies of living in the space of the unthought and unremembered. In Chapter 1, “The Wake”, she details the various definitions of the word “wake” and how those definitions permeate black life. The first instantiation of the wake that Sharpe describes is that of the slave ships bound across the Atlantic and what propelled those ships forward: “Racism, the engine that drives the ship of state’s national and imperial project…cuts through all of our lives and deaths inside and outside the nation, in the wake of its purposeful flow” (3). Sharpe at once gestures to the way anti-Black racism operates beyond the boundaries of nation-states and beyond time itself. Particularly within the context of the United States, anti-black racism is not incidental to the country’s founding, but is rather the basis upon which its entire democracy is predicated.

In Chapter 2, “The Ship”, Sharpe uses the documentary film The Forgotten Space (2010) as a touchstone by which to extend her ship metaphor. The ocean acts as the literal and metaphorical space for thinking about a modernity and globalization which, Sharpe argues, cannot be understood without centering the effects of transatlantic chattel slavery. The ship operates in the ocean backdrop as a space where individuals undergo a negative transformation from people to cargo, subject to object. She also introduces her concept of the “Trans*Atlantic” as “that s/place, condition, or process that appears alongside and in relation to the Black Atlantic but also in excess of its currents….to get at something about or toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies” (30). Her play with language is purposeful as she works to reimagine the limits, boundaries, and expectations inherent within language and explore how it can have radical, transformative potential for those occupying that unthought space. Wake work then functions to theorize “the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness” (33).  This necessitates reexamining the commonly used disciplinary approaches for working with the archives of slavery and beyond. How does one look at such an archive ethically? When faced with the ongoing disasters of police brutality, various refugee crises, and natural disasters, how do we look without commodifying that pain for our own consumption? Sharpe interrogates the efficacy of memorials for such tragedies and their potential to do wake work. While monuments may be dedicated to those affected by disasters both natural and manufactured, their essence often relegates their subjects squarely to the past. In doing so, the ongoing effects of such events become obscured. These monuments function as commemoration and reparation without needing to contend with the structural inequalities and injustice inherent in their construction.

Grappling with such systemic injustice first necessitates being able to recognize and acknowledge how they may manifest in contemporary contexts. In Chapter 3, “The Hold”, Sharpe traces the genealogies of stop-and-frisk police practice, family detention centers, and the school-to-prison pipeline back to the hold of the slave ship. Again, she emphasizes the role of language in shaping reality as “[the] first language the keepers of the hold use on the captives is the language of violence: the language of thirst and hunger and sore and heat, the language of the gun and the gun butt, the foot and the fist, the knife and the throwing overboard” (70). These violences haunt the lives of Black people living in the diaspora from birth. Partus sequitur ventrem, the slave code that mandated that the condition of slavery passes from mother to child, propagates into the present; Black birth becomes Black death, birthed in the shadow of the slave ship. We must conceive of blackness as “a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made” (76). While this deterioration of language and meaning can be weaponized against Black subjects to render them less than human, it may also open the space for imagining new potentials. 

Chapter 4, “The Weather”, explores some of those potentialities and offers alternative methods for pushing back against the anti-Black structures that shape Black lives today. Sharpe conceptualizes “the weather” as “the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (104). Despite such an overwhelmingly negative environment, Sharpe does not resort to pessimism. Rather she notes how surviving in such a hostile environment calls for improvisation and adaptability to resist the push towards premature death. Sharpe calls us to “aspirate” those figures occupying forgotten spaces, to breathe life into them by remembering their names and giving voice to their experiences. Through this practice, we may exercise a form of care for them. Care and remembrance become radical acts in the wake when these experiences of subjection and dehumanization often pass unacknowledged. She also offers Black annotation and redaction as techniques that can be used when approaching archives. She notes that “so much of Black intramural life and social and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures” (114). Sharpe implores us to look upon archives as actively working on the behalf of those forgotten voices. That is not to say we speculate wildly to fill in all the gaps of the archive, but rather that we try to listen for the silences and let them speak for themselves when supported by the proper context, unencumbered by the pre-scripted narratives of the story of slavery and its afterlives.

Sharpe poetically shifts between the personal and the political, the local and the transnational, to demonstrate how arbitrary those divisions truly are. She asks us to look at these texts and archives as extensions of the people that comprise them, imploring us to engage archives with an ethic of care and empathy. Through this, she asks us to never surrender to the wake’s powerful current.

Works Cited

Sharpe, Christina E. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016.

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