TW: rape

BLACK HORROR: The Phantom

This week’s thread is about understanding the invisible and illegibility of Black women in Black literature,cinema and this worlding.

Objects of Analysis:

‘Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

‘Tales Of The Grim Sleeper’ (2014)

Reading:

‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison (1952)

‘Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora’ (2017) by Hershini Bhana Young

“Female Iconography in Invisible Man” (2005) by Shelly J. Eversley

Although, it is important to contextualize and acknowledge the experiences of Black men, active erasures of Black women and girls are dangerous. Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man,’ as a brilliant work that centers the life of a Black man...

...that through haptics captures the sonics of jazz and experimentalism, brings Black women and girls into narrative by barely addressing them.

I focus on chapters 1 and 2, to understand the ways that Ellison horrifically renders Black women and girls visible while also...

... erasing, invisibilizing and muting their experiences through the narrative of Jim Trueblood.

I imagine what giving care to the characters Trueblood’s daughter and wife could look like.

What does it mean to mute the violences of Black women and girls in order to tell a particular story about Black men?

I read Shelly J. Eversley’s “Female Iconography in Invisible Man” which interrogates and critiques the visibility and invisibility of both Black women and white women.

Her arguments suggest there are representations of both that move away from stereotypes or reify them.

Although, white women are present in both readings, it is important to this discussion that Black women are centered.

Black women and girls being depicted as invisible in literature, television and film are issues that speak to the lived experiences of Black women and girls off page and off screen.

The Silence of the Lambs is a film that centers white women as victims, whereas the character who murders these victims were based on several serial killers; some of the victims were Black women and women of color.

(I would also like to acknowledge that the serial killer Buffalo Bill is a white trans woman, who is purposely rendered more monstrous because of her transness. As a character, who she is really based on were cisgender white men- serial killers)

Images: Gary Heidnik, torturer and serial killer of Black women and women of color in North Philadelphia.

Most of his victims were mentally disabled and a woman who survived was a sex worker.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.phillymag.com/news/2007/07/23/inside-the-house-of-heidnik/%3famp=1

As narratives of victimhood are stolen and erased from Black women, so are evidences of their will and strength, if it is rendered mundane.

Within the context of diaspora, Hershini B. Young’s Illegible Will seeks to go through horrific and violent archives to acknowledge the strength and will of South African women whose performances of will were rendered illegible by these archives.

Ralph Ellison’s work of fiction, ‘Invisible Man’ (1952) with jazz-like prosaic description discusses issues that an unnamed Black man faces during the early twentieth century.

Image:

The Invisible Man, Harlem, New York, Gordon Parks, 1952

This unnamed Black man wrestles with issues of Black identity and the politics that are informed by Blackness. ‘Invisible Man’s’ Prologue engages ideas of ontological importance.

Reading this left me of questions of who is truly the phantom in this story and who is truly invisible? When Black women are used as plot devices and props to propel a story into various dimensions, in what ways does this reaffirm their/our invisibility?

Invisibility is not a question of not being, because it does not suggest that someone is not there. That is the issue- they are there. They are not being seen, yet their presence is felt in the room, as well as having a presence that also takes up space.

In the Prologue, the unnamed man described himself as a phantom that almost killed a man. He clarifies that he is not a spook or even a ghost.

However, he is made of flesh and bone and yet sociologically he is comprised of a theme; one that continues to haunt the story over and over again- Blackness.

This kind of phantom Blackness lends itself to gender, class and sexuality, as these social categories are part of the recipe for what is and who is Black.

Within Chapter 2 of Invisible Man, both a pregnant Black mother and daughter haunt the entire novel for me as someone who is hyper-aware of her race, gender and sexuality.

The violence that Trueblood is able to inflict on his daughter and wife without accountability and consequence is horrifying. What is more horrifying is that the word rape is dared not to be entertained.

Trueblood impregnating his daughter is indeed presented as a social taboo, but all of this is described to make a larger point about the phantom of white supremacy.

Ellison describes Trueblood’s contention with white supremacy by not only using Black women and girls as symbolism and signifiers, but also white women.

Trueblood and the unnamed character are obviously tormented figures,...

... but the ways that Trueblood’s wife and daughter are cemented within a dream raises questions.

Trueblood’s haunting dream/nightmare describes the horrors of white supremacy, and yet we are left with the imagery of a white woman struggling with a Black man.

The struggle is just a cover up of the rape and harm done to a Black woman and girl. They are still there, but they are invisible to the narrator or even Ellison perhaps.

Shelly J. Eversley in “Female Iconography in Invisible Man” articulates how Ralph Ellison, as immersed as he was in visual cultures, literarily failed to visualize the humanities of named and unnamed characters of women across racial lines.

In the protagonist’s description of his engagements with women, across racial lines, even he is unable to decipher the believability of these women’s humanity; he refers to some of his engagements with them as “dream intervals.”

As nameless subjects, like the protagonist, they struggle to find or reveal their identities. Shelly argues that women cannot reveal the social and psychological implications that inform the gendered dynamics of their invisibility.

However, her article is not about the subjugation of women, but rather the rendering of the rationalities of their visibility.

Their high visibility through excessive stereotypical performance, renders them “un-visible,” an argument Ellison makes about the characters within ‘Invisible Man.’

The protagonist’s and Ellison’s vision is driven by their desires to be seen and recognized in a particular way. Eversley articulates this creates the distortion of women’s bodies, lives and visualizations.

“In an interview, Ellison explains that Invisible Man is ‘‘about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality,” states Eversley.

“Consequently, if the novel’s struggle to recognize humanity requires a movement from ‘‘illusion to reality,’’ visual depictions of women correspond to a world of illusion that reflect false realities.”

It is necessary for Eversley to note that Ellison, who often spent time with photographer, Gordon Parks, was a freelance photographer, who prioritized aesthetics over reality. He states,‘‘[a]n event is often seen better in pictures than in actuality.’’

The binary gendered dynamics between men and women and men and girls ranges from possession and virgin/Madonna-whore dichotomies.

Though there are a few named women, they serve as plot devices to define and declare the protagonist’s position as an invisible man.

Hershini Young using a historiographic African and diasporic approach that ties the various oceans connecting South Africans, African Americans, Black British, East Africans, Madagascans, Goans, and South Asians together,...

‘Illegible Will’ unearths the historical and current day limited notions of individualized agency, will, and illegible will.

By reviewing case studies of the enslaved, the indentured and the racially gendered commodified, she unveils the connections of their labor.

One of the theoretical and methodological interventions of the text, is how Illegible Will seeks to explore the practices of reading the archive across existing literatures and linked fields.

Speaking to the illegibility of the subjects that Young discusses, she uses performance studies as a methodology to help inform the performances that are not immediately recognized as “will.”

Although, the materiality of the body is critical to the text, Young’s identifies how essential it is to utilize Diana Taylor’s theorization of “performance’s manipulation and experimentation of historically located notions of embodiment.”

With no universal conception of the body, it is difficult to pinpoint the travel of Black performance. She urges the care for understanding the interactions between textuality and embodied memory.

“We must know when to remember and when to reinvent and when to search out fugitive traces and echoes of prior moments in the gloom,” states Young.

“Instead of the search for an object that leads to a subject, the scholar’s search should be for a subject effect: a ghostly afterlife or a space of absence that is not empty but filled.”

“In other words, rather than insisting on excavating factual evidence that may or may not be there, but that can never adequately fill the holes in the archive, my work performs politically urgent narrations or informed critical conjurings,...”

“... a method at which some historians might balk.”

As case studies she analyzes the life of Madagascan enslaved woman Tryntjie, Andre Brink’s historical fiction about her, The Rights of Desire, Indian indenture in Natal, the Miss Landmine Angola beauty pageant,...

... Saartjie Baartman’s time in London, Joice Heth,  and Yvette Christianse’s historical novel, Unconfessed, a theorization of the performances of a queered will.

Most useful, for this week’s theme on the unvisibility of Black women, is Young’s chapter on Baartman (Chapter 1). Demarcated by centuries, Baartman and performer, Josephine Baker, experience a similar event, as in 1810, Baartman (Hottentot Venus) was requested...

... by the fourth Duke of Queensberry to be brought to his Picadilly mansion.

At eighty-five, he was allotted the excesses of sex, horse racing and gambling. He invited guests and examined her bottom.

However in 1926, Baker was summoned by Count Harry Kessler, to perform for his guests in a similar manner, except this time the location was Paris.

Young is challenged with the practice of reading beyond the archive, as both Baartman and Baker’s agency is rendered illegible within the archive.

She notes that unlike Baker, Baartman was not a professional dancer; however, the myth of their “primitive Blackness” certifies that their bodies were sensationalized and objectified.

s performance to critically imagine a possible eruption of her and Baartman’s will from within the deep of archival absence,” states Young.

“She embodies her will in her frenetic movement, in her somatic sarcasm, in the “grotesque” throwing around of her limbs…This is why Baker’s frenzied movements that exposed the creation and consumption of the Other become so significant.”

Additionally, Young’s brilliant articulation of performances of vulnerability in the archive shape her primary argument about illegible will.

I encourage those of you who are able to watch ‘Tales of the Grim Sleeper,’ as a means to understand the ways that Black women and girls were rendered invisible, making them susceptible to the violence of a Los Angeles Black serial killer.

Black women and girls who were rendered of no importance because of drug use, sex work or what was thought to be other deviant behaviors were left in the hands of a Black serial killer. While the world mourned for the lives of Black men being brutalized by the police,...

... Black women and girls were rendered illegible.