As complaining in all its guises seems ubiquitous in contemporary life, scholars across fields have increasingly interrogated the promises and pitfalls of the form. Lauren Berlant (2008), for example, has examined how the “female complaint” in American culture enables women to oppose patriarchy without jeopardizing their position within it. Aaron Schuster (2016), meanwhile, suggests that complaining might in fact express an all-consuming joy, and Avital Ronnell (2018) frames the complaint as a mode of speech that is always on its way to protest—but never gets there. While these analyses tend to conceive of the complaint as a personal problem, Sarah Ahmed (2019) reminds us that the personal is also institutional. Formal complaints, Ahmed shows, help build important social and political collectives regardless of their institutional outcomes.
How might we account for the many divergent uses and abuses of complaining? How does it work and what can it do? Taking its cue from these ongoing conversations, this session considers the complaint as a literary, political, institutional, and social form across time and medium. More specifically, it aims to answer some of these questions by attending to the form and function of complaint in two broad discursive contexts—namely, those of race and gender. This is not, however, to posit any strict division between these two categories, as some of the individual presentations illustrate how “race” and “gender” can be co-constructed through particular modes of complaint.
This structure rather helps accomplish two goals: first, it groups presentations that are in direct conversation with one another in terms of topic and historical context; and second, it highlights the centrality of the complaint form to racialized and gendered histories of protest and dissent. One need look no further than the form’s recurrence in writing by and about enslaved people—William Cowper’s “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788), Robert Burns’s “The Slave’s Lament” (1792), and George Moses Horton’s “The Slave’s Complaint” (1829) come immediately to mind—or its ubiquity in studies of women’s writing. A recent Shakespeare Association of America conference, for example, featured over a dozen papers in a seminar on “Women and Complaint in the English Renaissance.”
The first two papers together consider racial slavery in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone Caribbean, and the second two papers turn to gender in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction. We have allotted fifteen minutes for each paper, leaving fifteen minutes for audience questions thereafter.
Catherene Ngoh’s (UCSB) paper, “The Slave’s Lament,” attends to the emotional life of race by considering the work of lamentation in slave and abolitionist literatures of the eighteenth century. She considers the performance of sorrow as an embodied experience of race and, conversely, how race is construed as a performance of lamentation. Examining Bryan Edwards’s poem “The Negro’s Dying Speech on his Being Executed for Rebellion in the Island of Jamaica” (1777), the paper frames lament as a form of “dying speech.” If studies of slavery and slave literature frequently foreground revolutionary politics, this paper mobilizes insights from feminist and critical race studies to examine how lamentation interrupts the possibility of revolution by proclaiming “the power to die.”
Nicholas Rinehart’s (Dartmouth) paper, “Enslaved Complaint as Social Form,” focuses on a singular, localized set of records from the Anglo-Dutch Caribbean: The Reports of the Fiscals and Protectors of Berbice and Demerara-Essequebo (1819-1834). The Fiscal was the chief colonial officer in British crown colonies charged with hearing and recording slaves’ complaints for redress. The paper foregrounds the preponderance of collective complaints in the Fiscal’s Reports—testimonies produced not by single complainants, but by groups of slaves as large as eleven, fourteen, and twenty-six. These archives thus illuminate moments of mutual witness and shared vulnerability, whereby the testimonial form of the complaint enables collective social action on the scale of everyday life.
Kasia Juno van Schaik’s (McGill) paper, “Small Discomforts: Lydia Davis and the Micro-Complaint,” examines Lydia Davis’s miniature “complaint stories” from her recent collection Can’t and Won’t (2016). She investigates the relationship between canonically minor aesthetic forms, such as the short story and the grievance letter, and the minor affects they produce—snarkiness, grumpiness, annoyance, or what Sianne Ngai calls the “possums and the rats” of the affective realm. By refusing cathartic release or narrative closure, Davis’s stories produce narrative frustration on both formal and affective levels. In Davis’s hands, the complaint becomes a mode of agile critique, cracking open fissures in patriarchy’s architecture and making things difficult.
Chris Walsh’s (BU) paper, “Bellow’s Ethics of Complaint,” suggests that Saul Bellow became one of the most celebrated American novelists of the twentieth century by mastering the art of complaint. As early as the first paragraph of his debut novel Dangling Man (1944), Bellow refuses the hard-boiled commandment to cope with personal difficulties by “grappl[ing] with them silently,” instead embracing and encouraging uninhibited complaining. But Bellow remained wary of complaint as a mode of effete kvetching. This paper thus explores the differences in Bellow’s fiction between justified complaint on the one hand, and the self-satisfied resentment on the other. It also considers how ideas of masculinity and Bellow’s Jewish heritage further contour his particular ethics of complaint.