Over the course of the long twentieth century, Black authors have evaded white supremacist grammars through formal and aesthetic horizons of otherwise possibilities in their writings. They do so by opening apertures such as what Christian Sharpe calls “anagrammatical blackness...blackness anew, blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made."1 In other words, Black authors employ narrative techniques that apply epistemological pressure on the normative architecture of white supremacist grammars, in both its perceptible and sublimated forms. This panel is interested in Black writing that allows us to see an ongoing horizon where grammars of language living are blurred, altered, or reinvented. Specifically, we focus on Black texts that confront the insidious (in)visibility of white liberalism and how its humanizing inclusivity covertly reduces Black subjects’ access to the genre of the human.
The papers comprising our panel examine 20th- and 21st-century texts constellated before and after the Civil Rights Movement. Norrell Edward’s paper, titled, “The Signifying Monkey in We Love You, Charlie Freeman,” uses Black Studies and Animals Studies lenses to critically examine Kaitlyn Greenidge’s 2016 novel, which considers the illusory progressivism of early twentieth century New England. Edwards argues that northern racism’s feigned interest in racial advancement and progress conceals its eugenic impulses, demonstrating the multiple ways liberal white supremacy co-opts language, even the non-verbal. In “White Critical Grammar: Disabling Richard Wright’s Native Son for the Reading Public,” Sophie Ziner argues that the 1940 publication of Native Son throws white liberalism into a crisis that forces the expansion of the reach and necessity of public grammatical prescriptivism, necessitating a formalization of standard language ideology in the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, Keerti Arora’s paper, “Representing Racial Sutures: Black Masculinity in James Baldwin's Another Country” uses a phenomenological approach to consider how the 1967 novel challenges dominant readings of the protagonist Rufus’s violent masculinity. Arora argues that Rufus represents an alternative grammar of experience when confronted with the white gaze in intimate relational settings. Arora reads Rufus’s violence in the context of the disorientation generated white supremacy’s delimitations of access and possibility for Black male bodies. Diana Farin Molina’s paper, “‘I Got Sandbagged and Sanpakued’: “White Sight” and Wholeness in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters,” brings the panel to the post-civil rights era, considering how the Bambara counters the ascendency of liberal humanism’s “scopic regime” through the figure of salt. Molina argues that the 1981 novels’s experimental nonlinear form dismantles anti-Black grammars of thought by eliciting interpretive strategies that approach the sensorium more holistically and are attuned to the experiential and multisensory aspects of language.
The four panelists will collaboratively counter the profound challenge of seeing what regimes of control, like white liberalism, work so hard to obscure, the norm-generating power of language, and how it is manifested through literal and metaphorical forms of grammar. Each panelist will have 12-15 minutes to present their paper, and then we will conclude with a 15 minute question and answer session.
1] Christina Sharpe, În the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 76.