Representations of Whiteness in American
Visual Culture from the Perspective of
African American Cultural Trauma and
Collective Memory
Name: Jenna Stivey 12160830
Course: Master Thesis Comparative Literature
Supervisor: Daan Wesselman
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1
Introduction
2
Chapter One: Framing Whiteness: Spectatorship, “Postmemory” and
Lynching Photography
10
Chapter Two: Drawing Whiteness: Passing Narratives, “Prosthetic
Memory” and the Graphic Novel
25
Chapter Three: Satirizing Whiteness: “Multidirectional Memory”,
“Grotesque Realism” and the Horror Film
40
Conclusion
60
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this thesis to my friends and family, who have supported me throughout the process. Also, to all of the teachers and students I have encountered at the University of Amsterdam this past year whose intelligence and passion have inspired me endlessly. I
especially want to thank my supervisor, Daan, who has shown me patience and understanding and helped me to push myself and grow academically.
Introduction
This thesis is first and foremost led by the cultural objects I have selected. In them, I have observed a contemporary zeitgeist dedicated to representing whiteness, specifically in the American context and born, I believe, from the increased racial tension in the United States. Alejandro de la Fuente’s introduction to the 2017 special edition of Transitions responded to Trump’s presidency, stating that ‘whiteness is the common denominator behind Trump’s support’ (3). Whether conservatively championed through overt racism within the increased presence of alt-right groups in America, or accepted and overlooked by those fortunate
enough to be unaffected by policies that threaten the lives of women, people of colour and the LQBTQ+ community, whiteness was ‘[t]he unifying and most consistent commonality
among Trump voters’ (3). Though it may be an oversimplification to attribute whiteness as the fundamental basis of the motivations and causes of the current political climate in the United States, Fuente’s inclusion of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the 900 “separate incidents of bias and violence against immigrants, Latinos, African Americans, women, LGBT people, Muslims, and Jews” following the first 10 days of Trump’s election (3) points to a relationality stronger than correlation. This focus on whiteness, however, which calls into question its violence, privilege and pervasive invisibility has gained momentum in visual culture and my analysis of a collection of lynching photographs, a graphic novel and a film look at how representations of whiteness are mediated through different visual forms in a way that reverses, subverts, appropriates and unravels the historically traumatic and contemporarily perpetuated oppressive white gaze from the perspective of African American cultural trauma and collective memory.
Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (translation, 1967) draws on the
psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan (1949 original, 1977 English translation by Sheridan)
domination and black subjugation. Lacan locates the “mirror stage” as an event in early childhood development whereby the image reflected in the mirror confirms and settles a sense of wholeness in the subject. According to Fanon, because blackness is visually different to whiteness, colonized black subjects are fixed by white subjects as “the Other” in a way that objectifies and dehumanizes the black body, fulfils the desire for wholeness in the notion of white identity and fragments the black subject’s conception of self. He states: “In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating” (42). W. E. B Du Bois in the seminal text on African
American experience, The Souls of Black Folk, also thinks through this concept in his notion of “double consciousness”. The dominating white gaze, he argues, produces a meditated sense of self for African Americans as the process of “othering” under white domination conditions a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others" (8). That is, the external, racist conceptions of blackness in the United States under the “white supremacist gaze” (hooks, “Glory”, 50) puts into contention a unified sense of self for African Americans which leads to a negating fragmentation.
Michel Foucault conceptualizes the gaze as a function of knowledge and power whereby bodies are produced and regulated by systems of surveillance within the dominant structures of society (Discipline and Punish, 1977). bell hooks brings into conversation the psychoanalytical notion of the gaze with Foucault’s discursive understanding of its function and applies it to cultural representations of race in the United States. She thus locates the gaze and the control of images as fundamental in the formation, consolidation and maintenance of white supremacy and racial domination in the United States since slavery. And, because of this exercise of white dominance through the gaze and its realisation through representation, she argues that: [a]ll black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness” (345). In her book,
Black Looks: Race and Representation, hooks outlines that her “thinking about
representations of whiteness in the black imagination has been stimulated by classroom discussions about the way in which the absence of recognition is a strategy that facilitates making a group "the Other” (“Representing Whiteness”, 338, emphasis added). Here, what hooks addresses is the unacknowledged position of privilege that whiteness occupies and argues it is this lack of critical engagement with its hegemonic status that allows white supremacist structures to operate and exercise dominance. Crucially, she states that the absence of this critical attention means that white people are either resistant, or find it difficult, to comprehend the terrorizing representations of whiteness in the collective
imagination of African Americans which “makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures…” (341). To represent whiteness in a way that attends to this collective African American perspective of terror thus works to recognize constructions of whiteness and white supremacy as they pertain to the longstanding infliction of African American cultural trauma. And, to produce, analyse and reframe images of whiteness in this way is to “…disrupt the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness” (341), uncover repressed memories of its role in African American subjugation and cultural trauma, and interrupt contemporary structures of white supremacy which perpetuate the oppression of African American people.
hooks also emphasis the role of memory as important to unveiling and
conceptualizing notions of whiteness as it equates to a “terrorizing imposition” in the cultural imagination of African Americans. She argues that “…we are always in the process of both remembering the past even as we create new ways to imagine and make the future” (5). I therefore draw on the field of “memory studies” particularly as it pertains to theorizations of collective and cultural trauma. This field of study finds its initial roots in thinking through the horrors of the holocaust as the aberrations it caused led to much ethically-based theoretical
discussions on how to represent such horrors which arguably defy the parameters of representation (Adorno: 1982; 1997, Lyotard: 1990). Though it emerged from this event, Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional model of memory” suggests that these theories on trauma and memory can be applied to instances of collective and cultural trauma outside of the Shoah as he states that the era of decolonization shares a connection with the
development of a public memory of the holocaust (7). Rothberg’s model pivots around Richard Terdiman’s claim that “memory is the past made present” (quoted in Rothberg, 3). Rothberg establishes that:
The notion of a "making present" has two important corollaries: first, that memory is a contemporary phenomenon, something that, while concerned with the past, happens in the present; and second, that memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or action. (3-4)
The performative aspect of memory which he outlines emphasizes the “constructed side of our relation to the past” (4) as recollections are mediated through representations. This relates to concept of cultural trauma developed by Jeffrey Alexander who locates the attribution of collective trauma as a “socio-cultural process” which requires certain criteria to be fulfilled, such as determining the perpetrators and the nature of the pain, in order to productively deal with event(s) that induce “acute discomfort [in] the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (10). Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” also identifies the social
production of memory based on the evidence that second and third generations belonging to a certain culture remember and identify with collective trauma even when they (historically speaking) have no direct experience of the event(s) (15-16). Ron Eyerman associates this with the cultural trauma of African Americans specifically and locates slavery as a “primal scene” (a term borrowed from psychoanalysis) by which African Americans collectively identify because its impact is felt through the reverberations of this trauma and continues to
define their “common fate”, especially seeing as the oppression of black people in the U.S in re-embedded in society’s contemporary white supremacist structures.
Given that memory and trauma are socio-culturally produced, I therefore situate my analysis of whiteness in the interactions between perspective, form and representation to see how its construction and position of privilege is interrogated through the lens of African American collective memory and cultural trauma. The way trauma and memory is mediated through representations of whiteness in the objects I have selected contend with the ways that white supremacy continues to affect African Americans and thus provides the opportunity to critically address and interrupt the systems within which white supremacy operates. Rothberg draws on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the screen to explain how representations can mediate memory in a way that offers spectators/viewers the opportunity to suture themselves into the traumatic memories of other collective/cultural groups by projecting individual
histories/memories/identities in a potentially productive way through empathy. Alison
Landsberg uses the term “prosthetic memory” to analyze how the representation of memories that one has no direct experience of can be adopted and incorporated into our own concepts of trauma and history from differently situated perspectives. She notes that this vision, which is rooted in empathetic potential, is perhaps utopian, but I would insist that the objects I analyze do navigate viewers through alternative narratives of whiteness which set up a dialectic between white supremacy in the past and present and trace the structural oppression of African Americans implicit in the continuation of white privilege. From this perspective, white spectators/viewers in particular can develop critical ways of recognizing and regarding their positions of privilege and thus revise and contest the systems which uphold this
position.
black experience in America, by any means. However, as hooks states, it is because
whiteness still carries with it the constant threat of terrorization to African Americans that it is crucial to engage in readings of whiteness from the perspective of African American collective trauma. Representing and interrogating whiteness through this lens is thus not a palliative response to the historical and ongoing trauma embedded within African American collective experience but a productive act which interrupts structures of white supremacy in a potentially transformative way.
In the first chapter, “Framing Whiteness: Spectatorship, “Postmemory” and Lynching Photography” I will be look at how James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) creates a frame from which to look critically at the role of the oppressive white gaze in consolidations of white supremacy and its traumatic affect on black subjects. It represents and (re)members the part played by spectatorship in substantiating notions of white supremacy by focussing on the circulation of the photographs. The collection
interrogates the role these viewing practices played in forming a collective identity in white (usually Southern) communities and draws attention to how spectatorship thus provides another form of trauma. I rely on theories which outline the relation between looking practices (including spectatorship and photography), representation and trauma from critics such as Marianne Hirsch (1999), Susan Sontag (2003) and Barbie Zelizer (1998). I also draw on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies” (2004) to look at how the circulation and exchange of the photographs, which is made explicit in Allen’s archival framing, worked to shape and consolidate notions of white supremacy by accumulating the affective value of hate through the repeated act of spectating violence against the black body. I have made the conscious decision to not include any of the photographs in this paper precisely to avoid this act of violent spectatorship. I do, however, think that analysing Allen’s collection is an important task seeing as the racialized looking practices it presents are still in many ways
implicit in the ways race is ‘looked at’ in the present.
In Chapter Two, “Drawing Whiteness: Passing Narratives, “Prosthetic Memory” and the Graphic Novel”, I analyse representations of whiteness in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery (2010, reprinted as a new edition in 2018). I look at how the generic tropes of the African American literary tradition of the passing narrative, which plays on the visibility and invisibility of race, are expressed through the graphic novel form. I draw Jeffrey Alexander (2004) and Ron Eyerman’s (2001) understanding of cultural trauma as a sociocultural process which is mediated through representation and use the notion of collective memory as a performative act of generational transference, led by the theories of Marianne Hirsch (1999), Ellen Fine (2001), Eva Hoffman (2004) and Victoria Aarons and Alan Berger (2017). I look at the way citizenship and national identity is expressed as a process of Othering and negation in a uniquely visual way in the graphic novel form from the perspective of African Americans. I follow Lauren Berlant (1997) and Michael Warner’s (1992) theoretical understanding of citizenship as it pertains to forming norms and
delineating bodies based on race in the public sphere, and also reference Sara Ahmed (2004) to highlight how Incognegro expresses this as a traumatising experience for African
Americans who are not given the full status of citizenship. Drawing on Sinéad Moynihan (2015) alongside cartoon theorist Scott McCloud (1994) I see how the superhero narrative in subverted in Incognegro through alternative visual and discursive framing and also apply the notion of “prosthetic memory” (Alison Landsberg, 2004) to show how this reframing forms new public narratives and memories of whiteness that extend the African American
representation of whiteness as terrorizing (hooks, “Representing Whiteness”, 341) beyond the locale of the collective to a wider viewing/reading audience born from an empathetic
In “Chapter Three: Satirizing Whiteness: “Multidirectional Memory”, “Grotesque Realism” and the Horror Film” I analyse the representation of whiteness in Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out (2017). Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “grotesque realism” (1941 original, 1993 translation by Iswolsky) alongside Michael Rothberg’s (2009) multidirectional model of memory, I look at how satire is used to critique and unravel whiteness from the perspective of African American cultural trauma. The film expresses the experience of terrorization at the hands of white supremacy within the framework of horror and uses grotesque absurdity to communicate the way micro-aggressions, fetishization and cultural appropriation forms African American experiences of trauma and a warranted suspicion of whiteness. I follow Harry M. Benshoff (1999) and Noël Carroll (2000) to look at how the film intersects the generic conventions of horror and humour through the lens of African American collective memory and draw on Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogism” (1981) to analyse the way this constellation creates new memories and perspectives out of itself and puts the past and present forms of African American oppression into conversation. Peele’s film satirically casts white, middle-class liberals as ‘body-snatching’ monsters against the quotidian backdrop of suburban American to communicate the way that white people operate under a guise of seemingly good intentions. In doing this, Get Out points to the everyday and accumulative occurrences of trauma induced by the unacknowledged privilege position of whiteness and, through unsettling comedy, situates the viewer in the African American perspective of white people, white spaces and white supremacist structures as always potentially threatening. The film makes the viewer ‘do the work’ of memory recall and thus exercises the multidirectional model of memory to re-embed new narratives of whiteness that are both productive and potentially transformative.
Chapter One: Framing Whiteness: Spectatorship, “Postmemory”
and Lynching Photography
Stef Craps in his seminal text, Postcolonial Witnessing, addresses the theoretical difficulties in understanding racism within the field of trauma studies. He states that, ‘[u]nlike structural trauma, racism is historically specific; yet, unlike historical trauma, it is not related to a particular event, with a before and an after’ (32). The formation of African American
identity in the United States had to contend with the historically specific collective trauma of slavery. Until the addition of the 13th and 14th amendments to the constitution, black people in America were legally objectified as property and their humanity was contested. However, though the addition of the 13th and 14th amendments abolished slavery and legally recognised black people in America as human with (a conditional) right to vote, the cultural legacy of slavery continued to oppress African Americans as racism was deeply embedded in
American culture, not only limited to the cultural imagination (a hatred of African Americans by white Americans) but also exercised through institutional means. Inequality and
oppression continued to define the lives of African Americans via the Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) ruling1 which formed the notion of “separate but equal” during the reconstruction era and in this period, white people in (mainly) the Southern states carried out the abhorrent act of lynching on African Americans, almost exclusively without persecution. As bell hooks observes, this cultural and institutional racism still forms the conditions of African Americans in the present and results in the representation of whiteness as “terrorizing in the cultural
1 The Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) ruling has never been directly overruled but the Brown vs.
Board of Education (1954) ruling was the first to legally overturn conditions of segregation. For a close reading of the case, see:
Lofgren, Charles A. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
imagination of African Americans” (“Representations of Whiteness”, 341). And, what the current Black Lives Matter movement in the United States tells us is that this institutional violence against African Americans at the hands of law enforcement and the justice systems is not a historically specific form of oppression but, rather, is still very much prevalent in the structures of American society2.
I take James Allen’s disturbing collection of lynching photographs, Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) as my object of analysis in this chapter and look at the ways in which the archive that presents contemporary audiences with the violent acts of lynching precisely to remember how constructions of white supremacy were formed and consolidated by violent acts against African Americans which continue to perpetuate their cultural trauma and collective memory. Allen’s archive frames the photographs in such a way as to show how they circulated and exchanged amongst white communities to form an identity out of this violent spectatorship through the inclusion of material evidence such as stamps and etched messages. The violence against African Americans that is depicted in the photographs is remembered by African Americans via a collective conceptions of whiteness as terrorizing and trauma inducing. However, this violence is largely repressed and disassociated from notions of whiteness by white people themselves (hooks, “Representations of Whiteness, 342). Thus, the collection addresses the historical and structural trauma of racial domination over black Americans and locates the “white supremacist gaze” (hooks, “Glory”, 50) as its source by framing the spectatorship of violence against black bodies as a crucial factor in forming white supremacy.
2 Christopher Lebron gives an account of the Black Lives Matter movement in great detail,
analysing both its historical roots and contemporary concerns.
Lebron, Christopher J. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea. Oxford University Press, 2017. Print.
Originally curated for an exhibition and later published as a book Without Sanctuary attests to the traumatic history of violence against African Americans exercised through the dehumanization of blackness under the white gaze and consolidated by technological looking practices (photography). According to Lacan, the subject cannot exist without the Other and thus the gaze is an objectifying strategy to define the self. Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, draws on the lacanian theory of the gaze to explain that the lived experience of black subjecthood exists in negation to whiteness (90). Photography functions as an extension of the gaze, or, as Susan Sontag argues, can be its ‘predatory weapon’ (14). In lynching photography, the viewer (photographer) captures the traumatic event of violence enacted upon the black body both as an indexical reality and as a symbolic objectification and violation (Sontag, 14). The photograph turns the single event into a spectacle and becomes a rhetorical example of white supremacy through consumption amongst a wider audience. In line with Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, they function as an object shaped by an accumulation of shared hatred toward the black Other through their circulation. In gathering these traumatic photographs and photo postcards in a contemporary collection, Without Sanctuary risks reproducing the trauma induced by the white gaze by increasing spectatorship. However, as a project of rhetorical reframing, the collection does provoke a reflection on what it means to look at these photographs, particularly as a white person, and comments on the dialectical relationship they share with racialized looking practices in the present.
Theorists W.E. B Du Bois (1903) and bell hooks (1992) accounted for the violent Othering of the white gaze in the consolidation of white supremacy and the trauma this inflicted on black subjectivity. hooks explicitly states, in relation to the oppressive white gaze that negates black subjectivity, that “[a]ll black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness”
(345). This not only speaks to the enduring resistance black people in America have had to develop in order to reclaim the right to look and negotiate the racialized looking practices that have historically formed and terrorized their lived experience, but also points to a distinct lack of recognition on behalf of white people to contend with their gaze as able to inflict this kind of terror and negation. Richard Dyer’s seminal contribution to the field of whiteness studies during the 1990’s states that, ‘[a]t the level of representation…whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race’ (9). Thus, to confront the image of whiteness as a white person does not produce a reflection of the ways white identity was constructed
through racial domination in America, even though this knowledge of oppressive domination is pervasive in the collective memory of African Americans. Dyer suggests, then, that
‘[w]hiteness needs to be made strange’ (12) in order to counter its hegemonic position and interrupt the oppression its supremacy induces. Without Sanctuary, because it frames the formation and consolidation of whiteness in the act of looking at racially motivated violence, uproots it from a position of normality in a way that makes white spectators in the present contend with the violent history embedded in the oppressive white gaze and the strangeness that this produces, and I can speak personally here, forces white people to critically reform ways of looking to avoid the perpetuation of trauma against black subjects.
Allen’s Without Sanctuary becomes an imperative example of the disturbing and affectual visualisation of the white gaze as it both shows white spectators in the photographs’ historical moment and implicates contemporary white audiences in these viewing practices. In many of the photographs, the gaze of the white viewer in the present is returned by the civil or smiling faces of the white lynch mob. Critics Jessy J. Ohl and Jennifer E. Potter argue that, “[r]ather than framing racial brutality as the product of fanatical small groups and
radicalized individuals, Without Sanctuary significantly differs from post-racial discourses by characterizing lynching as collective, deliberate, and controlled” (187). The collection makes
apparent the role of the white gaze in forming notions of collective white identity based on the supremacy over black inferiority. Capturing the event on camera makes a spectacle of the traumatic and violent event and the commercialisation achieved through circulation becomes a crucial part of producing a certain knowledge of white superiority by reproducing and consolidating power dynamics which repeatedly objectify the murdered black body.
In photographs 24, 26 and 27 featureless white faces gather around a lynched black man/men in the centre. They peer into the camera (some with clear effort as they strain their necks at the back of the crowd), not only with an apparent lack of fear that they will be recognised but also implying a desire to be seen at the event, and to share the fact of their presence with a wider audience. The desire for recognition demonstrates the “deliberate, collective and controlled” participation amongst the lynch mob present but also confirms a value judgement which places the spectator as acting for a common cause. Photograph 28 is a framed copy of 27, highlighting the circulation of these photographs amongst a wider
population than just those present for the event, whilst the addition of an inscription which flags the position of a friend/family member in the crow and uses a violent racial slur to refer to the black body, confirms the practice of sharing postcards which capture the event as a form of collective memory and identity rooted in the act of looking at the violated black body. Allen’s collection thus highlights that the photographs are not only an exercise of the white gaze on a par with the spectators present at the event who witness the lynching, but are also used to produce and confirm white identity through a broad circulation of the violent Othering of blackness. Because of photography’s role in producing, confirming and circulating these racist looking practices, contemporary white audiences do, on one level, participate in the spectatorship that helped form white supremacy and terrorize black subjects.
In 21 photograph, the perspective of the camera places the contemporary viewer just above the crowd in attendance of the lynching. The position allows for a scopic view of the spectators but also a ‘privileged’ position in terms of capturing the traumatic event of the lynched black body. It is difficult for the contemporary viewer not to become implicated in the spectacle as the gaze of the camera is heavily embedded in the oppressive white gaze that seeks to capture proof of blackness as subhuman and whiteness as superior through the indexical reality of the violated body. As Marianne Hirsch suggests, “[w]hen we confront perpetrator images, we cannot look independently of the look of the perpetrator” (25). In this particular photograph, the black body is not immediately noticeable in the scopic field of the image. It is difficult not to search for the object of the gaze and thus participate in the violent act of looking at the traumatic image of the murdered black body. As Jessy J. Ohl and
Jennifer E. Potter argue, because Without Sanctuary rhetorically implicates the viewer as a lynching participant through its social orientation, audience members are drawn to evaluate their own passive involvement in human oppression” (197). The historical distance enables the contemporary white viewer to proclaim innocence, however the voyeuristic association with the photographer’s lens implicates them in the act of objectification. However, the photographs/ photo postcards in Allen’s collection do not remain fixed in their original context and thus provide an opportunity to engage critically with the implications of racialized looking practices precisely because the collection’s framing situates the viewer through a different perspective. This framing, which provides a detour and separation from the original way the photographs were circulated and viewed, allows the contemporary audiences to see the ways in which the racially dominating white gaze can be mobilised in the present as they participate in spectatorship but then interrupts this gaze as the collection draws attention to the original white supremacist, racist viewers of the photographs rather than replicating the traumatic act of gazing at the murdered black body. This shift in
perspective attends to the way that African Americans view whiteness as terrorizing and therefore offers contemporary white viewers an explicitly horrific example of how this view is formed and the indebtedness of the white gaze to these trauma inflicting practices.
The addition of etchings, messages and annotations along with photographer stamps and occasionally advertisements on many of the photographs in the collection highlight the broad spectatorship they achieved. Contemporary white viewers are able to witness the symbolic value attached to the photo postcards as souvenirs and items of exchange. This extra layer of looking materialized through additions to the photographs testifies to their role in forming a collective white identity through the annihilation of the black Other and thus offers an opportunity to reflect on the role of spectatorship in trauma, rather than just
becoming implicated in the violent monocular gaze of the camera. On the back of photograph 16, there is a message that includes a racial slur in relation to barbecuing, whilst on 22 a message reads, “This is the barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son Joe”. The references to “barbecue” and “cooking” are shocking to
encounter as the euphemism draws a connection between the violent practice of lynching with a communal or family event. Photographs 7 and 51 actually include white, well-dressed young children (both boys and girls), demonstrating how the construction of white supremacy relied on these violent acts against black people to be looked at as a form of socialisation and knowledge production, interpolating children into this racial rhetoric as a form of collective identity in the Southern States. The sender/recipient of photo postcard 22 appears to be a parent/child relationship and the sender’s desire to make his presence at a ‘barbecue’ known to his parents establishes that shared family values or important memories to be shared are in this instance predicated on confirming racial superiority and this is carried out through the visual documentation and circulation of lynching photographs.
To expand on the how the circulation and exchange of the lynching photographs formed and consolidated white supremacist identity, I want to draw on Sarah Ahmed’s seminal text, “Affective Economies”, in which she argues that emotions accumulate and assign value to signs, symbols and objects, similar to the ways in which the economy functions in the accumulation of capital through circulation and exchange (120-21). She states that it is ‘…the accumulation of affective value [that] shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds’ (121). Adhering to Ahmed’s convincing theory, the lynching photographs and
postcards become signs of white supremacy and the hatred of African American ‘Others’ through their circulation. That is, they “…increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more they circulate, the more affective they become, and the more they appear to “contain” affect” (121). Thus the act itself which is captured in the image represents the indexical reality of violence that occurred. But, the reframing which the
archive undergoes also represents the wider circulation of these lynching photographs amongst white people as an integral part of forming a collective identity of white supremacy based on a hatred and violence directed at black subjects. The collection represents white supremacist identity as the materialization of an affective economy of hate. It shows how the consolidation of the individual and collective white self is produced by the accumulation and exchange of spectating violence against the black body. Such reframing therefore calls attention to the role of spectatorship as a second form of trauma-inducing-violence. By bringing this role of spectatorship into the contextual frame of the archive it turns the focus away from the indexical acts of trauma, so as not to repeat the violence of looking, and places it on the circulation of these images. In this way, Without Sanctuary shows how these
photographs depicting acts of racial hatred and the violent othering of black subjects shaped a collective identity of white supremacy. As evidence of horrific acts of violence, these
because they depict actual moments of suffering or mutilated black bodies in a period where racially motivated acts of violence were frequent occurrences in a vigilante movement under a prominent and hegemonic racist ideology. However, the collection shows that the
circulation of photographs-as-objects for white viewers and consumers, in their historical moment of exchange, accumulated value by reproducing collective investments in notions of white superiority. The framing of the collection thus foregrounds white supremacy as a narrative embedded in the repetition of viewing acts of violence against the black body. Without Sanctuary, through its archival framing, draws focus to this act of violent
spectatorship in order to make it visible. What the collection is thus able to represent is how white supremacy is a construction explicitly built on and implicated in the cultural trauma of African Americans.
The circulation and exchange of the photographs therefore accumulated spectatorship and formed narratives of white superiority and the racial domination of African Americans. However, these narratives rooted in and produced through racialized looking practices are not static, precisely because looking practices are made up of various mediations. Marianne Hirsch argues that, “[t]he gaze is mediated by the screen, contested and interrupted by the look” (24). She follows the Lacanian concept of the gaze as it pertains to a (in this case harmful) objectification motivated by the desire to fulfil a lack, which, as Fanon theorizes in relation to the oppressive white gaze, forms a terrorizing negation of black subjectivity as whiteness is confirmed through the terrorizing objectification of black bodies. The look relates to the ability of vision/the eye to take in a wide scopic field and, by the screen, she means the ideological and rhetorical filters produced by ‘cultural conventions and codes that make the seen visible’ (24). Because Without Sanctuary reframes lynching photographs in a way that does not subscribe to the oppressive white gaze and, by extension, the ideological screen that consolidated racist narratives embedded in gaze in the original production and
spectatorship of the images, contemporary white viewers are encouraged to look differently. Hirsh focusses on the trauma experienced by, in particular, the second generation of
holocaust survivors. She coins the term “postmemory” to conceptualise the way that memories can be socially produced and that traumatic events need not be directly
experienced (though trauma is often defined as not fully experienced) in order for one to remember and consider them part of their collective/individual identity (15-16). Wendy Wolters, in her discussion on Without Sanctuary, states that:
Postmemory can be used to explain, for instance, the ways in which African Americans who have no direct experience of lynching or knowledge of lynching in their family nonetheless "remember" lynching with skepticism of the legal system and fear of violence by whites. (403)
Indeed, Without Sanctuary develops a new mediating screen from the perspective of African American “postmeory” by representing and reframing the lynching photographs, which raises productive questions. Contemporary audiences become spectators in order to (re)member the violence enacted through looking. That is, they too become members of the audience who spectate this traumatic violence but in doing so are made to remember and acknowledge the ways that spectatorship reproduced and informed racist ideologies of white supremacy. Addressing these racialized looking practices and the narratives they build through the screen is important precisely because the traces of this legacy informs African American
postmemory, which manifests in representations of whiteness as terrorizing. Moreover, because the screen has the ability to attend to and shift the racist narratives which have historically constituted the ways white people have looked at black people, projects such as Without Sanctuary, which reframe images that previously represented white supremacy, hold the potential for white people to remember and attend to this problematic formation of racist looking practices and develop new ways of seeing.
It is necessary to point out that images in Without Sanctuary have provoked criticism regarding the (re)presentation of such painful and violent acts against the black body. Wendy Wolters sees that, ‘[i]ndeed, in order to participate in the historical narrative that Without Sanctuary seeks to create, one must accept that the documentary meaning of the photographs is not static; photographs that were evidence for the lynch mob now serve as evidence of the lynch mob’ (208, emphasis in the original). She states that the framing of the collection no longer supports the consolidation of white supremacy that their original context sought but goes on to note how, “…the "new" evidence that the photographs provide of the lynch mob does not necessarily alter the original social relations embedded in their creation” (408). Wolters’ concern over the potential reoccurrence of trauma implicated in presenting the lynching photographs holds considerable weight. However, as Amy Louise Wood argues, there are historical instances to show that “once [the photographs] were removed from their localities, through lines of commercial distribution or political activism, these meanings became quite unstable, allowing antilynching activists to imprint, quite successfully, entirely different meanings upon them” (377). Though this argument for the potential shifts in the photograph’s knowledge production through iterations outside of their original context appears to contradict what I am attempting to argue, what I want to stress is that this reframing has been dedicated to reclaiming and fighting for black subjectivity via visual representations of the indexical reality of the traumatic event. Leigh Raiford points out that the process of African American subjects re-appropriating the archive of lynching
photography in the Jim Crow era, Civil Rights Movement and contemporary art and criticism has become “a constitutive element of black visuality’ and forms what he calls ‘black critical memory” (118). Whilst black critics such as Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Due Bois and bell hooks, as well as journalists working for NAACP funded journals dedicated to black subjectivity
such as Fire!! (1926) and The Crisis (1910 – present)3, have experienced, theorized and refigured the burden of the white gaze in order to recuperate their subjectivity, white
Americans, on the other hand have undergone no such critical practice to address the role of their visual practices in this trauma. What Without Sanctuary does is represent white
supremacy, which often remains insidiously invisible, by framing it as a collective process formed and constituted by inflicting violence on the black body.
With regards to the issues and implications of representing trauma, which have been discussed by François Lyotard, Theodor Adorno and Cathy Caruth, amongst others, I want to focus on the importance of framing in reproducing images with such affective value. Barbara Zelizer, discussing the representation of traumatic images from the holocaust, argues that,
…while the reduction of the archive of images and their endless repetition might seem problematic in the abstract, the postmemorial generation--in displacing and
recontextualizing these well-known images in their artistic work--has been able to make repetition not an instrument of fixity or paralysis or simple retraumatization (as it often is for survivors of trauma), but a mostly helpful vehicle of working through a traumatic past (Remembering, 9).
By looking again, through a reframed and critically-engaged archival lens, contemporary audiences can contend with the ways their looking practices may be historically indebted to racist narratives and how this may continue to perpetrate African American cultural trauma. Indeed, Ahmed argues (in relation to objects invested with affective value) that emotions can travel backwards “through “sticky” associations between signs, figures, and objects”
3 W. E. B. Du Bois was the founder of The Crisis and edited the journal from 1910 – 34. For
more information on The Crisis, see:
Protest and Propaganda: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History. Eds. Amy Helene Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014. Print.
precisely because “repression always leaves its trace in the present—hence “what sticks” is also bound up with the “absent presence” of historicity” (127). That is, not looking at these images both represses the indexical reality of their existence and the way their circulation formed narratives which constructed and consolidated white supremacy against the dehumanization of blackness. Though African Americans in the present may not have the direct experience of lynching, they have more than likely experienced (directly or indirectly) police brutality, stop and frisk policies and the overwhelming number of incarcerated African Americans. What becomes apparent, then, is that the repression of the traumatic history of lynching and spectatorship does not remove it from memory, but rather leaves traces of these racist ideological narratives largely intact to be mobilized in the present.
As Ahmed argues, “fear opens up past histories that stick to the present […] and allow the white body to be constructed as apart from the black body” (126). Thus, what I have just discussed not only relates to an individual task which calls upon white subjects to reflect on their way of seeing, guided by the framing of Without Sanctuary. But also, in returning to the photographs, I want to focus on the presence of authority figures and civic values which are prevalent in them to see how the oppressive white gaze and the racist ideology in the consolidating screen is deeply embedded in organisational and institutional structures of American society. Some photographs show lynching taking place in green park-like areas, but many depict more public events where the murder is carried out in a space which is important to the community. For example, postcard 50 features the body of Augustus Goodman hanging from a tree which, the collection points out, “served as a
community bulletin board”. The lynched black body hangs amongst the posters, leaflets, and other pieces of public knowledge made accessible and so regarded as important to the (white) community. Whilst photograph 61 shows the image of an un-named black body hanging in a courthouse yard and 76 depicts the corpse of Leonard Wood on the town’s public-speaking
platform. These images show that the lynching of black bodies was considered amongst white spectators as a form of justice as the organised event was selected to take place in a public location associated with the organising body of civic matters. In this way, a
contemporary white viewer of the collection is confronted with the way in which the practice of looking at and dehumanizing black subjects visually constituted community values and served the binding of white, Southern American identity and that this was bolstered by and realised through societal structures. In the present, the encounter with historically specific trauma inflicted by the white mob may provoke a contemporary white audience, on an individual level, to deny any involvement. However, by making the specifically civic sharing of these lynching images apparent in the frame, there is an opportunity to critically contend with the implication of the violent and oppressive gaze as it informs not just individual racial narratives which dehumanize blackness but how these narratives are upheld by and operate through institutional structures associated with politics and legislation. Having no direct memory of lynching, or not explicitly subscribing to racist ideologies, in the present does not prevent or resist one from falling back on the historical narratives of white supremacy
particularly seeing as there are examples of how the violence against the black body in America is still enacted via institutional structures, as the Black Lives Matter movement makes explicit. In this way, the task of reforming racialized looking practices requires not just an individual reflection from white people of the ways their look is embedded in a history of violence against African Americans, but also, in a larger sense, a structural reorganisation of the racial narratives which inform political and legal institutions.
So, by representing and (re)membering the narratives of white supremacy produced through spectatorship, Without Sanctuary asks contemporary viewers to take on the
uncomfortable task of confronting these problematic looking relations in order to see how they manifest in the present and develop the critical faculties to understand and unravel these
practices by forming new narrative “screens” and seeing anew. The horrific depictions of violence in Without Sanctuary risk re-traumatizing both the victims in the image and contemporary African American viewers who share a collective “postmemory” of the terrorizing history of lynching in the United States. However, as I have argued, through the collection’s reframing and focalization it draws attention to how constructions of white supremacy were realized through the circulation of these lynching photographs. Seeing as white supremacy and white privilege are still in existence in the United States and lynching informs the cultural memory of African Americans, it seems that there is crucial work to be done with regards to acknowledging the role played by violent racialized looking practices and examining the traces of this legacy as it informs and is informed by legally and
politically institutionalized structures of looking in the present. Indeed, Zelizer argues that historical cultural trauma (that is, traumatic events that occurred in the past and as such are not experienced directly by the present generation of that collective) forms “aberrations or ruptures in the cultural continuum [that] demand retelling'" (Remembering, 10). Without Sanctuary engages in a ‘retelling’ of the traumatic history of lynching in the U.S by
reframing the lynching photographs in a way that interrogates the role of spectatorship by the white mob, the extension of this gaze via the camera to the contemporary white viewer, and the way their circulation informed and consolidated structures of white supremacy. By representing, (re)membering and reframing the photographs, the collection invites a potential disruption to the narratives of white supremacy in the present as it forms a discourse around the racialized looking practices through the lens of African American cultural trauma. In this way, it reveals how racist structures are produced through looking and spectatorship and addresses the need to develop white critical viewing practices both on an institutional and individual level precisely because they remain implicitly embedded within American society.
Chapter Two: Drawing Whiteness: Passing Narratives,
“Prosthetic Memory” and the Graphic Novel
Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Icognegro: A Graphic Mystery (2010) traces the story of Zane Pinchback, a light-skinned African-American journalist, living in Harlem, who passes for white in the southern states to report on lynching cases. During the Jim Crow era, black and white bodies were separated in the public sphere under the Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) ruling and thus the black body was discursively framed as ontologically Other within
legislation predicated on epistemologies of visual difference by the myopic projections of the hegemonic white gaze which made up the ruling class. Incognegro follows a tradition within African American literature termed ‘passing narratives’, written largely in the period of segregation and exploring the experiences of subjects legally defined as black who pass as white in order to access the economic and social privileges afforded to white citizens.
Republished as a new edition in 2018, the addition of an afterward from Johnson observes the pertinence of Incognegro within the United States’ current political climate. He states that the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia contradicted his belief that ‘…the age of organized, public, avowed mainstream white nationalism was over’ (135). Johnson’s declaration of hope that the text has the potential to ‘…serve as an entry point into a larger historical exploration’ (135) of race relations in America is where I take my lead in the analysis of Incognegro. Precisely because white supremacy still exists in the United States, and white nationalism seems to be gaining momentum, I want to see how Incognegro’s graphic medium makes use of abstraction, framing and closure to represent whiteness
through the lens of African American cultural trauma and memory provide an opportunity to disrupt these structures by challenging hegemonic narratives and forming new ones.
In the preface to Incognegro, Johnson states that Walter White, a journalist and prominent member of the NAACP who passed as white and reported on lynching in the
Southern states was a source of inspiration for the text precisely because of the influence his story had on him as a young adult, which enabled him to perceive his light-skinned African American identity as a potential ‘asset instead of a burden’ as he struggled with his ethnic appearance in the ‘height of the Black Power era’ (4). Because of this, I see the text as an example of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”. The forward that shares Johnson’s personal affiliation with Walter White’s story and the 2018 afterword that references the current racial tension in America bookend the graphic novel and demonstrate how the text’s “…connection to its object or source [the traumatic event(s)] is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation’ (Surviving Images, 9). Indeed, Johnson remembers the events in Walter White’s life by projecting his own
experiences of race on to his biography, whilst he reflects on the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally through the meditation of fictional events in Incognegro. Page 76 depicts an angry white lynch-mob who confront Carl, Zane’s light-skin best friend who is mistaken for him by the Klansman hunting down “Incognegro”. The mob is armed with pitchforks, guns, baseball bats and a noose and expressions of hateful rage are drawn onto their faces. Though the creation of this image preceded the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, there is an alarming similarity between the details drawn in the fictional image of the lynch-mob and the photographs from the contemporary “Unite the Right” event, including grimacing
expressions and the violent wielding of torches. As such, the text not only creates a graphic passing narrative to remember the Jim Crow era of white supremacy, but implicit in the forward/afterward framing of the text is how its representation of whiteness expresses memories of historically specific African American collective/cultural trauma (from the immediate or more distant past) to demonstrate how it continues to reverberate through generations after the fact precisely because whiteness still assumes the position of privilege in American society.
To expand on the term cultural/collective trauma that I apply to my understanding of Icognegro, I follow the concept as it is outlined by Alexander and Eyerman. Alexander makes the claim that the attribution of trauma on a cultural or collective level occurs when, “acute discomfort [enters into] the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (10). This then needs to be represented through a “sociocultural process” which involves
determining the nature of the pain, the nature of the victim and the attribution of
responsibility (10-15). Eyerman adopts this framework for thinking through cultural trauma and applies it to the African American experience of slavery. He states:
…[S]lavery is traumatic for those who share a common fate, not necessarily a common experience. Cultural trauma articulates a membership group as it identifies an event or an experience, a primal scene, that solidifies individual/collective identity. This event, now identified with the formation of the group, must be recollected by later generations who have had no experience of the “original” event, yet continue to be identified by it and to identify themselves through it. (14-15)
On page 18, the panels depict Zane altering his appearance to pass for white so that he can go undercover in Mississippi and save his dark-skin twin-brother Alonzo who has been falsely imprisoned for of the murder of a white woman and awaits a hanging. This pass is performed via a “mirror scene”, which Sinead Moynihan points out is a trope of the passing narrative (48) and relates to Franz Fanon’s Lacanian-based understanding of the subject defining “mirror stage” which, for black subjects, is a negation under the culturally traumatic
oppressive white gaze which produces a fragmentation of the psyche. Reflected back at Zane during this “mirror scene” is, along with his own reflection, an opaque, grainy image of a black woman being clutched and overpowered by a white man (see Fig 1). This interrupts and negates Zane’s mirror-image (Panel 2, 18) and functions as a “primal scene” from which Zane identifies both individually (through seeing this image as part of his own reflection) and
collectively as an “American Negro” (18). Moreover, the diegesis, narrated from Zane’s first person perspective, explicitly outlines that his racially ambiguous appearance which is reflected back at him is ‘…the product of the Southern tradition nobody likes to talk about. Slavery. Rape. Hypocrisy’ (Panel 2, 18), and this repressed history is captured by the interrupting image. So, Incognegro’s graphic novel form is able to represent this identity-negating “mirror scene” trope and the psychological fragmentation it produces in a
specifically visual way by compressing and thus relating generational depictions of trauma to illustrate how the legacy of slavery is perpetuated and continues to inform African American identity. The overlay of the traumatic “primal scene” which Zane euphemistically names “the Southern tradition” materializes the transference of cultural trauma from one generation to the next and the disruption of Zane’s reflection in the image expresses that white supremacy continues to inform collective trauma and a fractured sense of African American identity.
Fig 1. Johnson, Mat and Pleece, Warren. Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery. Wisconsin: Dark Horse Books, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2018. P. 18. Print. (Reproduced with permission of
In the “mirror scene”, Zane abstracts any signs that may act as visual markers of his black racial identity by straightening his curly hair with a Madam C.J Walker product4 and donning a suit. Incognegro uses only black, white and grey in its illustrations and so particularly within these panels that depict Zane’s ‘transformation’ to pass for white, the images represent an almost imperceptible change in his appearance to undermine the notion that whiteness is a secure ontological category that can be optically confirmed. Instead, then, the ‘passing’ panels focus on what bell hooks terms the “terrorizing image of whiteness in the African American cultural imagination” (342). The fact that Zane identifies his ability to pass with “…the Southern tradition nobody likes to talk about. Slavery. Rape. Hypocrisy’ (Panel 2, 18), highlights that he sees himself as a mediation of a traumatic legacy historically
predicated on the rape and sexual exploitation of black women by white slave owners, seeing as miscegenation laws criminalized interracial sex and marriage but did not legally recognize black women as human and thus not ‘rape-able’ subjects before the addition of the 13th Amendment to the constitution (Kumar Katyal, 794). As outlined in the Introduction, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that black subject formation in the United States produced a sense of “double consciousness” in African American subjects as their status as American citizens was formed through the culturally traumatic experience of slavery which legally, politically and institutionally contested not only their national identity but their humanity even after the introduction of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. The image of sexual
4 Madam C.J Walker was a successful, African American business woman who made her
money by selling cosmetic products for skin-lightening and hair straightening.
Advertisements for her products were often featured in the critical, literary journals funded by the NAACP such as The Crisis Magazine and Fire, demonstrating the deeply embedded hegemonic concept of whiteness as the attainment of superiority in the U.S. See Bundles for more information on her life:
Bundles, A. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker. New York, NY: Scribner, 2001. Print.
exploitation that interrupts Zane’s reflection expresses the African American experience of “double consciousness” and locates these traumatic ruptures in the terrorizing effects of white supremacist structures. Again, Icognegro’s lack of shading which depicts Zane’s pass as imperceptible emphasizes that the construction of whiteness in the United States, as it pertains to a guaranteed status of citizenship, is not only an identity formed by visual codes (white vs. black) but, rather, was formed and consolidated by violent acts against black people which were legally, politically and institutionally embedded to uphold the notion of white supremacy.
This representation of the constructed norm of U.S citizenship as white and as terrorizing to African Americans is also depicted in Icognegro through the opaquely
impressed image of United States flag which ruptures the cohesion of Zane’s mirror image. As Sara Ahmed points out: ‘The flag as a sign that has historically signified territorial conquest as well as love for the nation (patriotism) has effects in terms of the display of “withness” (whereby one is “with others” and “against other others”)’ (130). She argues that the flag is therefore an object which is reiterated in an effort to shape the collective or
national body of citizens as unified based on a separation from the Other. Indeed, Icognegro’s graphic form produces a counter narrative to this “withness” as the flag separates Zane from his own reflection in another materialized image of “double consciousness”; the flag is a negating screen rather than a symbol of a coherent self who identifies with the notion collective national identity. On the page that follows, Zane (passing as white) enters into the public sphere and narrates his perceptions of whiteness. He states: ‘They don’t think they have accents. They don’t think they eat ethnic foods. Their music is classical”; “They think they’re just normal. That they are the universal, and that everyone else is a deviation from form” (Panel 3, 19). Lauren Berlant argues that the public sphere forms subjects via
institutions within a geopolitical space (37). However, Michael Warner notes that, (focusing on sexuality and citizenship in the United Sates), “The bourgeois public sphere has been structured from the outset by a logic of abstraction that provides a privilege for unmarked identities: the male, the white, the middle class, the normal’5 (383). Under the Plessy vs.
Ferguson ruling, black bodies were literally prohibited from areas of the public sphere and were thus legally and politically marked by inscriptions of Otherness that negated their existence in the United States and, as Zane observes, defined African Americans as a
“…deviation from form” (Panel 3, 19). By overlaying Zane’s mirror image with the U.S flag, Incognegro points out that, as an abstract representation of the collective national body of citizens, it encompasses the historical trauma of African Americans precisely because their blackness prohibited them from being regarded as national citizens part of this collective. Ingonegro thus represents the image of the flag to focus on the process of Othering that its “withness” symbolizes. By reproducing the “star spangled banner” as a negating screen, Incognegro brings to the fore the relationship between notions of collective national
identity/citizenship and its historical construction and confirmation of white supremacy. And, to address the U.S flag from an African American perspective of cultural trauma and identity fragmentation is to interrupt the hegemonic conceptions of its symbolic unity.
White supremacy operates insidiously and efficiently because it remains unmarked and invisible according to the abstract logic which constructs the U.S citizen. Because it is the source of perpetuating African American cultural trauma, this adds another dimension to the challenge of representation. Critic Cathy Caruth, discussing the individual, event-based
5 Warner’s discussion of citizenship is rooted in the theory of framing and passing from
philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas:
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991. p. 175-177. Print.
model, states that trauma is the haunting return of the ‘unassimilated’ event that cannot be known (3-4). Similarly, Ron Eyerman argues that
National or cultural trauma (the difference is minimal at the theoretical level) is also rooted in an event or series of events, but not necessarily in their direct experience. Such experience is usually mediated, through newspapers, radio, or television, for example, which involves a spatial as well as a temporal distance between the event and its experience. (3)
In both cases, (though I am focusing more on a sociocultural approach to trauma in line with collective attribution of trauma theorized by Eyerman) post facto representations and
mediations based on the absent presence of memory or historicity are needed to assimilate experiences of trauma and resolve a “crisis of meaning and identity” (Alexander, 10) on the individual and collective level. As a journalist, Zane is what Eyerman calls an ‘intellectual’ in that he mediates information between the cultural and political spheres of activity to make certain claims for and to others (4). He therefore assumes a role in the sociocultural ‘trauma process’ which attempts to assimilate African American trauma by representing the collective experience of fear and violence under white supremacy to a wider audience. Once again, to draw on Johnson’s forward/afterward framing of the graphic novel it is evident that, for Johnson (as well as many other Americans) Walter White (who is the inspiration for Zane’s character) was an intellectual figure who played a historical role in the African American ‘trauma process’ but also continues to be an influence in the present. Ellen Fine states that members of a group can “continue to ‘remember’ an event not lived through. Haunted by history, they feel obliged to accept the burden of collective memory that has been passed to them and to assume the task of sustaining it” (126). Thus, Johnson’s affiliation with White’s story on a personal level and with regards to the part he played in raising awareness of the
violence of white supremacy, demonstrates this ‘passing on’ of memories which is realized through Incognegro.
In reference to the graphic novel form, in particular, Andreas Huyssen argues that the “cross-cutting of past and present” achieved through the comic form, “points in a variety of ways to how [the] past holds the present captive…” (71). Thus, not only do the overlaying images in the “mirror scene” attend to the unique ability of the graphic form to materialize the generational overlap which pertains to the experience of African American collective memory and cultural trauma, but the forward/afterward explicitly situates the reader in multiple historical frames (the antebellum South, the Jim Crow era of segregation, the black power movement, the contemporary racial tensions in America). The multiple generations which are referenced in the framing of the text and in its diegesis provides a temporal guide for the reader which is akin to the experience of African American collective memory and cultural trauma, as it is understood by Alexander, Eyerman, Fine and Hirsch. In the text, Zane states that his bi-racial identity is a “…walking reminder” of the traumatic history of slavery and is thus caught in the perpetual present-ness of the past. I would argue that Incognegro as a whole, and not just the figure of Zane is thus “an example of an internalized past, of the way in which atrocity literally reverberates through the minds and lives of subsequent generations” (Eva Hoffman, 103). Incognegro therefore functions as part of the ongoing ‘trauma process’ that Alexander and Eyerman outline. The text’s 2018 republication, which Johnson states is a reaction to the evidence that “…white racial resentment has reentered the American discourse as an overt, unapologetic force” and therefore “…the era of racial terrorism covered in Incognegro is suddenly relevant again”, consolidates the point I am trying to make. That is, the text engages in the working through of ruptures to the collective identity of African Americans as they are perpetuated and re-embedded within contemporary American society.
Incognegro also reworks the cultural and collective memories associated with the comic form itself. Sinéad Moynihan notes that the appropriation and subversion of images which evoke the figure of the Superhero, a character whose origins are indebted to both the comic form and “…problematic notions of white racial superiority”6, interrupts the myth that
the form introduced. Drawing on Megha Anwer, she states that, “…in a knowing nod to this history, Pleece visually frames the head Klansman in Incognegro, in terms explicitly
reminiscent of the superhero” (49). On page 106, the Klansman’s stance (hands on hips, legs slightly wider than hip-width apart) and cloak form an image reminiscent of depictions of comic-book superheroes. Incognegro, in referencing the mythologies of white supremacy embedded in the history of its own form, foregrounds and interrupts these notions as the graphic novel alternatively takes its perspective through the lens of African American
cultural memory and trauma. Scott McCloud notes that, “[b]y de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favour of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts” (41). Thus, by visually framing the Klansman in a superhero-like way, Incognegro tackles the concept of whiteness-as-superior by subverting the figure of the hero in the form of the leader of a white supremacist terror organisation, responsible for the deaths of multiple innocent African Americans. In this way, as Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger state
collective memory is a dynamic act with the potential to interrupt and develop narratives as it is, “…transferred, undertaken, and performed” (46).
6 Sinead Moynihan goes into detail about the white supremacist origin of the superhero in
American comics. She draws on Adnan Morshed’s exploration of the superhero as related to “social darwinism… and Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch” (82). For more information, see:
Morshed, Adnan “The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama,” Journal
of the Society of
Architectural Historians 63.1 (2004): 81-93.
Moynihan, Sinéad. "“Watch me go invisible”: Representing Racial Passing in Mat
Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro." South Central Review, vol. 32 no. 3, 2015, pp. 49. Project MUSE. Web.
