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Freedom with Violence

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction | Freedom's Amendments Race, Sexuality, and Disposability under the State Form.........................................1One | Freedom and Violence in W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk The Land of Racial Equality....................................55Two | Legal Freedom as Violence in Nella Larsen's Quicksand | Black Literary Publics during the Interwar Years......................90Interlude...........................................................................................................................134Three | Rights-Based Freedom with Violence | Immigration, Sexuality, and the Subject of Human Rights................................143Four | Moving beyond a Freedom with Violence | The Politics of Gay Marriage in the Era of Racial Transformation.....................182Conclusion | Don't Ask, Don't Tell..................................................................................................219Notes...............................................................................................................................247Bibliography........................................................................................................................283Index...............................................................................................................................297

Chapter One

The Land of Racial Equality

But black nationalists have recognized since the time of Delany in the mid-nineteenth century that the location of the land of the black nation is highly problematic, as is the establishment of a state when the territory for the black nation has been identified ... The status of land and statehood is ambiguous among the theorists who embrace the nation-within-a-nation thesis. "Revolution is always based on land!" Malcolm X argued in his speech entitled "The Black Revolution." Yet the land over which the black revolution is to be fought was never specified. —MICHAEL C. DAWSON, Black Visions

It is a bitter fact that the research university's great leap forward came in the decades, 1890–1910, during which Jim Crow segregation was being systematically installed in American life.—CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD, Ivory and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980

This chapter positions W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a critique of the emergent disciplinary organization of knowledge within the newly formed US research university. Du Bois interprets US modernity through two distinct currents at the start of the twentieth century. First, and the most apparent current by which the text is opened, is the emergence of black male citizenship in the state and the persistence of racial despotism after the abbreviation of Reconstruction. The second current, less remarked upon though no less central to Du Bois, is the development of the modern research university in the United States and the rise of positivist modes of knowing, especially for the sciences of government and state. The currents are not merely a contiguous development, and Souls renders each as constituting a unified and complex dialectic of US twentieth-century modernity. What emerges, Du Bois argues, is a modernity with distinct and marginalized contingencies and the possibilities they engender. It is in pursuit of these contingencies that I argue that Du Bois's composite text produces a materialist theory of black culture as a suppressed difference of national capitalist state modernity.

For Du Bois, the twentieth century forces the recognition of race as irreducible to its functionalist representation as an object of and means for violence, an emergent liberal-juridical thesis of the time. Rather, the text offers an understanding of race, as in the case of black citizenship, as the production of the bodily subject as an experience of freedom and violence. As such, race offers as much as it demands a different epistemology of US modernity than that institutionalized by emergent positivism. Rather than seeking to engage or resolve the current debates concerning the numerous inconsistencies in W. E. B. Du Bois's racial thinking in Souls of Black Folk, my goal in this chapter is to focus on a set of narrative occurrences that operate across the different empirical, historical, literary, and autobiographical chapters and that, taken together, reveal a suppressed narrative structure—a structure that I believe discloses Du Bois's theorization of race as one of twentieth-century liberalism's conditions of possibility. In this way, I read Du Bois's Souls as a form of countermemory to the official narratives of national citizenship and emancipation that were generated by the liberal positivist methods that organized the university and the state in this period. Comparing Du Bois's work to that of the liberal progressive historian Henry Jackson Turner, who sought to offer narrative meaning to the state (conceived of as a field of practice and information), I read the two authors as offering conflicting accounts of the narrative of emancipation through which the nation and the citizen are naturalized and accorded the status of truth. Considered against the background of Progressive Era state building, Du Bois's text can be read as more than an example of the contradiction of emancipation for African Americans. Rather, his text offers a theory of race as a genealogy of what the narrative of emancipation both cannot admit and seeks to subjugate as the outmoded, anachronistic, or the archaic part of state-based political modernity.

LIBERAL POSITIVISM AND THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION

The work of the early Du Bois, including Souls, has generally been read as thoroughly complicit with the liberal and racial progressivism that organized academic thinkers and political elites in the United States from the 1880s through the First World War. Scholars and critics cite Du Bois's reliance on liberal theories of political representation as a countervailing force to the chaotic and degenerate conditions of mass democracy, and his belief in Lamarckian evolution and the civilizational discourse that overtook a country thoroughly engaged in imperial geopolitics. For Adolph Reed Jr., many of Du Bois's most famous formulations in Souls—many of which, like "double-consciousness," he would never return to—were part of a larger Progressive Era worldview: "The many different expressions of 'alienage,' fragmented consciousness, and anxieties about overcivilization were articulated within an outlook that hypostatized dichotomous, essentialist categories as fundamental determinants of human existence." That the concepts expounded by the early Du Bois fit so well within these Progressive terms convinces Reed that we ought to read Souls as part of a larger corpus produced by a university-trained academic elite that was both progressive and positivist and that sought to engage the ongoing social conflicts of the time. Reed writes: "Knowing what we do about Du Bois's faith in science and the nature of social scientific discourse about race during the era in question, it should not be too surprising to see that he operated within the parameters of mainstream academic conventions."

Seen from this perspective,...