Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sharon Patricia Holland is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and Black Subjectivity and the coeditor of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, both also published by Duke University Press.

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The Erotic Life of Racism

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................ixintroduction The Last Word on Racism.................................................................1chapter one Race: There's No Place like "Beyond".....................................................17chapter two Desire, or "A Bit of the Other"..........................................................41chapter three S.H.E.: Reproducing Discretion as the Better Part of (Queer) Valor.....................65conclusion Racism's Last Word........................................................................95Notes................................................................................................115Bibliography.........................................................................................147Index................................................................................................161

Chapter One

"Race" is not what it was. —Paul Gilroy, Against Race

RACE There's No Place like "Beyond"

The rhetorical force of race talk is its ability to invoke that wonderful place called "beyond." If we can divest ourselves of our preoccupation with the past, if we can shed who we are (or have been) to one another, then we can get beyond race. Such joyful overcoming is worthy of a civil rights dirge or a Heideggerian tirade on the ends of (human?) history. But as time ticks on, moving beyond looks a lot like getting over. The particular conundrum here in this desire to move beyond, to get over, race is its reliance upon a future in which we will become, at least discursively, productive. In the wake of Johannes Fabian's classic Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), critics such as Lindon Barrett and Michelle Maria Wright have contributed to the further dismantling of the time/space continuum—otherwise known as the West's progress narrative—and the centrality of black bodies to modernity's reimagining of the white self.

As I noted in the introduction, this peculiar overcoming might have its roots in a somewhat pedantic intelligence about the relationship between black and white. It is precisely because the black subject is mired in space and the white subject represents the full expanse of time that the meeting of the two might be thought of as never actually occurring in the same temporal plane; yet the desire to get over such a meeting is immediate and the recovery is often swift. Exactly how does one move beyond a nonevent? How can this encounter be so important to us if these two never literally meet? Or to put it another way, maybe my encounter with the woman in the Safeway parking lot attests to the problem of relation—we meet all the time, but like Faulkner's Judith and Henry at Sutpen's Hundred the words we exchange when we happen upon our nonhappening serve as "brief staccato sentences like slaps" that reverberate off the walls, corridors, alleyways, and yes, even parking lots around us. This persistent ordering of such a meeting (one that we usually show up to with script in hand) might lead us to understand the fervent desire to move beyond an encounter that has in fact already occurred in the blood, and yet in time and space remains a nonoccurrence.

The (non)happening, and our critical obsession with its potentiality, marks a strange and schizophrenic approach to the very idea of relation. In racist ordering, relation is defined as those who shape time and those who stand outside it, as those who belong to your people, and those who do not. Only grave trespass can produce another order altogether. What makes that parking lot scene so compelling to me is that although my female counterpart certainly wanted to order time for me by manipulating the space I occupied ("move your car please"), she became the one who turned back the clock, thus changing the terms of the relationship. That confrontation illuminates the way in which racist logic ensnares even the racist trying desperately to declare the order of things, verbally or physically. By refusing to move in that Bartleby the Scrivener way—politely, I preferred "not to"—I challenged her to find another way to move me. And she did; but not without giving up her own stronghold on time's order of things. To move me she had to situate me in a discourse I would recognize, and in that one moment she looked back past me. Like a rider on a difficult horse, she tried to bring me up under her so that we could move forward—a move that in equestrian parlance equals mastery. In that instance, she touched on the mysterious life force of racist endeavor: in constantly trying to align the world according to a particular ordering, it arrests time rather than attests to its futurity. For her beyond race is nothing of the sort—it is just an order of things in which black (radical) yields to white (liberal). Theoretically speaking, beyond signals a very dangerous turn for antiracist struggle as it reifies nonrelation while simultaneously reinscribing the past (one's history) in a master-slave dialectic. Such is the order of things.

If relation technically happens (two persons, black and white, face to face) but never occurs given the time/space split, then what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva observes holds great purchase on my following review of work in "race" studies. As he notes: "People cannot like or love people they don't see or interact with. This truism has been corroborated by social psychologists, who for years have maintained that friendship and love emerge when people share activities, proximity, familiarity, and status." While reorganizing "status" under capitalism in the United States might be more than a small challenge, it is not difficult to see that proximity and familiarity can create the conditions to overcome racist practice. Or do they? What if proximity and familiarity don't create a level playing field of difference, but instead replicate the terms upon which difference is articulated and therefore maintained? What if our coming together (all the time) is the thing that we continue not to see as the lie of nonrelation and difference rolls off our tongues each time we say who we are and where we come from?

In the last two decades of humanities scholarship on race and racism, proponents on either side of an increasingly widening gap have moved through the terrains of racialization as social construction, identity politics, critical race theory, and genetics and genomics in order to understand what constitutes so fraught a belonging. For example, as Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres, in their own formulation of racism, announce: "In our analysis 'race,' simply put, is the child of racism." By placing race in pseudo-biological relationship with racism, Darder and Torres metaphorically reify the problem of biological relationship that makes studies of race and racism so difficult to manage. Settling the problem of biological belonging is the psychic life of race, and race work is always already performed by quotidian racism. My project gives depth and shape to the work of racism, arguing first and foremost, as have other Americanists, that...