Black Flesh Rendered Queer: Richard Wright's Island of Hallucination

• In Event: Corporeal Dissent: The Flesh, Clothing & Tattoos

Abstract

In 1987, critical theorist Hortense Spillers introduced the concept of black flesh in her seminal article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Black flesh, Spillers argues, “comes before the ‘body’” and “register[s] the wounding” caused by racial oppression. In this formulation, the black (discursive) body serves as the locale for social constructions and “differences” such as gender, sexuality, and disability while black flesh entails a site of pain, death, horror, trauma and abjection. As pre-discursive, black flesh cannot embody sexuality or queerness. Instead, it is figured as the affective yet material residue from experiencing racism. In this framework, black flesh is viewed as the constituent for black subjectivity and identity. In other words, subjectivity is sculpted from black wounds and pain. This not only silences a critique of subjectivity but also locates pain a foundational to black identity. In my presentation, I argue for a move away from understanding black flesh as a symptom of abjection and objectification towards reclaiming its critical potential. To accomplish this, I theorizes queer black flesh as a new ontology—one that reclaims flesh as not needing, ultimately rejecting the logic that it is only valid when articulated and experienced through subjectivity. I draw from Richard Wright’s unpublished manuscript Island of Hallucination (1959) to illustrate how his protagonist comes to embody queer black flesh. The presentation is divided into three parts.

First, I show how the protagonist recovers queer black flesh by first eliminating his socially constructed identities through embracing his queer (non-normative and same-sex) blackness. By pushing himself rather than being pushed to the margins, he realizes that normative—and abject—black consciousness as routed through Western subjectivity isn’t enough. Resistance and subversion cannot support his queer black life and that the supposed pain of flesh includes another dimension. In part two, I analyze Wright’s development of queer black flesh as not just pain or trauma but includes Black jouissance, love, and joy. By reframing flesh through this queer optic of pleasure Wright successfully offers an alternative ontology to subjectivity and recuperates a dispossessed world hidden when black flesh stands as abjection. In part three, I explore the phenomenology of queer black flesh. Without subjectivity, Wright represents his protagonist qua queer black flesh via performativity. In particular, Wright shows that when the protagonist must “speak” with others an improvisation occurs: whatever aspects of flesh are available form an ensemble and then perform an improvised and temporary “subjectivity.” This ephemeral “subject” interacts with others but immediately dissolves when no longer needed by folding itself back into the matrix of queer black flesh. This process of forming and deforming the subject is not of sign of agency but rather a queer black performance that pivots on call-and-response interactions and a non-hierarchical improvisation of flesh that’s available and not what “subjectivity” must be conjured. This paper is important because it reinstalls sexuality into the question of black flesh and outlines a new ontological condition. The replacement of subjectivity with queer black flesh radically dissents from hegemonic models of blackness.

Author

• Alvin Henry, St. Lawrence University