Xcp:  Streetnotes: Spring  2005

Streetnotes Spring 2005 xcp



Kara Lynch




  episode 03
--meet me in Okemah

from Invisible





about this project



 

 

 

 

--->  We are a people on the move

 

 

voluntary

                                                NO

 

                                                            coerced

seduced

                               

                        taken for a ride

 

 

 DRIVEN <---

 





 

prologue


detourment

Q: Is there ever a time when the black body is not performing?

A: When it’s dead.

 

Morbid and not true.

As Yen Le Espiritu has said, ‘Even dead, our bodies are contested.’

 

In late April 1911, a posse visited Laura Nelson, her son, L.W., and her husband.  They lived several miles and equally distant from, both Paden, Ok (a white town) and Boley, Ok (a black town).  The posse was looking for stolen meat – dead or alive.   The posse was headed up by deputy sheriff George H. Loney from Okemah, Ok -- Okfuskee county seat and host to the courthouse and jail.  Okemah was an all white town. Not native, not black – all white. All white in a frontier of settlers and boomers and statehood only five years old. An all white town in a region that ten years prior had been Indian Territory and designated Creek. Like all the other rivers turned to lakes in Oklahoma, a trail of tears dammed.

 

The deputy and his posse came looking for stolen meat.  What they got were a couple bullets in the leg and a stand-off.  And two bodies swinging in the breeze hovering above the North Canadian River, six miles from the county courthouse.

 

 

 

So the story goes: the deputy bleeds to death while the family keeps his boys at bay. The mother and son go to jail for the same murder.  The husband turns himself in for the original crime – grand larceny. The husband is found guilty as charged and sent to prison out of town while mother and son await arraignment. Two weeks before she sips her last breath, everyone knows Laura Nelson didn’t do it. 11pm the night before her arraignment, they come for her. First, the men drag fourteen year old L.W from the county jail. At the courthouse they think to fashion a gallows from a telegraph-post and the rope they carry on their saddles. Their minds shift and quietly head for the bridge.  All manner of things happen between hushed tones as they ride silently out of town with their quarry.  Six miles down Old Schoolton Road the group loops 1/2” hemp into two knots. The steel bridge is christened by this judge and jury execution. Pants at ankles and hands tied at wrists, head down, L.W. swings. Dress cinched at waist, hands loose by her sides, head cocked heavy, Laura floats.

 

The next morning, a young boy, black, walks the riverbed. Looking up, he sees his own swinging, floating, hanging dead from the trestle.  Slow, slippery N. Canadian river below laps sandy, silty shores listening to the wind whispering the evening’s deeds. By afternoon a crowd gathers at the bridge to see the sights. God-fearing settlers stand side by side looking out, down, across. No black people on the bridge only under it. Below a photographer captures the moments, one by one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A week earlier, Laura tries to escape. She bites the jailor in the scuffle and he calls her wild and unruly.  He recounts that as he choked her back into the makeshift women’s cell in the courthouse, Laura begged he kill her.’[1]

 


As a closing to a conference/festival of art and technology at UCSD called Powering Up/Powering Down[2], George Lipsitz spoke about performance as an important part of our work and struggle.  He reminded us that it is the repositioning that happens when you run the ideas, images, etc. through your body that is powerful.  Detourment. It is this kind of vigilance that is most necessary in the current moment.  He reminded us that creative and artistic communities have always embodied and enacted democracies that are living and growing. The political climate that we confront right now has not happened because we are weak but because we are potentially strong.  I go this far to paraphrase him because I feel that I needed that reminder. This relationship is a working through of lived experience coupled with political consciousness and a commitment to collective engagement. Sometimes I need to remind myself that for me to take a break from working myself into the ground can be an active response to the current political moment. I needed to recognize the ways that even when I think I am taking a break, concentrating on my work, in the studio or in the library, in the seminar room, on the bus, talking with friends, teaching college students, making dinner, having a dance party, sobbing cause I’m done laughing, that even in these moments that do not look like going to meetings, or demos or collaborating or whatever may constitute art/activism these days, I am still engaged and involved in resistance.

 



The space of imminent danger and casual violence

Black folks are left out of history. We are spatially outside of time.[3]

Laura Nelson is floating.

This does not however lift the weight of the crime of the hurt of the violence meted out upon hers and her son’s bodies.  This violence is a repetition of life for them.  It is a reminder to us all. Exemplary.

But she is not pulling downwards.

 

Just kill me now.

 

Laura knew well what was in front of her.

Kill me now.

What are the other options?  Watch a mob of men beat and rape your only son, then string him up beside you.  Look up at the stars focusing on the heavens rather than feel the thrust of some cowboy or gentlemen loose a load into your womb.  Your only consolation: that this time it won’t matter.  You won’t live to see that child into this ugly world. 

 

What are the other options?  Imagine that the judge will take pity upon you and set you free without protection – then find yourself preyed upon by every white, black and red man in the county who hears you are on your own and beaten down and wouldn’t try to protect yourself for fear of a hanging this next time….

Not many options.

Just kill me now.



the body in relation to subjectivity, recognition and double consciousness

Identity and identification are processes of power, subjugation and recognition.[4] For black folks recognition as it’s understood in western philosophy, has always been experienced through our relationship to whiteness/power/master.  Dubois/Fanon/Hall/Carby et al. describe the process of seeing through this veil of subjugation to understand oneself and propose a self-recognition that engages this double consciousness.  I think that there are folks making work that takes this double consciousness as a baseline and then pushes forward to imagine that we not only know ourselves through this veil, but we also know whiteness/power/master in a way that it can never fully know itself without us.  I think the driving question in my work these days is: what if black people just didn’t show up? If we just followed our parallel logic/trajectory without whiteness what would power look/feel like?

 

This line of inquiry of course brings up all of our investments and dependencies as Black people upon those power structures and narratives that we want to disrupt, fracture and resist.












invisibility

conspicuous invisibility:

 

In my work around issues of race and representation I have found that race’s constituent elements - gender and class  - always inform and interrogate the processes of racialization.  Understanding this, is one way to understand how power works.  In the last few years, it has become relevant and even necessary to include the national subject as one of the constituents of RACE.  In light of this, I have been fascinated by the hyper present absence of black and brown female bodies and reproductive potential within the production of power. 

           

The most representative and analogous image of this is the Hottentot Venus, Sartjee Bartman, the South African woman who was exhibited throughout Europe in the 19th century.  On the surface she is powerless – an object viewed as a freak of nature. The western representation of her -- big booty, hyper-sexual, primitive -- erases her as a political subject.  It is her very hyper presence as a body that makes her disappear and in turn, unrecognizable.  Meanwhile, if you scratch the surface a bit deeper, you find out that this woman did agree to participate in these tours.  You find that she was literate and fairly educated.  And though we don’t know all of the circumstances of her decision to join the circus of western colonialism, there is the possibility that she in fact had some agency.  Maybe she wanted to travel, see the world, and on someone else’s dime.

           


 

I give this example because my work troubles this question of subjectivity and agency that I think most liberal thinking simply describes as un-empowered.  If women, and specifically black and brown women, do not exist in any meaningful way in western philosophical[5] and political discourses, nor in Black discourses: veiled in Fanon[6] and in Dubois’ descriptions of double consciousness[7], or Carmichael’s Black Power; I propose we take on these conspicuous invisibilities as spaces of resistance where we can name ourselves and perform those identities.

 

Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine.  It can be obvious, it can reach you by baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present. It is dense and superficial, it can cause you bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to touch you. It is systematic and it is particularistic and it is often both at the same time. It causes dreams to live and dreams to die. We can and must call it by recognizable names, but so too we need to remember that power arrives in forms that can range from blatant white supremacy and state terror to ‘furniture without memories.’[8]

 





The project

 

Invisible is an ongoing episodic multidirectional, multimedia, narrative that speculates the black liberation parallel to eurotrash western civilization in the conflux of public record and sci-fi.

 

In 2099, the transatlantic slave trade never happened.  The event disappeared from the history books.  A strange cult keeps the false memory alive through ritual bondage and transport of bodies across imaginary borders.  In ‘Invisible’, maritime meets speed of light.  Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel, ‘the Invisible Man’, Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, and John Akomfrah’s film ‘Last Angel of History’, this time based electronic blkgrrrlretrofuture, sci-fi action-documentary takes on issues of black radicalism, turn of the century phenomena, passing and cross-over cultures.  Two main characters dominate our experience in this futurescape.  One, Z.L. Rhinehart is a CLEANER, the other, Nia Tabono, a TIME-TOURIST.  We now have the technology to move freely between a time/space continuum without adverse effect.  There is no present/future ‘consequence’ for altering the past. The grandfather paradox has no weight: thanks to a corps of CLEANERS.  This chameleon caste melts into any era as they follow the every move of careless TIME-TOURISTs, picking up after them, shifting events to remedy their clumsy interactions with past and future landscapes.

 

‘Episode 03 here, now and then: meet me in Okemah’ activates a documentary photograph of a lynching in Oklahoma circa 1911. The first installment of this episode: an outdoor video projection and ambient sound piece, launched 12.01.03 to 12.07.03 in the visual arts facility of the UC, San Diego campus. Another installment at Art Center will live as audio and video projection within spaces of transition, movement and suspension -- the stairwell, the airspace, the elevator. Part visceral experience, part clairvoyance, these site-specific audio and video installations intervene into the time and space of memory and architecture through a speculative fiction.

 

 

When this episode begins, our time tourist, Nia, finds herself yanked from a rivers edge to a skiff.  An entrepreneurial photographer enlists her help.  Above on the bridge, our Cleaner, Rhinehart, blends into the crowd of working Joes who have come to see the sights.  Dangling from the steel girders, Laura Nelson and her fourteen year old son swing in the breeze, necks broken by one inch hemp rope.

 

The performance/execution of this project was a 7day audio/video installation embedded into transitory public space: stairwells, vestibules, catwalks, hallways and elevators.  The installment concentrates on multiple perspectives of violence and environment set at the moment of a photograph of a lynching of a black woman, Laura Nelson and her son, from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma on May 25, 1911 and the present day recovery of that place/time.  The piece encourages the audience to perform by way of internalization or incorporation as well as by way of disassociation and dismissal.  It is as much a performance to not see/hear the piece as it is to acknowledge its presence. Anyone could walk through, into or past the work.  Just as we do or don’t witness, recognize, engage in, open ourselves up to the daily, ordinary violence of becoming a political subject.

 

 


 

 

space/time, performance, non-narrative strategies and reception

 

The narrative keeps me afloat as myself in my world without excuses or explanations.  It is an antidote to “keep that nigger boy running.”

 

I have a very elaborate back-story to my project, Invisible, that at this moment is only for me. My back-story is set in a future where time travel is possible, Time Tourists are picked up after by a commoner caste of Cleaners, a resistance movement plots the disruption of a Eurocentric time/space continuum, and the transatlantic slave trade never happened but is kept alive by a pseudo-religious cult. I chose science fiction or rather it chose me because it is unlike the more character-driven genre : literature. Sci-fi speaks to and contends with social relations. The back-story, the narrative, is the vehicle for me to get into the issues at hand: the inherent violence of subjectivity. 

 

I still grapple with the place of the narrative and its performed-ness in my work as its own body.  When experience is everything to a piece, what happens when you refuse a narrative to your audience? Is this a way of silencing myself or speaking more loudly? And what really are the strategies of conspicuous invisibility that originally brought me to this material in the first place? More recently, my work has found its way into the tricky world of abstraction.             




 

form

 

 ‘don’t forget to pick up your stone…’

a bridge. a mother. a son. a crowd above. a river below. the shutter opens and quickly closes - as quickly as a breath held by a new devotee dressed in white at the river's edge dunked gracelessly by the pastor and comes up panting for air - saved.  as quickly as the knot tightens and the neck breaks.  suspended, this moment rises above the river below taunting gravity. it lengthens.  we remember. we blink.  we see the horizon.  we take it with us.  we sink.  We listen and voices carry us.  we float. we blink and it's over. 

it's like it never happened and we feel it in our bones.


 

 

‘Invisible’ is propelled by movement. Not progress perse, but movement nonetheless. It is traveling, mobile, and transitory in its relationship to form – stopping in one place only for moments – but leaves behind traces and memories of its expanse. I traverse media: video, audio, text, and architecture. Each installment utilizes diverse media building upon the strengths of the relationship of form and content. Each element is conceived within the whole but with the conceit that it may function independent of other elements.  In keeping with my theoretical and material concerns, the piece plays with grand scale spectacle in the form of two-story video projections, discreet sound infiltrations in elevators, hallways and entry-ways, and the uneasy relationship of the body to the art object or aesthetic experience by way of public and private performance.

 

Structured as an episodic project, ‘Invisible’ unfolds over time. Each episode has its own integrity and relationship to the other.  They do not appear in chronological order and each takes form through multiple installments. The performance of these parts regenerate from the process of research and immersion, to the production of each element, to its presentation, to the audience’s participation.


 

 

 

 

 

episode 03.

 

One image has held my attention for over a year. In researching G.H. Farnum, the ‘bachelor foto graffer’ of Okemah, Ok, I found two more images that bookend the one published in Without Sanctuary – Lynching Photography in America. In one, the frame tightens, boxing the spectators in and brings more detail to Laura and L.W. swinging below the bridge. Few stances change, and everything is in focus – just a document of what happened. A good souvenir for folks to take home. The other is the blooper, the un-staged, the unrehearsed. The frame is closer still, and all heads point down as the spectators on the bridge lean over the steel railing to see the bodies below. The three together move spatially and temporally but resist narrative. They are not chronologically fixed

 


 

 

 

Pushed.  Shoved.  Jostled. 

Swaying off balance, righting himself he looks past the tow-headed boy between arm and torso. He looks past the railing resting between them and the river below. Past his toes hovering the edge, water slips below, he sees jute, knotted, twisted.  kggghhhrrrrrrkahh. Spiraling held taut and heavy pulling downward.  Rhinehart sinks at knees. hffffuuuh. The walls of the room flicker blank. Breathe.  hssss--h. Fingers raw and red grip thick mass hemp woven, a handful. Gloveless wrap round rope, over, around, through -- a lanyard. Temporary not staying long. brrrrrrhhhhhuuuuph. Head down, eyes closed; mane shakes worried and impatient.  Another handful of rope, thicker and longer. Looping three four times, rough edges saw callous and skin tough from wear. Pulling through coils waiting and ready. The standing end short and knotted and strangled.  

 

Neckless the rope pulls free, a magic trick. 

Gripping metal, a ball; kneecaps cradle Rhinehart’s forehead. Light touch - heavy load.[9]

 


In late June, 2003 I traveled to Okemah, Oklahoma to collect images, sound, text and a sense of place. I spent several days at the bridge at Yarbough’s crossing shooting video, photographs and recording sound. On my last day of shooting, I decided to walk across the bridge, now a well traveled two lane paved county road. Glued to the shoulder I peered over the edge with the lens of the video camera.

 

I lean over the side of the bridge.  I’ve spent the last week nervous, anxious, tentative.  Just before ‘leaving for good’ – I’ve got everything I need.’ I’ve only looked across this river from its bank. The river water close to my toes.  My feet on sandy shorelines and sinking a bit.

 

I lean over the side of the bridge.  Minutes ago I was in the red rental car with every intention of leaving the scene, on my way out of town. a job well done.  So long, it’s been good to know ya.  Gotta go.  I scanned the roadway, empty on a good Christians all in church Sunday morning.  I had been concerned about cars passing and the shoulder too narrow for me to walk the length of the concrete.  I was concerned about people asking me a lot of questions.  I was worried about being alone, nobody knowing my whereabouts or activities.  then I thought, how much of a risk can it be to walk over this bridge.  One car passes every 20minutes at the most, the shoulder is wider than me, and all week long I’ve driven this stretch of road, climbed down to the riverbank, wandered through these woods without incident, why now would anyone take notice. 

 

I hold the camera at chest level cradled by both hands.  I walk without looking.  I’m sure it looks fine, I switch everything to automatic.  This is not ideal, but very convenient.  I know that the footage will bump with each step I take.  I keep walking.  Every so often I stop to look around, take it all in.  the woods, the road, the river in the distance, below.  I get over my worries.  I walk confidently to the middle of the bridge and point the camera down over the side. 

 

Half expecting Laura Nelson to appear before me, I stare the lens down into the ripples of the water.  Zoom ravenously at so much brown – green liquid and the sparkles from the sun like stars lost at sea.  EEEhhhhn!  Eeeeeehhhn! Eeeeeerhhhn!   My head turns, back straightens.  I face a ford F150 barreling towards the bridge.   I am not interested in big pick up trucks and what they want to honk at me.  Again the honks and more urgent.  I look up more carefully this time and more annoyed.  Wide load.  Wide load. black on yellow. Bold strung across the bumpers of the F150 and the flatbed behind.  A house approaches.  Wide load. I assess my size and the sliver between the house and the waist high cement wall of the bridge. The F150 passes, I sprint across the two lane paved county road to the other side. Only a few good options and my body took survival.  In another version of the same story I jump over the bridge and meet Laura Nelson on the way down.

 

With no time to switch the camera to standby, this episode is recorded on video tape. This footage becomes the template and mirror for the video loop entitled: ‘rope’. ‘Rope’ pieces together the perspectives of the three main characters in this episode: Rhinehart walking on the bridge looking down, Nia nervously shifting on the riverbank below looking up, and Laura Nelson hanging, swinging, floating eyes fixed on the horizon. ‘Rope’ is part clairvoyance as it situates us in the moment that Rhinehart experiences the bridge and all its trauma. This six minute loop incorporates my near death experience with multiple perspectives of the past, present and future violences of the site: the Old Schoolton Bridge at Yarbough crossing of the North Canadian river, Oklahoma. This loop then inhabits a semi-circular wall beneath a staircase and catwalk and it’s double image dominates an adjacent wall a full story above.

 

There is a break between the double projection of the still image of G.H. Farnum’s photograph ã 2897[10] of the spectacle of Laura and L.W. Nelson’s lynching and a loop of the riverbed and water moving below. This messy line emphasizes the iconographic potential of the top image where townspeople from Okemah, Ok circa 1911 now lean against the metal railing of a catwalk of the Visual Arts Facility and Laura and L.W. shift the weight of two brick columns one functional the other decorative. It also questions the point of view of the photographer, past and present, of this scene. 

 

Both sets of double projections infiltrate and dominate space. From above, they stare across to one another, from below they are separated by a long, semi-enclosed hallway. They also work to transform these transitional spaces, illuminating a walkway with flowing water or with its flickering details of trees, riverbanks, bridges and birds soaring above lends texture and shape to an neglected wall.  In the case of the first installment, these sites of public architecture activate the image and open up meaning to incorporate both aesthetic and social concerns. Space is the new frontier.

 

Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.[11]

 

Sound travels and resonates. It is the audio component of this project that reverberates over time. Implanted into the architecture, under the stairway, in the elevators and within a vestibule, the voices of crickets, birds, cars passing, a church sermon, a whip, a moan, footsteps, water splashing, a choir, echo. These voices, culled from field recordings from research at Galveston, Texas’ Juneteenth celebration, ten June days in central Oklahoma, and a reading by Grisha Coleman of two paragraphs of text from episode 03, are refashioned into representative excerpts and journeys. The shortest, ‘rope’ 1min. 16 sec. conflates Laura Nelson’s memory of the white mob two weeks later at the courthouse and her subsequent passage from jail cell to the North Canadian river. The longest piece, ‘church’ 8min. 06sec. time travels an ambient landscape that hints at revelation and redemption. I am loath to narrate these sound-scapes because their strength is that they defy narrative structures, but they do tell our stories.

 

The most formidable element of this project is the text itself. It is multi-layered. Zoom out: there is the meta project and time travel meta-narrative of Nia, Rhinehart and the archivist who builds their stories out of traces and artifacts. Zoom in: we are in the woods along a riverbed staring at a spider’s web pulling the focus ring of a digital video camera. From reams and reams of imaginative prose, self-reflexive field notes, fictional diary entries and postcards I have pulled out two paragraphs to brace the two installments of episode 03: meet me in Okemah. Beyond its influence upon other elements and inspiration for further research, the written text of this project remains an archive. There are plans to incorporate the specific narrative of episode 03 into a final installment that takes book form. This object will carry sound image and text equally with two versions: the LP box set and a chapbook with accompanying CD.




 


Methodology

1. Stax v. Motown

 

Stax is always the raw cousin, rebellious stepchild of an American musical landscape dominated by rhythm and blues in the early 1960s. Motown was the sound and the style that crossed us over, filling Top 40 lists and juke-boxes nationwide. Both are innovations in their own right.  The ‘stripped down soul’ of Stax gave voice to singers like Otis Redding and the Staple Singers and songwriters like Isaac Hayes and David Porter. The finish and finesse of Motown does not gloss over the dominance of Black music and culture in the popular consciousness and its relationship to a growing civil rights movement and the push towards integration in the 1960’s and 70’s in the United States.

 

I am looking for the moment of impact and innovation that plays out in the everyday tension of Stax v. Motown.  I propose it is this tension that propels culture, history and memory for Black people in the Americas.  You cannot have one without the other. Denmark Vesey necessitates Frederick Douglas and vice versa.  The Underground Railroad stays on track in dialog with maroon communities. Meanwhile each form lives within a construct of captivity and struggle.

 

At it’s most literal my approach is one of pitting artists, events, objects, information and styles against one another to push their potential to the fore.  I look at work that may be considered raw and gritty in tandem with its contemporary crossover cousin. As a process and approach, Stax v. Motown is the Black vernacular dialectic.  Move over Herr Hegel.

 






2. performance

 

There is a spider’s web and she is in the center - spotlit.  I want to capture that image. That moment.  At the very least I want not to disturb it.  I am glad I see it before I plow right through turning the lacework into sticky threads across my neck and shoulders.  I step to the side. Flash forward -- wipe my face clean with one solid stroke down forehead over eyes, across nose fist closing past mouth.  I stare.  Flash back -- the sun treasures this web.  Lattice.  An eye tugging at nearby branches.  It seems stupid to point the camera at something so thin and commonplace.  For the first time in hours, my eyes settle calmly.  And I steady the camera smoothly and turning the iris, the focus ring and readjusting the eye-piece I finally find it.  shards of light against the strings are so delicate that they get lost in the fuzz and noise of the camera lens.  Focus, unfocus, turn left all the way then right all the way.  No stop right there.  Slow down, take your time.  There it is.  slowly pull focus and zoom in.  don’t move a muscle and take a breath to hold for at least a minute.  My body becomes a tripod as I swallow down the urge to gulp the thick cool breeze.  Stupid really to think that I could see anything this way. 

 

Panning down from the web I imagine what Nia would see.  The rush of anxiety for this girl alone losing her shit in the woods in a time that is not hers thrusts my eyes and then my hands pointing the camera from floor to ceiling of this lush green place.  Looking for a calm spot.  A way out.  Looking for air.  Looking for the footsteps coming closer.  Footfall - light through heavy sand then a rustling crunching steady rhythm.  Quiet.  Look up.  There he is.   white shirt collared.  Black bands running from waist over shoulders hoisting up pants also black.  A brim far out from a hat that covers a face with bright eyes.  A hand reaching down.  She slaps it away, ducks her head down and lets out another moan.

 

 

Documentarian, archivist, researcher, ethnographer, carpet bagger, griot. In all of these manifestations, the work of gathering and transmission insists upon active physical presence. The body is a vehicle for research and social interaction. I pick up and leave the safe haven of the studio and head straight to the source. I follow in the footsteps of social theorists like Foucault, Dubois and Fanon and artists such as Anna Deveara Smith, Shu Lea Cheang, Janet Cardiff, Mark Dion and Renee Green.

 

The line drawn between performing and researching wears down, spread thin by constant crossing, stretching, bending and breaking. At once the ethnographer and documentarian gathers field recordings and returns ‘home’ to condense these experiences into representative image, text and audio tracks. The very act of gathering informs each subsequent step. Intrinsic to the collecting is the knowledge that these recordings will be synthesized and assembled into a document with its own characteristics and criteria for presentation. This built-in reflexivity informs and often determines the treatment of the recordings for the next phase of the performance. Each document has its own set of rules and logics, but inhabit a larger whole. These documents are malleable and reform as I rework, revise and revisit the materials and the performance itself. The viewer is also implicated in this cycle. The completed circuit includes a participatory audience.


 

 

 

 

An outsider with good intentions[12], the archivist carpetbagger drops in on a community and rummages it for its jewels and treasures, then catalogs the local resources for use at a later date. What may be described as pillaging doubles as a reclamation project. The Diaspora necessitates a transitory griot. This 21st century griot reconfigures these stories with sound and image and gives voice to our collective memories within a public sphere. In this way, the narrative shifts from its traditional oral form to a non-linear spatial experience.

 





3. sci fi

 

 

Octavia Butler teaches me the limits and constraints of the body in concert with the limitlessness of the imagination. Samuel Delaney teaches me the semiotics of science fiction and to engage the form for the purposes of social critique and personal discovery. Through these living legacies of Black sci fi, I’ve learned that science fiction as a genre reflects back the society and its norms. Both Delaney and Butler provide journeys rich with sentient beings, shifting realities and a potential for change. These two skilled writers/scholars/visionaries pen worlds anchored by familiar details and a deep, dark, distant referent of the Black experience in the Americas. But these worlds are also places we’ve never been before, liminal and transformational. The spaces of Afro-future in their writing are visceral, emotional and visual. I owe a great debt to them for infuriating and exciting me into exploring the potentials of speculation.[13] In the case of Invisible, science fiction is a strategy that veils and unveils in order to open up a broader dialog around race, space, time and vision.

 









Points of departure

1. Black holes and time travel

 

‘note to future self: You forgot something, go back and get it.’

 

Physicists currently know how to travel into the future. It is all about speed.

They say, If you get on a space ship – the space shuttle for example – and you travel at light speed or at as close to light speed as possible, you will be moving faster than those you left behind. In order to notice a difference, you must travel far.  And what will be 25 years for those left behind, will be 5 for you.[14]  You will return to a future that may not remember you at all.

 

They say that the past is more difficult.

You need a black hole.  At the edge of the black hole just before it sucks you in – time stands still. Static. If the black hole, this huge vacuum of anti-matter had an egress one could travel back in time. It would become a portal or what sci-fi buffs call a worm hole.[15]

 

Though I would be excited to hover at the edge of a black hole imagining the possibilities… I wonder if the past is not already wedded to the future so much that the first trip to days and years ahead doesn’t also take us backwards. What happens to the 20 years difference upon your return to earth after rapid travel far away?

 

2. Master :: Slave // Hegel :: Reconstruction

 “From century to century you'll remember me

In history - not a mystery or a memory

God by nature, mind raised in Asia

Since you was tricked, I have to raise ya

From the cradle to the grave, but remember

You're not a slave

Cause we was put here to be much more than that

But we couldn't see it because our mind was trapped

But I'm here to break away the chains, take away the pains

Remake the brains, reveal my name

I guess nobody told you a little knowledge is dangerous

It can't be mixed, diluted; it can't be changed or switched

Here's a lesson if ya guessing and borrowing

Hurry hurry, step right up and keep following

The leader

 

…. and follow and follow, because the tempo's a trail

The stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail…”

- Radio Rakim Follow the Leader.[16]





slavery the peculiar American institution.

There is much to be gained from theorizing subjectivity and representation through the black body. Susan Buck-Morss makes a compelling argument that in his work on Phenomenology of the Mind and more specifically in considering the Master/Bondsman relationship, that Hegel does indeed consider the context of the transatlantic slave trade as well as independence and resistance movements in the Americas as exemplified in the case of Haiti at the end of the 17th century. 

We are left with only two alternatives.  Either Hegel was the blindest of all the blind philosophers of freedom in the Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and Rousseau by far in his ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the print right in front of his nose at the breakfast table [Hegel read Minerva religiously – and it reported upon the revolution in Haiti]); or Hegel knew – knew about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within his contemporary context.[17]

 

The traffic of Black bodies between the African continent, the Americas and Europe is the invisible ground in which Hegel theorizes the life and death struggle of coming to self-consciousness: the process of becoming which he attributes to Spirit.

But now this young lecturer, [Hegel] … made the audacious move to … inaugurate, as the central metaphor of his work, not slavery versus some mythical state of nature (as Hobbes to Rousseau had done earlier), but slaves versus masters, thus bringing into his text the present, historical realities that surrounded it like invisible ink.[18]

 

I believe that this invisible ink that Buck-Morss proposes is RACE.  It is the racialization of African slavery in the Americas which remains unspoken in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel assumes that the slave, and especially in this case the African slave had not had subjectivity prior to contact. With that, it will always appear that the African slave should struggle and fight for ‘freedom’ and subjectivity.

 

The problem is that there is no acknowledgment really of what captivity means.  In the case of the transatlantic slave trade, captivity means a stripping away of culture, history and tradition as well as a total displacement of close to 15 million peoples. We cannot underestimate the effects of the experience of the middle passage for these kidnapped people. Within the varied traditions and world views how was this journey across an ocean in total confinement and lock down understood by these enslaved African peoples? Orlando Patterson describes the transition that a slave goes through to become a slave and thus become socially dead.  The first is to totally break with the past.  The slave is uprooted from his/her community, “he is de-socialized and depersonalized.” The next stage is the introduction of the slave into the world of the master, “but it involves the paradox of introducing him as a non-being.”  The slave is totally defined in relation to the master and is socially dead without history or a past and without his/her own community: “the slave will remain forever an unborn being.”[19]

 

This is where we find Hegel. The description of the Master/Bondsman relationship is described from the point of view of the becoming subject, the Master. This precludes any other cosmology of a life except that of the dominant culture. In this way, freedom via Hegel will always be a trap for the slave.  A trap of interdependency or death. You may argue that for the slave population in Haiti, there was no choice but death – better to fight for independence than live a social death without rights or agency.

 

Then why Hegel? Hegel’s dialectic, by way of the Master/Bondsman passage, alerts us to the inherent violence of subject-ness. The other reverberates against the self --- and somehow we know more (§179, 181, 184). My theory is that Hegel discusses Master/Slave independence + dependence in regards to self-consciousness as a way of understanding the life or death struggle that this process necessitates WITHOUT the negation of death.  Self + other as equals both coming to self-consciousness in relation to one another, recognizing (Hegel §184)[20] can only result in a life or death struggle, that’s what Hegel proposes to us, that’s what he comes to (Hegel §187)[21].  And then he throws out that that won’t work because Death is the ultimate negation (Hegel §188)[22]. Then presto – Master/Bondsman (Hegel §190).  Like magic he has found a way to work out this process without the risk of real death. Possibly the risk (in the place of death), persists in the dependency/independence between the Master + his slave.  Death exists allegorically as a social death as in the case of the slave[23].  Hegel offers a little role-playing as a stand-in for the trial by death between these equals: self and other.

 

If you then step back to Susan Buck-Morss’ discussion of the historical context for Hegel’s dialectic we must consider seriously the significance of the Black body with regards to this inherent violence of recognition and becoming. W.E.B. Dubois highlights the peculiar nature of the institution of slavery in the U.S. in his discussion of the Reconstruction period. In many ways, the southern plantation system’s reliance upon slave labor was antithetical to capital and economic growth during the industrial revolution. Dubois’ perception of how race trumps class in the case of Reconstruction and its relationship to the failures of manumission and emancipation for the economic and social systems in the U.S. further emphasizes the presence of another dynamic process that is not just about the price of cotton.[24] The institution of Code Noir: the legal insistence upon the ‘thingness’ of Black slaves in the Americas, presents evidence that the relationship is cathectic.[25] It is not just that the presence of racialized slavery in Europe and the Americas offers a paradox and scapegoat to cries of freedom, but it is a case study for the both the internalization and representation of the violence of self-consciousness for the Western subject.






3. violence and representation

Miss Otis Regrets, she’s unable to lunch today, madam,

Miss Otis Regrets, she’s unable to lunch today.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

She is sorry to be delayed,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

But last evening down in Lover’s Lane she strayed, madam.

Black bodies swinging in the sun on the breeze

Miss Otis Regrets, she’s unable to lunch today.

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

When she woke up and found that her dream of love was gone, madam,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

She ran to the man who had led her so far astray

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh

She drew a gun and shot her love down, madam,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Miss Otis regrets, she’s unable to lunch today.

When the mob cam and got her and dragged her from the jail, madam

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

They strung her upon the old willow across the way,

For the rain to wither, for the wind to suck

And the moment before she died,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

She lifted up her lovely head and cried, madam….

Here is a strange and bitter crop.[26]

Miss Otis regrets, she’s unable to lunch today.

Miss Otis regrets, she’s unable to lunch today.[27]

 

The two negroes were taken west of town six miles to the Canadian river bridge in a negro settlement and were swung from the bridge. Both the woman and boy were gagged with tow sacks. The rope was half inch hemp, and the loops were made in the regular hangman’s knot.  The woman’s arms were swinging at her side, untied, while about twenty feet away swung the boy with his clothes partly torn off and his hands tied with saddle string. The only marks on either body were that made by the ropes upon the necks. Gently swaying in the wind, the ghastly spectacle was discovered this morning by a negro boy taking his cow to water.[28]

 

Lynching is any kind of extralegal means of practicing ‘popular justice’. It is at once image and object.  It is symbolic and real. It is surveillance. It is exemplary violence.[29] The Black body swinging from the poplar tree becomes a notice to others: ‘stay in your place. The only justice for you is from the end of a rope.’ The violence is not only meted out upon a single body, but upon the collective. The effects are physical, economic, social, psychic, emotional and spiritual. They seep into every corner of daily life. The terror becomes a legacy passed down for generations. At the height of lynching in the U.S. the irrationality of the attacks are not shocking, because the event is ordinary[30].  The violence is casual and intimate in nature and only reflects back the position of Black folks in the Americas regardless of any well-worded proclamation or bill to enfranchise them.  W.E.B. Dubois rarely has occasion to roll up his banner: Another Man Lynched Today.  Black spectatorship in this case outdistances the meaning of double-consciousness.

The lynching came as a complete surprise to the sheriff’s forces and the people….and while the general sentiment was adverse to the method, it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them under due process of law.[31]

 

Black people were lynched for all kinds of alleged crimes: having an affair with, whistling at, talking to, sassing, hitting and raping a white woman; horse thieving; murder; robbery; assault, etc. Many were in the custody of local jailors and judges at the time of their abduction. Others were dragged from their homes in the dead of night and the middle of the day.[32] When trying to understand the mentality behind white mobs of regular folks participating in and/or attending a lynching and it’s sometimes carnival atmosphere, it is important to remember the multiple meanings and purposes of the act itself. The charred piece of finger, or penis, or ear taken from the burned, scarred, beaten, dragged, whipped, castrated, raped, torn, bound, bullet-ridden, lynched body by a spectator is a souvenir, a marker, an image and object: a fetish. The entertainment value of the violence played out yes, is spectacle, but it is also real. This is not a movie. It will be replayed throughout the United States of America at a lamp-post, a bridge, a tree near you -- the bodies seemingly interchangeable. It is the repetition of the act itself, the viewing of it during and after and then the distribution of the image of it by way of postcards that balances lynching between a naturalized and symbolic act.

 

The woman was very small of stature, very black, and about thirty-five years old, and vicious….the boy was about fourteen years old, slender and tall, yellow and ignorant.[33]

 

Why Laura Nelson? What could the community learn from her? What is the message here? Why must she and her son watch each other’s death? Once the parade of viewers from counties as far east as Arkansas and  south and west as Texas was subsided, why will no one come to claim their bodies? How did this ‘small in stature, very black’ woman come to have a ‘tall, slender, yellow, and ignorant’ son?[34] There are an unprecedented number of newspaper articles about this event[35]. At the same time, each newspaper mis-names and re-names Laura as Mary, L.W. as L.D. and cannot decide whether the boy is 14, 16 or 18 years old.  Even with all the attention, their bodies become things without fixed identities. Conspicuously absent. And after the fact, the judge in Okemah, distressed not at the loss of human life, but at the breech of official justice, calls for a Grand Jury investigation into the lynching. This investigation ends a month later with some information of those involved, but no hard facts to bring them in for the crime committed.

 

 

 

Laura’s husband gave himself up to the law days after staving off a posse of men outside their home long enough for a man to die of bleeding from a wound in his leg. By giving himself up, he receives quick and deliberate justice and is sent to prison while his wife and her son await arraignment for a murder that could be described in legal terms as self-defense, and was most certainly an attempt at self-preservation. It was well known that at the time in the border territories it was not difficult to become a deputy, and anti-horse thieving groups were vigilantes with reputations, missions and world views akin to that of the Ku Klux Klan in other states.[36] When Deputy Sheriff Loney came to their door looking for stolen meat we can conjecture that he also came looking for trouble. In all of the newspaper articles about this event there is never mention of Laura Nelson’s husband’s name. He is always referred to as her husband and not L.W.’s father. Who is this baby’s daddy? His namelessness marks race as a question, and therefore a threat. Miscegenation and self-determination. It is his namelessness that points to the need for a double hanging. Laura and L.W.’s bodies hanging beneath the Old Schoolton bridge at Yarbough landing constitute a double threat: this is what could happen to you, and this is what will happen to you.











conclusion

 Shhhhhhhhhhwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ….She is in a small room floor and ceiling closing in as she bounces back and forth between the four corners a rag doll. A rubby ball chucked back and forth. Her hands curl over her head protective between blows, elbows out, jabbing. The walls draw inward, so close that she is standing still in one spot, circling and wobbling from corner to corner. Pounding, burning. The walls flash a living pinball machine. 2 feet from the tree. Head bobs. Hands tied. Rope, rough, raw, rrrrrrrehhhhaaarrr. hemp. Body seizes, flops, legs pulling arms caught. Push, pull and the rope draws up, yank. Weight down ground ten tons, yank many hands make light as a feather. Swwwwwwwssshhh Crreeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrk tree resists. Rumble.  Laughter, shouts. Hard sounds careening. Hsssssssitk -  hauuuuh. Auhn. Hsssssitk – hauuuuh. Auhn. Toes draw jerky lines deep in the dirt, next to the tree, in front of a clump of bodies. Ears fill as right thumb rasps along left wrist and edges of fingernails rake ruined cuff. Eyes wide open. The floor littered with thin, small twigs cut off, scattered. Glint, bronze sharp edges like a hand pronged and folded dropped and discarded. One of many.  Hsssssitk – pa –h --- ckhrrrrrrrhhhk – hauuuuh. Tree a river of  bark pushing upstream. Green  thick  velvet  wraps  roots  warm. Tree shrinks in corner, a rope slack, lips worry a metal bit.  eyes look back --  huge round unsparing.  Weight shifts, the horse whispers. Eyes close nothing to see. Water to the horizon inside lids a small opening punched through an eager bobbing. Swells jagged coax to shore. Knees plunge, arms yield, head too heavy, neck gives way.

 

Mouth wide.  Silence. Last image: a constellation scarred light on deep dark blue black torso – the night sky.

 

She[37] looks up.  Sky heavy and weepy waiting.

 





disillusionment

 

In 1955, Emmett Till was lynched. A 15 year old Chicago native visiting family in Mississippi was beaten, abused, shot and drowned for whistling at the white woman behind the counter of a local grocery store. At the time, two men were brought before a jury of their peers and acquitted. The all white jury and townsfolk terrorized their Black neighbors and employees into silence around this brutal extrajudicial murder. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, decided in 1955 to have an open casket funeral and opened it to the public. The white press was astounded, shocked. Mrs. Till Mobley felt strongly that people had to see the crime committed. She was not interested in remorse or shock, She was interested in laying bare the effects of racism in America. This was not an isolated incident. In light of the trajectory of the Civil Rights Movement in 1955, it would seem that white justice and power in Mississippi had sent a clear message of exemplary violence and surveillance to Black people nationwide. That there was outcry from the international community and that the shocked northern white press deemed this lynching newsworthy does not preclude the fact that it was not safe to be Black in Mississippi. It did however prove that there was a broader audience for this spectacle. In the same stroke, Black activists, artists, and writers alike cite the photograph of Emmett Till’s battered face and body published by Johnson Publishing in Jet Magazine and the event of Emmett’s funeral as a powerful marker in their political consciousness. To this point, Johnson Publishing has exclusive rights to the image of Emmett Till. You must go through them for permission to use the image. To my knowledge they have not released it to anyone. Beyond a healthy caginess with regards to the dominant media, its receptive audience and their joint role in making meaning, it seems that the publishers of Jet Magazine know something about conspicuous invisibility.

 

 

 

 

Torture functions by destroying the prisoner by inflicting pain, objectifying the body and then denying that pain in order to reiterate the position of power in the hands of the state. Torture is not really about the act itself – interrogation is a false motive and the pain of the prisoner is inutterable; it is about representing power through the mechanism of this act. It reproduces itself and is exemplary. By denying that images of torture are possible, we too deny the pain of the and subject-hood of this prisoner.[38]

 

Power is cautious. It covers itself. It bases itself in another’s pain and prevents all recognition that there is “another” by looped circles that ensure its own solipsism.[39]

           

Whether our denial is seeped in guilt or ignorance makes no difference. In our distance, we are party to the reproduction of power through the misrecognition and re-representation of physical, emotional and psychic pain and subsequent silence inherent to torture.

 

A collective ‘American’ shock and awe at the content of and the context of the digital photographs of torture conducted in the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq affords democracy loving patriots innocence and distance from these abuses and the war that makes them possible. The public discourse around these images is one of moral outrage on

 

 

both sides: left and right. For once folks can agree on something: avoiding the issue. For several days I did not see any of these images, I simply heard about them – on the radio, from friends, through email lists, eavesdropping. Everyone talked around these images. The only specific descriptions were in print form. Verbally, people’s comments concentrated upon the meaning of these images, their implications, their consequences, how they got out, who produced them, and rarely but sometimes they referred to the acts themselves. I did not hear uttered a full description of what was within the frame of any of these images. It is as though we could no longer see, or were unwilling to look. And further, we are unable to convey in words from person to person what these images hold. Shock and Awe.

 

Black folks in America do not see the anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till and the emergence of new evidence in the case alongside the leaking of images of torture and abuse from Abu Ghraib as a coincidence nor as a sign of wonder. Two sides of one coin: heads, you lose; tails, you lose. Another wooden nickel.  These representations of power reproducing itself, these images and events warrant public scrutiny and debate side by side. Though the solipsism of power seems hopeless, as experts in the racialized nature of images and representation, we have a major contribution to make in the decoding of the process. It is our challenge to envision another cycle.

 


 

 

 

 

 

“Then the war in which we refused to believe broke out, and brought – disillusionment.”

-- Sigmund Freud[40]

 

We have been bullied into shock and awe. If only there were space for disillusionment. Freud and Rosalind Morris invoke a disillusionment that denotes both a sense of disappointment but also its deeply rooted meaning: a sense of revelation.[41] It is through this understanding of disillusionment that Freud flips his original question about the nature of civilized war, to ask what of civilized nations is revealed through the wars that they generate. I also desire a flipped script. Disillusion provides both a and b sides of the issue and provokes complex readings and active engagements.[42] This is the current project of representation and imagination before me.

 

Like Mamie Till Mobley, I can’t look at the image of Emmett’s brutalized body, but I also can’t not look.

 





epilogue

 

memory

 

 

Janitor Frank Jacobs of the court house received a scare Sunday morning that he will remember for the rest of his life. He had business in the room in the county court house in which the female cell is located and entered the room before it was quite daylight. Not finding what he wanted he struck a match to look around, when he heard a noise in the female cell, and turning in that direction was almost paralyzed with fright to see standing in the cell door a negro woman clad in long white garments. He knew in an instant that the ghost of the Nelson woman had visited the cell from which she was taken, and as soon as he could move he started out of there. A few boxes, chairs etc., that got in his way were run over, and parties hearing the noise would have thought a half dozen mules were being driven down the court house stairs.

The apparition was the negro woman, Mable Brown, brought up from Weleetka Saturday evening and place in the cell without Mr. Jacobs knowing of her presence there.  Hearing him moving around the woman got up to see what it was, and the ghostly robes were nothing more frightful than a long white night gown.[43]

 


 

 

The all-Black town of Boley currently has a permanent population of 250. The census reports the total population at 1,100 as it includes the inmates in a local penitentiary and those housed in small family run rehabilitation centers. What once was a booming township is now a wide semi-paved street off the two lane federal highway rte 82. Of these 250 residents, the majority are women. Mostly widowers, they have either lived their whole lives in Boley, or returned from their lives in the cities. Oklahoma City and Tulsa are no more than 40 miles away, respectively. The current Mayor, a young woman in her 50s with a day job as an administrator for the Oklahoma board of education, keeps an office in the Community/Senior Nutrition Center. Daily the women of Boley come for lunch.  They wear hats and scarves rivaling their Sunday best and pray and sing before each meal. I ask the Mayor about the photograph of Laura Nelson’s lynching, about the town’s historical society and whether there is an archive of the three newspapers printed in Boley in its early days. She says she had always heard about the lynching but never thought it was true. We walk next door to the old Boley hotel and find the proprietor amidst boxes as she prepares to move all that’s left of Boley’s history to the library. She has seen the photograph and has a copy, from either Life magazine or Jet, she can’t remember which. All of the archives of local newspapers are housed in the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City – which mysteriously is missing issues from mid May to mid- June 1911. The Mayor invites me to lunch. I decline. I am uncomfortable with the idea of interrupting their meal for my own gain. I came with an agenda -- they came to eat. A missed opportunity for the ethnographer/ archivist, but a signal to the documentarian – 21st century griot: ‘you forgot something, go back and get it.’






 

Bibliography

 

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Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1995

 

Allen, James, Als, Hilton, Lewis, Congressman John, and Litwack, Leon F. Without Sanctuary- Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers 2000

 

Baker, T. Lindsay and Julie P., edits. The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1995

 

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul. New York: Zone Books 1988

 

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press 1988.

 

Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman Ethics and Sublimation, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2002

 

Davies, Paul.  How to Make a Time Machine  New York: Viking Penguin, 2002

 

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press 1966

 

Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren Hanover, NH:Wesleyan University Press 1974/1996

 

duBois, Page. Slaves and Other Objects.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2003

 

Dubois, W.E.B.  Black Reconstruction in America – An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, New York: Meridian Books 1935/1969

 

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International 1952/1995

 

Everett, Percival. Erasure a Novel. Hanover: University Press of New England 2001

 

Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. NY: GrovePress 1959/65

 

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1967

 

Galeano, Eduardo. Upside Down a Primer for the Looking-glass World. Translated by Mark Fried. New York: Picador USA 2000

 

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997

 

Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C.L.R. James Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers 1992

 

Hall, Stuart. “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities” The House that Race Built  Black Americans, U.S. Terrain  edit. Lubiano, Waheema New York: Pantheon 1997

 

Hegel, G.W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press 1977

 

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Harper & Row 1935/1990

 

Jenkins, Mark. Visible & Invisible Persons Distributed in Space: Figurations of Complex Subjects in Contemporary Theory and Science Fictions by William Gibson, Samuel R. Delany & Kathy Acker. (dissertation) University of California, San Diego 1996

 

Kelley, Robin D. G. and Lewis, Earl, edits. To Make Our World Anew – a History of African Americans.  New York: Oxford Press 2000

 

McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters, Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000.  Los Angeles: University of California Press 2001

 

McBride, James. The Color of Water A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother.  New York: Riverside Books 1996

 

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather – Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.  New York: Routledge 1995

 

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, Vol 15, No. 1, Winter, 2003

 

Morris, Roslalind “Theses on the Questions of War: History, Media, Terror” Social Text  vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2002

 

NAACP Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918  New York: Negro University Press, 1969

 

Nelson, Alondra, ed. Social Text 71 Afrofuturism. Summer 2002

 

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and the Social Death, A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982

 

Sante, Luc. “Tourists and Torturers” New York Times, May 11, 2004

 

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain the Unmaking and Making of the World.  New York: Oxford University Press 1985

 

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Specificities: Peace-Time Crimes” Social Identities, Vol 3, Number 3, 1997

 

Serres, Michel with Latour, Bruno. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time.  Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995

 

Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others” New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004

 

Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, ed. ‘ The Visible and the invisible in the interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality’, Analecta Husserliana the Yearbook of Phenomenological Research vol. LXXV.  Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002

 

Ward, Gayle. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture, Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press: 2000 [introduction: ‘Race, Passing and Cultural Representation’]

 

Wells-Barnett, Ida B., On Lynchings Amherst, N.Y. : Humanity Books, c2002

 

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[1] Various newspaper accounts. Thursday, May 25, 1911: The Okemah Ledger, Okemah, OK ‘Lynchers Avenge the Murder of Geo. Loney, The Nelson Woman and Her Boy are Taken from the County Jail by Unknown Parties and Swung from Bridge Across North Canadian’; The Independent Vol.7 No. 36 Okemah, Okfuskee County, OK ‘Woman and Boy Lynched, A Mob Enters the County Jail Last Night and Take two Negro Prisoners Whom They Hang from a Bridge’.  Friday, May 26, 1911: The Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City, OK ‘Woman Lynched by Side of Son, Okfuskee County Mob Takes Double Revenge for Officer’s Death, Bridge is Gallows’; Tulsa World, Tulsa, Ok ‘Mother and Son are Lynched at Okeemah, jailor is surprised and bodies later found dangling from a bridge’.

 

[2] Powering Up/Powering Down Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2004 organized by Teknika Radica explored the relationship between technology, gender, race, and economics by creating a living laboratory where artists, performers, scholars, students, and the public will discuss innovative artwork, share skills and collaborate on new work. Lipsitz’ comments were a perfect synthesis of the work that folks had done all weekend. The three days were organized around themes and gave as much emphasis to creative practice as scholarly research, and participants opened up their process to one another in order to forge common languages across diverse disciplines, methodologies and modes of production.

 

[3] McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather – Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context.  In the chapter ‘Lay of the Land – Genealogies of Imperialism’ McClintock discusses the spatial nature of time as it relates to colonization of the ‘new world’. She introduces the idea of anachronistic space, which found fertile ground in the late Victorian era. “Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity.” …. “The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Euroope and thus equally valid but as temporally different and thus as irrevocable superannuated by history.” p.46

[4] Hall, Stuart. “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities” The House that Race Built  Black Americans, U.S. Terrain  edit. Lubiano, Waheema (New York: Pantheon 1997) p. 292

[5] except maybe in McClintock’s discussion of Freud’s Nanny. Imperial Leather.

[6] A Dying Colonialism ‘ Algeria Unveiled’ p. 35-67 and Black Skin, White Mask chapter 2,  ‘the Woman of Color and the White Man’ and chapter 5, ‘The Fact of Blackness.’

[7] Dark Water, Dubois, W. E. B.

[8] Gordon, Avery Ghostly Matters, Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. p. 1

[9] Rhinehart’s second vision in episode 03: meet me in Okemah.

[10] Allen, James, Als, Hilton, Lewis, Congressman John, and Litwack, Leon F. Without Sanctuary- Lynching Photography in America. (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers 2000) plate #38.

 

[11] Gordon, Avery Ghostly Matters. p. 8

[12] I exploit the term carpetbagger for both its positive and negative connotations. Following the U.S. Civil War, in the period of reconstruction, 1865-1877, traveling politicians from the North, were branded ‘carbetbaggers’. They made their way south to assist in the great shift of power from plantation oligarchies to democracy. They were widely supported by the newly enfranchised, free black population and vice versa. Simultaneously, they were resented by the white population because they were a political extension of Northern ideology ‘imposed’ upon a ‘Southern way of life.’

[13] Though all of their writing, fiction and non-fiction have great effect and influence upon my work, the books most relevant to the current discussion of invisibility are ‘Kindred’ and ‘Dahlgren’ by Butler and Delaney respectively.

 

[14] This is a totally hypothesized calculation. I use it as a place marker for the real calculation, and as a way of pushing us quickly to the ‘what if’.

[15] Davies, Paul How to Make a Time Machine (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002)

 

[16] I am indebted to Greg Tate who replayed this quote in my mind during a recent conference on Black folks and technophilia and technophobia.

[17] Buck-Morss, Susan. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry  (Summer 2000: 821-865), 844.

[18] Ibid. 845-6

[19] Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and the Social Death, A comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38.

[20] Hegel, Phenomenology…,  “Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself: and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation.  They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”

[21] Hegel, Phenomenology…, “In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other…. Thus the relation of the two self-conscious individuals is such that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle.  They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case.  And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won”

[22] Hegel, Phenomenology…, “This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally.  For just as life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the required significance of recognition.”

[23]Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and the Social Death, A Comparative Study  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 38. 

[24] Dubois, W.E.B, Black Reconstruction in America – An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, (New York: Meridian Books 1935/1969)

[25] Coleman, Beth “Pimp Notes on Autonomy” Everything but the Burden: what white people are taking from Black Culture. edit. Tate, Greg (New York: Broadway Books 2003) In her analysis, Coleman looks at the Black Pimping as the descendent of the slave economy in the u.s. From Code Noir to the Super Star, she uses the Black pimp as a way of exemplifying how the black body has become a fetish and further how the Black pimp turns a job into a fetish.

[26] pseud. Allen, Lewis (Abel Meerapol) Strange Fruit 1938

 

[27] Porter, Cole Miss Otis Regrets 1934 (from Hi Diddle Diddle, Savoy Theater, London) In another, longer piece I would take the time to read these two songs more thoroughly within the Stax v. Motown paradigm as they fit so nicely – especially if you consider the recordings by Ella Fitzgerald (Miss Otis Regrets) and Billie Holiday (Strange Fruit). The authors of these songs are white men on the margins in their own right: Cole Porter a public homosexual and Abel Meeropol a Jewish Communist school teacher best known for adopting the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And both songs have fairly contested histories.

[28] Okemah Ledger May 25, 1911 ‘Lynchers  Avenge the Murder of Geo. Loney. The Nelson woman and her boy are taken from the county jail by unknown parties and swung from bridge across North Canadian’

[29] Morris, Roslalind “Theses on the Questions of War: History, Media, Terror” Social Text  vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2002; p 164

[30] NAACP Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918 (New York: Negro University Press, 1969) during this period there were at least 3,000 lynchings reported. The majority of persons lynched were Black men, though there are accounts of ethnic whites, white ‘criminals’ as well as women both white and black meeting judge, jury and executioner at the end of a rope.

[31] The Okemah Ledger, Okemah, OK Thursday, May 25, 1911 p.1

[32] NAACP Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918 ( New York: Negro University Press, 1969) and Wells-Barnett, Ida B., On Lynchings Amherst, N.Y. : Humanity Books, c2002

[33] The Okemah Ledger, Okemah, OK Thursday, May 25, 1911 p.1

[34] Ibid. p.1

[35] It is significant that Laura and L.W. Nelson’s deaths were publicly reported. News of this lynching made local, regional, state and national papers. At this time, many lynchings were not deemed newsworthy.

[36] From the oral history of J.P. Owen recorded in 1976 from archive in the Oklahoma Historical Society Oklahoma City, OK.

[37] Rhinehart’s first vision in episode 03: meet me in Okemah

[38] Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain the Making and Unmaking of the World, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985) ‘the Structure of Torture’ p27-59. Scarry refers to the annihilating negation of the prisoner as one of the phenomena of torture.  Torture itself becomes the world for the prisoner to the extent that her own body becomes an agent or weapon of torture. There is no outside.

[39] Ibid. p. 59

[40] Morris, Rosalind C. “Theses on the Question of War: History, Media, Terror” p 149

[41] Ibid. p 149

[42] refer to Stax v Motown

[43] The Okemah Ledger Thursday, July 13, 1911 ‘Seen the Nelson Woman’s Ghost in Female Cell’







  (c)Lynch 2005

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