Imagining the Undesirable and the Desirable

In “Death and Nation’s Subject” Sharon Holland perceives that in the United States, living is “something to be achieved and not experienced.” She argues that blackness “is the yardstick by which most peoples in this nation measure their worth—by something they’re not.” One, in fact, “achiev(es) the status of ‘American’,” through the establishment of non-blackness. Blackness is therefore perceived as undesirable by the nation-state despite the fact that according to the nation-state, blackness is a nation within a nation—unable to define itself, unwanted, and yet incapable of separating itself fully from the norm (white America). Blackness, in relation to the nation-state becomes one of two things: invisible or undesirable (Holland 16).

Despite the fact that with the nation-state came the abolition of slavery, the U.S. treated(treats?) the African American as less than—in fact, non-existent. Through slavery (specifically slave-trade), Africans were cut off from their heritage. The formulation of the African American identity was very slow because there wasn’t a strong sense of community and a common past. When slavery ended, blackness was still viewed culturally as the invisible other—you know they are there because you are better than they are, but they don’t get any personal consideration. Holland rightly identifies this as “the unaccomplished imaginative shift from enslaved to freed subjectivity.” (Holland 15)

The other concept that blackness takes on in relation to the nation-state is that of the undesirable, unfulfilling (non-member) who is merely tolerated. In modern day especially, blackness is nearly synonymous in pop-culture with (or in Holland’s rhetoric, imagined as) theft, guns, drugs, and ignorance (everything which the nation-state supposedly despises). Holland discusses the “ganster film” Menace II Society in which the two African American youths are viewed by the Korean shop-owners as shoplifters and are followed around the store by the older Korean woman. The Korean man says as the boys were heading out “I feel sorry for your mother,” implying how unwanted and unrespectable what they perceived to be young male black behavior to be. This brings us one again to the imagination: “the Korean couple dies from what they imagine as real—from the belief that all black subjects are criminals.” Blackness in pop culture seems to be synonymous with the gangster life—because the bad apples are visible in our disgust whereas the rest of the African American community is invisible in our apathy.

The Documentary A Good Man about Bill T. Jones’s work on his piece Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray engages with Holland’s work in a number of ways. What stands out to me most is when Jones says that as a boy, Abraham Lincoln was the only white man that he was allowed to love unconditionally. I believe that this exemplifies blackness as being a nation within a nation—not everything in the nation can be his, but he may still have a shared national pride and reverence for this figure. The documentary focuses on the idea of a good man. Jones would like to imagine that Abraham Lincoln was a good man. Do we know this for certain? No, but the idea—the common imagination of him creates Lincoln as a very good man.

The performance piece which I chose is the song “Abie Baby” from the musical Hair. Right before the song is sung, a trio of performers with spears in African garb kills the other politicians on stage. Abraham Lincoln (played by a black female) is left alive and the Africans rejoice in him being the emancipator of the slaves. This reverence for Lincoln and only Lincoln is a common thread between Hair and A Good Man. The ambiguity of exactly how good a man he was is also present in both pieces.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKq2EGqpWyI

Works Cited:

Holland, Sharon P. "Death and the Nation's Subjects." Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 13-40.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKq2EGqpWyI 10/15/10

http://www.billtjones.com/repertory/present/fondly_do_we_hope/ 10/15/10 negotiating