To Whom do We Belong?

In her article Death and the Nation's Subject, Sharon Holland boards several concepts in relation to the formation of a national identity, the formation of national imaginary. This formation occurs at the expense of bodies/entities, and perhaps other imaginaries, that [seem to] represent the undesirable. In other words, opposition and cancellation of undesirability are at the core of the formation of an [national] identity. Here is where "death" and the idea of death come in Holland's criticism. For Holland, death goes beyond the expiration of a living body, but it also involves the memories of what has passed and how those memories are used and reinterpreted. At the same time, Holland also deals with the concept of social death coined by Orlando Patterson, which refers to symbolical death of certain bodies that serves a purpose within the social imaginary and identity. In this case, Holland links it to blackness, the black body and the nation state. I think an important distinction that is made by Holland is one between individuals and masses, and how certain practices aim at individualizing bodies and how others work in massifying bodies; much in the tone of Foucault's ideas of anatamopolitics and biopower.

Holland argues that black bodies, African Americans in the USA, are "socially dead", their bodies - and the idea of their existence - exist in the margins in a state of death from which they sometimes emerge. In other words they exist in the verge of life and death, thought to be lost, because in the memory of the nation state, those bodies are undesirable and still not free. In page 14, Holland says that "Ultimately a system such as slavery might be halted, but its dream lives in the people's imagination and becomes fodder for both romantic fictions and horrific realities." Here, we can see a historical link made by Holland between slavery and the current state of blackness. Though slavery has been abolished, within the imagination of an enslaving society these bodies continue to be objects of oppression, and objected to their oppression. I think this is what Holland, tries to point to when she mentions that "enslaved bodies are genealogical isolates because they are denied access to the social heritage of their ancestors".(12) By being stripped of a common history, other than that of being objects of/to slavery, these bodies have to redefine, or rather, re-create their identity. Unfortunately, their identity is parallely and to the collective identity of the enslaving nation, and thus the history of the slaves begins with their enslavement. Their memories of the past are a product of their enslavement. In this way, the oppressor continues to strive as the maker of history, and reinforcement of its own identity as such.

In this light, Holland posses an important question: "When living is something to be achieved and not experienced, and figurative and literal death are very much a part of the social landscape, how to people of color gain a sense of empowerment?"(16). This question guides the rest of her essay in analyzing how the black body and identity is constructed as directly linked to death and violence, as a lost cause. Because these bodies and identities are undesirable, they posses a negative quality to them that turns them into taboo. Thus they come to represent the bad, where good is not expected from them or their communities. So how does this relate to Bill T. Jones' Undesirable? This multimedia piece is presentation and dialogue about memory and death precisely. What is most interesting about a piece of work such as this, is that is indeed constructed. David Gree comes to understand dance like language, reading not only the bodies performing but the environment. Jones is very much aware of this and thus consciously creates a memory, in order to commemorate a memory. I am venturing to say that the performance piece is also a memory because it is consciously designed, and it has helped Jones in further understanding death and its memory. Finally, Gere tells us of how the video performance of untitled, differs from the live performances Jones did, and that these differed from one another as well. This directs us to the malleability of memory and how, and the undeniable multiplicity of it.

I think an appropriate cultural formation for what I have been saying in regards to memory and its [re]creation, as well as identity, is Spike Lee's Bamboozled. This movie deals with several imagined identities of not only black bodies but white bodies. We can come to understand minstrel shows in the USA, and particularly the "black face" phenomenon, as linked to black bodies as undesirable. Because one cannot bring those unwanted/dead bodies [back] into public existence, instead one must try to emulate them based on our imagined notion of them. So What does it entail that a black body publicly performs an identity that was meant to represent his own by those who helped destroy it in the first place? The ending to this movie is not so happy, and I was glad that it was so, but it bears other questions related to death and memory. Would a happier ending, death absent, have had the same effect?I think the fact that it perhaps wouldn't have speaks of the symbolical value of death and the continuity that it gives to idea, the tangibility that it can give memory.