BAR Book Forum: Julia Jordan-Zachery’s“Shadow Bodies“and Sabine Broeck’s “Gender and the Abjection of Blackness”
Our authors examine how white feminism became “junior partner to enslavist capitalist patriarchy,” and how do we “resist silences that limit the span of democracy?”
“How does our act of silencing “non-prototypical” Black women allow for the perpetuation of their marginalization by others and by us?”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Julia Jordan-Zacheryand Sabine Broeck. Jordan-Zachery is a Professor of Public and Community Service and director of the Black Studies Program at Providence College in Rhode Island.Her book isShadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics.
Broeck is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany.Her book is Gender and the Abjection of Blackness.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Julia Jordan-Zachery:Black women are often celebrated for the herculean work they do; consider the 2017 elections in Alabama. For all the cultural, political, and economic work Black women do, we often don’t know about them because we tend not to hear Black women’s voices. Shadow Bodies brings to the center the voices of Black women. This work troubles the water a bit because it asks: how are Black women speaking about other Black women—who are they allowing to be on the agenda and who is left off? This is important to consider as it forces us to think about the notion of democracy. Using Black women’s words on HIV/AIDS, domestic violence and mental illness, Shadow Bodies exposes what often goes unsaid, the silences within the community of Black womanhood. This helps us to understand why, for example, Black transgender women are often relegated to the shadows—seen, but yet not seen. It also helps us to see that we need a #sayhername campaign that is not solely focused on how communities external to Black women choose to, or not, recognize Black women, but how Black women engage this process. This is also a book about resistance, specifically how do we resist silences that limit the span of democracy? This book is useful in this current climate as it offers a different angle for understanding and critiquing ideologies of power.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
When we think of the Black woman’s body and representation, broadly defined, Shadow Bodies asks us to (re)examine the meaning of “community” and how our construction of such influences group rights that are shaped by the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality. Activists and community organizers need to systematically consider how the Black female body forces us to deal with the tensions and binaries that result in our silences—especially around issues that make some uncomfortable. We have to ask ourselves, how does our act of silencing “non-prototypical” Black women allow for the perpetuation of their marginalization by others and by us? It’s the asking of these critical questions that I hope activists and community organizers will take away and allow them to inform their work for freedom and justice.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Through Shadow Bodies, I imagine that we can unlearn narratives of Black womanhood by considering the scripts, Ass and Strong Woman, for example, and how they can be explicitly or implicitly used to not talk about some issues. I want us to not only look at speech as a place for politics but also silences, as sometimes the silences are more harmful that the speech. In other words, we need to look at what are not there—the absences.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I smile at the term intellectual heroes as I wonder how this is defined. My mother’s work inspired this book. Is she considered among the canon of “intellects”? More than likely not. My mother worked for 35 years as a mental health nurse. During that time I watched her engage in a practice that I don’t often see in the academy. She is the one who taught me about intersectionality, and particularly its functioning between and within the community of Black women. My grandmother, a woman who walked and talked to the canes, also influence this work. She taught me to be honest with my words regardless of whether anyone understands. Shadow Bodies is the product of these two women.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
Shadow Bodies ask us to look at what’s not there. I remember one reviewer being particularly troubled because I was attempting to analyze nothing—silence. Using a very Westernized understanding of data, this individual was challenged to see how I could make the case of the disappearance of Black women by other Black women. Another reviewer was also challenged because the case studies didn’t produce “equal” pages of data/analysis. My thought was this is exactly the argument I am making; the length of the chapters mirrors the silences around HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse and mental illness. I took the time to tell these stories, because I want the reader to think about how norms limit us and our knowledge production. What would justice and freedom look like if we moved outside the norms? Maybe I don’t have the answer, but hopefully by taking the risk to tell the story that is Shadow Bodies, someone else will help us get closer to a new world where identity, even when perceived as “troubling” is not seen as a deficit but an asset in the quest for freedom and justice.
Sabine Broeck’s Gender and the Abjection of Blackness
“I am much more concerned with the here and now of undoing white abjective practices, my own included.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Sabine Broeck: I see the current resurgence of white women’s movements capitalizing on Black Lives Matter, and one has seen this happen in recurring historical instances before. Instances of anti-racist practices notwithstanding, anti-Blackness has had a persistent hold over white movements of emancipation and anti-oppression. This is not just an accumulation of individual ethical failures over historical time, beginning with early 19thcentury white feminism’s turn to politics in the first person, abandoning the solidarity with Black struggles (which it also has been) but has been due to the fundamental anti-Blackness settled in the very premises of analyzing human society as gendered in a binary fashion. In order to make feminist struggles for the right of white female persons possible, and gain acceptance as human agents in civil society, the concept of gender was mobilized over and against anti-enslavism. For white women to successfully pursue the course of social, cultural and political immersion into and acceptance by post-Enlightenment humanity, they had to distance themselves from “the slave,” and by extension in the course of history, from Blackness – which, of course, had to remain in place as the grounds of the calculus that woman (a status only assigned to white females) unequals slave. The concept of gender (of course something that has been a changing same over time, subject to debate, refinement, ostentation, and controversy) – to say yes, we are different from men but human – was the epistemic breakthrough that enabled white feminism to become, as Frank Wilderson might say, junior partners of enslavist capitalist patriarchy.
“In order to make feminist struggles for the right of white female persons possible, the concept of gender was mobilized over and against anti-enslavism.”
So, if we look at the transnational debates about mainstreaming so-called diversity on one end, and at the political corruption of white women in last US elections on the other end, those discourses and practices share the same understanding. They employ a discourse of intra-human difference, rights, entitlements, empowerment that signifies and accrues to white woman over and against Black life which those post Enlightenment discourses have made into the not-humanthat enables the human to be, in the first place, and to have internal struggles over what human is supposed to mean. .In Germany, e.g., almost the entire reception of the #MeToo campaign focuses attention on a white-on-white conflict; the fact that this campaign originates in a Black feminist intervention (Tarana Burke) becomes unnamed, absented, abjected in a replay of white feminism’s surge after the Civil Rights Movement -- even though much of the energy and radical gist of the campaign is owed to Black practice against misogynoir violence: fungibility at work, to borrow Hartman’s term. We see one more replay of the ever-pervasive “We are not your N…” analogy. The concept of the human as gendered became the lever for white women to cast themselves as subjects, not property, as human beings against which violence is a transgression, as citizens and fully valid agents of society; over and against the assumed ‘flesh-ness,” and accumulatability, and killability of black life, suffering from, and in conditions of un-contingent violence.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
I hope that white individuals and groups within and beyond academia who want to struggle against anti-Blackness, might use this text to dismantle its conceptual, theoretical and epistemic hold and ubiquity, to move beyond prescriptive appeals to good behavior in ally-ship. White readers are offered a step further in theorizing the afterlife of slavery as the enslavist implications of humanist trajectories, including the arsenals of liberation theories, that neither white feminism, nor Marxism nor postcolonial studies have dismantled. I am hoping that white readers will acknowledge this trajectory in that I try to make readable my own process of learning from, and accepting black epistemic authority. I am also hoping the book might be of service to black thinkers and activists in that it sets out to provide in depth analyses of white gender theory, the power of which still radiates through school, college, and university classes and seminars. But that’s not for me to say.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn?
It is urgent for white people to unlearn the kind of naïve white trust in humanism, even in its post-humanist reincarnations which have never looked at the human so as to see the human subject’s practices of abjecting Blackness and all forms of Black life, by way of making it fungible, or destroying it. What with all the fashionable quotations of Fanon in what passes as hip theory, his principle insight: that the human is because the Black is not, has not been followed up with a thorough white-on-white destruction of humanism’s legacies, of the always already given-ness of white epistemic power. This holds true for the white European construction of binary gender, as well. I was trying to realize a methodology of unlearning: a reading of theory quasi naturalized as sine-qua-non critical, progressive, liberatory, and radical against its hailing, against its interpellation of white readers to accept its demands for identification.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I don’t work with the concept of heroism. Coming out of leftist feminist anti-colonial activism, I have always been interested in collective practices of study and critique. So there are various groups of family, friends, colleagues in Europe and the US, over the decades of my working life, who I feel indebted to in my thinking and writing — to list all their names would take up too much space here. My intellectual trajectory has always been at odds with both, American Studies’ disciplinary canons and my European academic schooling. I read Biko before Althusser, Fanon before Habermas, George Jackson’s “Letters from Jail” before Foucault, James Baldwin before Henry James, Césaire before Derrida, and Toni Morrison before John Locke. Just for examples. I began studying Black Feminism in 1979, so I read Fran Beale, Angela Davis, Toni Cade, and the Combahee River Collective’s work before, say, Theresa de Lauretis, and studied All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave before Judith Butler. What I want to get at is that I came to institutional white knowledge, even critical and poststructuralist theory, through studying Black knowledge, and specifically through, and after, Black feminist critique -- an odd trajectory for somebody of my generation and location. In particular I do want to point to these extraordinary texts: Beloved, Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Wynter’s path-making Boundary II article “The Ceremony Must be Found,” Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, and Sharpe’s In The Wake which have been teaching me, and continue to teach me, to look at the world I know in fundamentally agonistic ways.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
I did not set out for it to do that. For me, a practice of negativity is required by the world as we know it, a kind of clearing ground before something new can really be imagined -- rather than carving a new world in my solitary imagination. The book, at best, will support a want to imagine an end to the world as we know it, and an end to relying on re-circling and recycling humanist knowledge of the world that keeps re-inscribing white permanence into the future, and ongoing black immanence by abjecting black life forms. I would like my book to help produce a reading of the world, and support social and political practices, by which the always already given destruction of Black life will be stopped. I have no fantastic images in my mind about the future, though. I agree with Wilderson that the coffles are waiting, one way or another. And for me the question is in those struggles, whose side will you be on. That is never something that happens by grandiose moral resolve once and for all, but needs to be an ongoing labor. So I am much more concerned with the here and now of undoing white abjective practices, my own included. This is a challenge for every quotidian moment not something to be paraded by way of declarations. What does it mean for me to “sit with history” in Dionne Brand’s words, “in the wake” (Sharpe)? What will an acknowledgement of white abjectorship mean for me? My wish is to practice a kind of white reckoning with our historical and lasting responsibility for the enslavism that permeates all our lives. I do want to read Wynter’s Metamorphoses next, though. I haven’t found the time for a thorough study yet, but I am eager to find out what her contribution to imaging a world beyond the reign of humanist MAN II, and WOMAN II, come to think of it, might look like.
Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for thePolitical Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
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