#animacies

[ID: Making-killable. I recently had a wonderful visit with Donna Haraway who suggested I consider the process of making-killable (as well as interspecies ethnography) when it comes to my Cyclops and her cave of sheep. Haraway and others describe making killable as a way of making sub-human, of transforming beings into masses that can be produced and destroyed, another form of empire’s mass production. Making-killable turns people and animals into always already objects ready for violence, genocide, and slavery. end ID]

[ID 1: The cultural effort to objectify and later reobjectify African Americans found rich potential in doll play and doll literature, because all stories about sentient dolls reorganize the boundary between human and thing. As Lois Kuznetsk observes, sentient dolls in literature “embody human anxieties about what it means to be ‘real’ — an independent subject or self rather than object or other. Around the time of the American Civil War, books about sentient dolls increased in popularity, and dolls in these books discuss their racial status, their duties to their owners, and even their relationship when enslaved people of African descent. The doll narrator of Julia Charlotte Maitland’s The Doll and Her Friends (published in 1852, the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin) describes dolls as “a race of mere dependents; some might even call us slaves.” The narrator pointedly informs the reader, however, that she is “not a negro doll, with wide mouth and woolly hair. In this children’s book and many others, dollness itself is a racial category that denotes servitude. White-authored dolls in literature asserted their race’s natural servitude exactly as abolition and later Emancipation challenged the belief that African Americans were constitutionally enslaveable.

ID 2: This dialogue’s connection between the ownership of sentient dolls and the ownership of human beings is unusual only in its explicitness. From the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth, ideas and anxieties about racial slavery flowed as a steady, ominous undercurrent through much doll literature and through the physical properties of specific dolls. Dolls, as signs of childhood and property of many children, create propinquity between the idea of childhood and the racial project of determining who is a person and who is a thing; thus dolls tuck racial politics beneath a cloak of innocence. end ID]

[ID: Redressing the pained body encompasses operating in and against the demands of the system, negotiating the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counter investing in the body as a site of possibility. Pain must be recognized in its historicity and as the articulation of a social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need, and constant violence; it is the perpetual state of managed depletion, of broken bodies and shattered persons, of soul murder and sinlessness. It is the embodied experience of stolen life and social death. Pain is a normative condition that encompasses the legal subjectivity of the enslaved, which is constructed along the lines of injury and punishment, the violation and suffering inextricably enmeshed with the pleasures of minstrelsy and melodrama, the operation of power on black bodies, and the life of property in which the fully enjoyment of the slave as thing supersedes the admittedly tentative recognition of slave humanity and permits the intemperate uses of chattel. This pain might best be described as the history that hurts — the still-unfolding narrative of captivity and dispossession that engenders the black subject in the Americas.

If this pain has been largely unspoken and unrecognized, it is due to the sheer denial of black sentience rather than the inexpressibility of pain. The purported immunity of blacks to pain is absolutely essential to the spectacle of contented subjection or, at the very least, to discrediting the claims of pain. The black is both insensate and content, indifferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal punishment. These contradictions are explained in part by the ambiguous and precarious status of the black in the “great chain of being,” by pathologizing the black body, and this aberrant condition then serves to justify acts of violence that exceed normative standards of the humanely tolerable, though within the limits of the socially tolerable as concerned the black slave. 

Pain is essential to the making of productive slave laborers. The sheer enormity of this pain overwhelms or exceeds the limited forms of redress available to the enslaved. In light of this, the significance of the performative lies not in the ability to overcome this condition or provide remedy but in creating a context for the collective enunciation of this pain, transforming need into politics and cultivating pleasure as a limited response to need and a desperately insufficient form of redress. end ID]

[ID: At stake in pain was not only justification for violence but also eligibility for citizenship and humanity. Visible pain, or what Lauren Berlant calls the "trumping power of suffering," established individuals' and groups' subjectivity -- and therefore, Linda Williams adds, their worth as citizens. Elizabeth B. Clark has shown that abolitionists understood the libel of black insensateness to disqualify African Americans from what Elaine Scarry has called the world-making properties of pain. Abolitionists understood a century and a half before Scarry that "the story of physical pain" is "a story about the expansive nature of human sentience, the felt-fact of aliveness. The stakes of pain are nothing less than the stakes of sentience, of humanity itself. end ID]