For Black History Month, JSTOR Daily editors have gathered stories that draw on scholarship to explore Black life, culture, resistance, and creativity, with free access to the research behind each piece.
Inside, you’ll find pieces on Black radical traditions, community spaces like libraries and record stores, the Black press, visual culture, literature, and performance, alongside deep dives into archival discoveries and the scholars who help make these histories visible.
See the roundup.
Image: Two African American women, seated and facing each other, 1900. Library of Congress. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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-- RaMell Ross, "Renew the Encounter." Film Quarterly.
the vampire lestat is the open mouth masticating a Sam's Club platter of cold cuts. interview with the vampire, in retrospect, is a buffet froid, still cold, but haute. iwtv showed its hand with the trial, revealing the show to be a spectacle of black suffering constructed as a beautiful diversion from the real stuff, the real show, the vampire lestat--Jones showed that when he trotted the book around as his personal talisman and AMC underscored its significance with its marketing.
trial diminished, the show's coup de grace is the finale, specifically the reunion of Lestat and Louis in New Orleans. the lobotomy begins here, when Louis accepts and soothes the tragically fracturing Lestat despite being left in the "care" of the genuinely psychotic mindflayer who scripted the lynching and would have succeeded in murdering Louis if not for Lestat, idk, tapping into the blood of Akasha to save his beloved in a moment of lucidity(?) (Armand s3: the slavecatcher cometh to finish the job). the Louis in the vampire lestat is a continuation of the Louis soft-launched in that scene, one who possesses the supernatural capacity for finding cheeks to turn and, when the narrative demands it, be a nurse, a shark, and a nurse shark.
the actors, Hayles and Anderson, struggled to swallow the meal ready-made of their performance. they occupy a dynamic positionality in that they are closer to the material than the audience--they enliven it--and they are also of the audience, witnessing repeated viewings of their live performances for the camera's gaze. whose eye directs the gaze? not theirs. they are a minor audience within a majoritarian spectatorship that has already imagined how they must perform, how they must look and what they must feel.
thinking that having black writers in the room would change the representation of blackness in the vampire lestat falls into a trap of indexical burden, outsourcing the responsibility of imagining otherwise to those who possess the same skin color and cultural contexts. writing is shaped by the gaze, the power of the gaze, and those who hold that power are informed by a whiteness creating the conditions in which describing a character as Louisiana Fried Chicken is perfectly acceptable in its edginess. this series is a product of its culture. it visually diversifies its source material, it comes from a system operating under the neoliberal guise of multicultural post-racialism. do i think Rolin Jones and the writing and directing and the AMC production staff are personally racist? does it matter when they give into the racist impulses and implicit biases of the culture in which they produce? does it matter when the only person consistently employing the oppositional gaze is Jacob Anderson?
anyway, not looking forward to anything. "Montreal" might be a dream or some convoluted sleight of hand to catch out somebody or it might even mean nothing in the grand scheme of Akasha being the mother of all of Lestat's monstrosity instead of his actual mother. Louis temporarily lost his head, but he definitely lost his leg (and Armand lost his eye, yes, and the camera establishes that with a brevity it does not reserve for Louis, where it lingers, savoring).
Ross says to read Mills' "Non-Cartesian Sums" to "reset your understanding of Western knowledge production." add "Innocent Amusements" by Hartman and hooks' "Eating the Other," in addition to Morrison's Playing in the Dark, particularly "Romancing the Shadow."
the layers of evil white people get up to is seriously astounding. yeah, we literally cant afford to give them the benefit of the doubt nor be forgiving or patient when the system they created and uphold is chomping at the bit to kill , imprison or enslave us in some manner.
demented. another reason i dont think white people should be able to teach Black studies but, they do anyway. Academia is not neutral.
fugitivity -> in Black Studies: a mode of refusal and escape; not just running away, but creating other ways of living outside or beneath the structures of control. inspired by enslaved people who fled plantations, but also used for any subversive, ungoverned life
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Thus the desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by thematerial relations of chattel slavery. In lightofthis, is it tooextreme or too obvious to suggest that Rankin's flight of imagination and the excitements engendered by suffering mightalsobe pleasurable?
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Race, Slavery, and Memory : Echoes of Black Studies Scholarship in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi
I’m still piecing together my thoughts after reading the very excellent Piranesi by Susanne Clarke. I’m gathering a lot of my thoughts here in these threads about how the book deals with its themes of race and abuse in academia. One thing that has always bothered me about reviews regarding this book is their lack of focus on race and some of the heavier themes of this novel. Even reviewers who get more cerebral about the novel’s messages often focus on decoding the metaphors in the book about knowledge and morality, but shy away from discussing its themes of race.
Make no mistake, Piranesi is a whimsical book that is as much about humanity’s quest for knowledge as it is about racialized violence, slavery, and academic abuse. Given the author’s background, I also believe that Susanna Clarke has interfaced with academic literature from Black Studies and Black literary criticism. In the following post I’m going to talk about how the book engages with its themes of race, and how Clarke’s treatment of race engages with concepts from the noted Black theorist and academic Saidiyyah Hartman’s works on slavery, memory, and black diasporic identity. Major spoilers below, do not read if you haven’t finished the book. Still gathering my thoughts so this more of a messy bulleted list than a full analysis.
The messy thoughts here all revolve around the topics of race, slavery, and theorizations of memory and the Middle Passage in Hartman’s works and how it relates to Piranesi. In the next post, I will be collecting my thoughts on Piranesi’s treatment of biraciality, the symbolism of the labyrinth, and the way the book deals with racialized power dynamics, queerness, academic abuse, and extractive forms of knowledge production.
- In one of his discarded journals, Piranesi / Matthew notes his anger with Ketterly for trapping him in the labyrinth and making him a “slave.” I don’t think the use of the word “slave” is coincidental. As other readers have pointed out, Piranesi is explicitly a black biracial man in the narrative, and in his quest to investigate an abusive academic cult he is kidnapped, stolen away to another world, compelled to perform labor for a white academic, and in the process of this rupture and transport to “another world” he loses all memory of his past. Notable Black Studies historian and scholar Saidiyah Hartman has characterized slavery and the middle passage as a “door of no return” - the journey of enslaved people from the old world to the new world historically stripped them of memory, language, and ties to place. We literally see this transformation happen to Piranesi in the book. He loses himself, his memories and has to learn to survive in with a world where he is essentially a captive.
- The interesting way Piranesi engages with its conundrum of black captivity is that we only get to meet Piranesi after he’s crossed the door of no return, after he’s been transported to the other world and after his memories and ties to the past have been severed. Based on the journals, we learn that at one point Matthew was angry about this. However, after the amnesia sets in the reader sees how against all odds, Matthew develops a camaraderie of the labryinth and an affinity for it. By the time the reader meets him, we too view the house not as a space of captivity but as space of infinite potential and even beauty.
- As other readers have pointed out, Piranesi’s kindness and optimism and his ability to view the House as a space of potential rather than as one of captivity is what keeps him alive. It’s what baffles and frustrates Ketterly and Laurence, who both view his optimism and care for the House as fanciful simple mindedness rather than what it truly is: genius and mastery of the maze.
- The juxtaposition of the Labyrinth being an “old world” where secret knowledge dwells to the villains and a new world that has its own inherent value to Piranesi / Matthew in of itself to me reads as another deliberate callback to Black Studies theory. The “door of no return” characterization of slavery by Hartman and successive Black historians and academics seems to be explicitly reflected in the ending of the story. While Piranesi is able to move between worlds he also doesn’t gain back the memories, experience, and composite wholeness of Matthew, instead he must walk two worlds and try to survive in this painful state of liminality and with a fractured sense of self. In her book Lose Your Mother Hartman talks about the condition of the African diaspora in the Americas as one of an often painful liminality. The Black diaspora is caught between two worlds (Africa and the Americas) and stripped of belonging in either precisely because of the wounds of slavery, wounds that erase personhood, culture, and a distinct past. The struggle of these descendants becomes fashioning a sense of self out of that fundamental negation of self and personhood. something Piranesi does when he embraces the Labyrinth and becomes its child.
- I have a lot of thoughts about the book’s title: we know that Piranesi is not Matthew’s name, and it is in fact a name inscribed upon him by his captor as a joke. The real Piranesi was an architect who is most renowned for his depictions of theoretical prisons….which I again don’t think is a coincidence. But then why is the book’s title Piranesi, if this name is the name ascribed to a slave by his captor? I think that’s what is so compelling about the character being named this, and the parallels to the architect who drew fake prisons. Piranesi in the book is someone who is technically imprisoned in the labyrinth. However, by the events of the book, it is clear that this “prison” is in fact something that Piranesi has reworked into a familial relationship - he calls himself the beloved child of the house, and by the events of the book the house rewards him with survival and blessings while it kills his captor, Valentine.
Piranesi / Mathew’s reworking of a prison into a space of potentiality for revolution and escape from abusers also reflects many of Hartman and Christina Sharpe’s work on Black resistance, namely the historical ability of Black individuals to transform histories of slavery and abjectness into spaces of potentiality. The House is in some ways also a captive of the white men she is exploited by who seek to extract and map it for its supposed knowledge and riches. The events of the book lead me to believe that Piranesi / Matthew are engaged in a co-rebellion with the House, both the captive and the prison are in rebellion against elite academics and scientists who represent the predatory nature of hegemonic whiteness and western knowledge production. But I will continue thoughts related to that in my next installment!
