THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#17, SEPT-NOV/2023
Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground, (New York: Vintage, 1942, 2021).
What is the underground of modernity?[1] What does it mean to speak of the underground of modernity as it relates to lived Black experience? And in particular, how does an existential liberationist reading of The Man Who Lived Underground enunciate the Black radical imagination through the work of Richard Wright towards disclosing the objective violence and miseducation of soul that positions human ‘being’ at a different socio-ontological register of existence – a lived positionality to western imperialist power that we can phenomenologically describe as belonging to the underground of modernity whom the normative gaze constitutes as subhuman foils against which the imperial mainstream defines its legitimating claims of universality to represent humanity in the absolute.
The Man Who Lived Underground takes place in an undifferentiated urban setting somewhere in 1940’s era America and tells the story of Fred Daniels, a Black man, who after getting paid for doing manual labor for his socially prominent ruling class ‘white’ family, gets stopped and frisked by the police in the midst of rushing home to see his pregnant wife who is about to give birth. Even after the police acknowledge his innocence amongst themselves and find nothing incriminating on his person, they deliberately harass and then ultimately torture Daniels into falsely confessing to a murder that he did not commit. However, when an opportunity presents itself to escape police custody by entering a manhole in the street, Daniels, who up until this point has been depicted by Wright as showing little to no inclination of risk-taking agency, reluctantly seizes the moment introduced by force of circumstance and decides to go underground into the city sewer system.
What happens next is classic Richard Wright: gritty hard edged existential realist fiction that reveals a nihilistic gravity of lived experience which introduces the question of the meaning of the human condition from the perspective of an exceptional antagonism that is manifest between the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ and the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by western imperialist power. And here, let us not forget that by the normative gaze, what we mean is that unreflective imposition of established power upon situated consciousness that coercively limits the social range and historical possibility of our actions, or what Wright describes at one point as “that constant threat of nameless punishment” experienced as being “claimed by some strange, powerful reality which the policemen represented.”
Early on, Wright carefully discloses how the objective violence that explicitly places Daniels in subservience to established power and the miseducation of soul that ideologically convinces him to remain in subservience to established power, together combine to constitute the normative gaze. First by sharing how “Johnson and Murphy lifted him bodily and swung him upside-down and hoisted his feet to a steel hook on the wall. The steel bands on his ankles were looped over the hook and he hung toward the floor, head first. Blood pounded in his temples and his heart and lungs sagged heavily in his chest. He could barely breathe”. Then as indicated by the police stating that “Before we get through with you, you sonofabitching nigger, we’re going to teach you something”. In this manner, Wright lets the reader know that, with reference to the effect of the normative gaze upon Daniels, “though his eyes were wide open he could see nothing”.
Originally planned as a full-length novella, The Man Who Lived Underground was first rejected by Wright’s agent, and then eventually edited down into a brilliantly tense short story that was published in the literary journal Accent in 1942, then included posthumously in Wright's short story collection Eight Men in 1961, before recently being restored to its authentic literary form and republished in 2021.
It is both intellectually and historically significant that The Man Who Lived Underground was written after Native Son and before Black Boy. For aside from being written at the creative peak of his literary prowess, this work was formed as a literary project several years before the start of Wright's intellectual camaraderie with Jean-Paul Sartre, a friendship which only helped to generate false assumptions that Wright adopted a more existentialist orientation only after his becoming the most prominent African-American literary expatriate in Paris, France.[2]
The truth is that there is no doubt about the mutual intellectual influence each exerted upon the other, as evidenced by Sartre acknowledging explicitly in his classic philosophical study, Anti-Semite and Jew, that Wright discursively contributed towards Sartre's groundbreaking critique of Anti-Semitism by reframing the so-called ‘Negro Problem’ as a ‘White Problem’.[3] Wright’s critical reformulation of the so-called ‘Negro Problem’ as the ‘White Problem’ provided Sartre with an epistemic opening from which to engage Black radical discourse and from there move towards crucially positing the so-called ‘Jewish Question’, not as the problem of Jewish community, but as the problem of Anti-Semites.
At the time, and still somewhat to this day, imperial mainstream thinkers and critics refuse to acknowledge the relationship between Wright and Sartre as a mutually influencing discursive dialogue between two interlocutors, intellectual giants who were each in their own right fiercely independent and committed to distinct existential liberationist orientations of thought; commitments that certainly generated ongoing tensions and serious disputes between them and the Communist Party of their respective nation-states. “It was toward this end that Wright agreed to work with Sartre to transform the Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire, which already had more than a thousand members among the non-Communist Left, into a powerful movement. Although Wright would not allow himself to risk being deported by becoming involved in the affairs of a country that was protecting him, he could help the group of Les Temps Modernes and the RDR by taking a public stand against certain aspects of American policy to which his nationalism alone would lend weight. He agreed with Sartre that the individual could, even by himself, act effectively and that a militant intellectual should always be ready to become involved when events called for it, as a person, not as a member of a party or nation. Thus his participation in the large RDR Writer’s Congress held on December 13th, 1948, was widely remarked upon. . . . Wright spoke at length, criticizing both America and Russia on the grounds that neither was worthy of guiding humanity if all it offered was material happiness.”[4]
Indeed, rarely is serious thought given to the fact that that Wright’s short story “Fire and Cloud” was published in the inaugural issue of Les Temps Modernes, that flagship journal of independent leftist discourse and existential thought which would continuously publish Wright's work over the years, including a serialization of Black Boy over several issues.
Furthermore, in Sartre’s seminal tome of intellectual engagement, What is Literature?, a significant amount of pages are devoted to a critical examination of Wright’s literary endeavors which then culminates in an unequivocal endorsement of Wright as exemplifying the committed writer par excellance. “Indeed, to recognize literature as a freedom . . . We still have to know who reads us and whether the present state of affairs does not make our desire of writing for the ‘concrete universal’ Utopian. If our desires could be realized, the twentieth-century writer would occupy between the oppressed and the oppressors an analogous position to that of eighteenth-century authors between the bourgeois and the aristocracy, to that of Richard Wright between the blacks and the whites, read by both the oppressed and the oppressor, furnishing the oppressor with his image, both inner and outer, being conscious with and for the oppressed of the oppression, contributing to the formation of a constructive and revolutionary theory.”[5] Wright eventually returns the favor in his essay, “I Choose Exile”, where he describes Sartre as “a free man who feels it his duty, and not on moral or metaphysical grounds, to take a stand against anti-Semitism, against racism, against imperialism” and discloses their mutual existential liberationist orientation towards the relevance of philosophy that is “found in the streets”.
From an insurgent philosophical perspective, the intellectual trajectories of Wright and Sartre were on a definite collision course of solidarity due to what we can now recognize as an existential liberationist orientation that speaks to their telling embrace of problematic questions of the human condition in confrontation with oppressive socio-historical situations. Indeed, although varying considerably in exact degree of coloniality,[6] what Wright was able to glean and communicate about the question of the meaning of human ‘being’ through fiction based upon his lived Black experience during the Jim Crow era of racist dehumanization, Sartre was immediately able to fathom in solidarity due to his own lived experience under the Nazi German Occupation of France.
Certainly, the shared existential affinities of resistance and coloniality between life under Nazi German occupation and lived Black experience situated by a western imperialist continuum are indeed uncanny. “Never were we more free than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, above all the right to speak; in the face of daily insults we had to remain silent, we were deported en masse, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners. Surrounding us everywhere – on the wall, on the screens, and in the newspapers – we encountered the foul, insipid image that our oppressors wanted to us to accept as ourselves. Because of all this we were free. Since the Nazi poison seeped into our ruminations, every accurate thought was a victory; since an all-powerful police force tried to render us mute, every word became precious as a declaration of principle; since we were wanted men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment. The often dreadful circumstances of our struggle made it possible for us to finally live out that anxious, unbearable, heartrending situation known as the human condition in a candid, unvarnished way. Exile, captivity, even death, which in happier times we artfully conceal became our perpetual concerns; we learned that they were not avoidable accidents nor an external menace; but must be recognized as our lot, our destiny, the profound source of our human reality.”[7] To be certain, is not fascism just the structural inversion of racist dehumanization and coloniality, from methods usually reserved for the underground of modernity, reconfigured to be imposed upon the imperial mainstream-as-civil society?
As such, this speaks to the emancipatory significance of The Man Who Lives Underground, which is driven by a limited third person narrative that allows the reader to engage the emotional severity of Daniels’s internalization of the normative gaze of modernity. “He had no fear about all this; he looked unseeingly before him, confident that he would eventually give an explanation that would free him. This was a dream, but soon he would awaken and marvel at how real it had seemed.” Now, the structural-inert violence of the police is what demarcates the socio-ontological boundaries between the imperial mainstream from the underground of modernity. However, by forcing Daniels into choosing between escaping and going “underground” or staying “aboveground” and facing a false murder charge, the unintended effect of this violence is that it also introduces the conditions of possibility for Wright’s protagonist to awaken from his unthinking acquiescence to the Real and, thus, be more open to the possibility of actually confronting the normative gaze that defines the imperial topographical coherence of modernity which characterizes his lived positionality to established power as coloniality in the Raw.
Until descending underground, Daniels was under the mistaken ideological impression that his freedom and rights were guaranteed by the stability of his identity as an assimilationist oriented Black man living in an objectively harmonious relation to the Real as constituted by the normative gaze of modernity. “Hey, boy, wake up,” Murphy said loudly. “What’re you doing? Sleeping with your eyes open?” “Yes, sir,” he mumbled dreamily; then added quickly: “Oh, no, sir.” Wright’s description of this interaction between the police and Daniels is telling. For throughout his underground ordeal, the reader is never sure whether or not Daniels truly embraces the dread realization of radical ontological freedom mediated by biopolitical pacification that situates Black subjectivity.
In other words, as the severity of Daniels’s gradually unfolding crisis and his literal descent “underground” removes the veil of his ideologically imagined inclusion “aboveground”, the reader witnesses Daniels curiously and unsuccessfully grappling with the realization of always already being underground, in the sense that lived Black experience exists below the realm of ethical relations[8] and thus outside the scope of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.
When Daniels is first accosted by police, he is still unshaken in his belief in the ‘common sense’ virtues of Black assimilation within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society. Daniels assumes that since he has done nothing wrong, for he has definitely committed no crime and certainly has not murdered anybody, the police will soon realize their mistake and let him go home to his pregnant wife. “Before him was the white face of a policeman peering over the steering wheel of a car; two more white faces watched him from the rear seat. For a seemingly endless moment, in the balmy air of an early summer night, he stood immobile, his blistered palm uplifted, staring straight into the blurred face of a policeman who was pointing a blinding spotlight full into his eyes. He waited for them to question him so that he could give a satisfactory account of himself. After all, he was a member of the White Rock Baptist Church; he was employed by Mr. and Mrs. Wooten, two of the best-known people in all the city.” In other words, Daniels sees no need to question the normative gaze of established power that he has adopted as his own, assuming wholeheartedly that his actual innocence of the murder that he is being accused of, is in itself enough to neutralize the imperial topographical coherence of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum.
However, as a Black man, Daniels is consigned to the underground of modernity and condemned by western imperialist power to suffer through coloniality as a perpetually underdeveloped, underprivileged, undereducated, underrepresented underclass who merits no human consideration, ethical treatment or legal redress under the normative gaze of modernity. “Mister, I ain’t done nothing,” he said. “You can ask Mrs. Wooten back there. She just paid me off and I was on my way home . . .” His words were futile and he tried another approach. “Look, mister, I’m a member of the White Rock Baptist Church. If you don’t believe me, call up Reverend Davis . . .” “Got it all figured out, ain’t you, boy?” “No, sir,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “I’m telling the truth . . .”
Indeed, the more Daniels appeals to the rationality of the oppressor and/or seeks the recognition of his innocence in the face of tyranny, the less it becomes a question of guilt and the more we are able to see the fast appearing contours of the question of his lack of ethical standing in relation to the normative gaze of modernity as constituted by the objective violence of the police that itself determines and delineates the sovereign legitimacy of established power.
Wright purposely paints Daniels as disgustingly naive in his attempt to appeal to truth and reason when confronting police violence. In doing so, does Wright’s prose then speak to the emancipatory limitations of the Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic predicated upon a fight for recognition and reveal the paradox at the heart of the Douglassian anti-slavery dialectic predicated upon Revolt? For as Frederick Douglass never hesitates to point out throughout the vast corpus of his fugitive slave lectures, in order to successfully enslave human ‘being’, the slave master must first comprehensively recognize and strategically account for the human condition of the population designated to be enslaved. As such, to base emancipatory praxis upon a fight for organized recognition from the oppressor, rather than a fight of organized resistance against oppression, only reinvests the normative gaze of the oppressor with an unjustified sovereign legitimacy.
Now, as we continue to engage the question of the underground of modernity and what that means in terms of Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, let us make sure we have an adequate understanding of modernity itself. The imperial mainstream ideologically approaches the question of modernity as the triumph of reason over superstition, the victory of scientific progress over religious dogma that speaks to a progressive legacy of Enlightenment belief in evolutionary social progress, scientific rationality, democracy, technological advancement, human rights rhetoric, mass production, standardization, division of labor, urbanization and economic development.
However, contrary to the imperial mainstream, modernity, when viewed from the perspective of the underground, has been nothing but an ongoing disaster of history, and revolves around post-traditional social structures of meaning that not only accompany the rise of the contemporary nation-state, but can be historically traced back to the process by which modernity was violently and systematically imposed upon the world through an ongoing praxis of imperial conquest, genocide, colonial expansion and industrial revolution – all underwritten by the enslavement of human ‘being’.[9]
As such, modernity as it is lived through by Black subjectivity, can be characterized by a socio-ontological tension of coloniality in the Raw that pervades existence as a result of the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum. In the words of Wright, “And again he was overwhelmed with that inescapable emotion that always cut down to the foundations of life here in the underground, that emotion that told him that, though he were innocent, he was guilty; though blameless, he was accused; though living, he must die; though possessing faculties of dignity, he must live a life of shame; though existing in a seemingly reasonable world, he must die a certainly reasonless death.”
And this brings us to the question of the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ that introduces disequilibrium within the normative gaze of established power upon which Daniels had up until this point built the whole substance of his Black identity. “His life had somehow snapped in two. But how? When he had sung and prayed with his brothers and sisters in church, he had always felt what they felt; but here in the underground, distantly sundered from them, he saw a defenseless nakedness in their lives that made him disown them. A physical distance had come between them and had conferred upon him a terrifying knowledge.”
We can identify this “terrifying knowledge” as the surplus of nihilism that accompanies modernity. A nihilism that is experienced as a deafening awareness that the objective basis according to which modernity attempts to justify itself through the normative gaze, both to itself and to the world, as an ethically sound and objectively meaningful foundation of sovereign legitimacy, is in itself objectively meaningless outside of its inexorable relation to a western imperialist continuum. For although modernity is often associated with the decline of religiosity, it would be more accurate to suggest that modernity merely introduces Race, Nation and Capital as a new pantheon of gods that easily compete with and often eclipse the leftover remnants of previous dispensations of the Cause of God in terms of authentic religious devotion.
From an insurgent philosophical perspective of existential liberation critique, Wright's prose engages in an evocative lyrical symbolism that describes the disaster of history which gave birth to modernity as “a little nude brown baby snagged by debris and half-submerged in water. At first he thought that the baby was alive and he moved impulsively forward to save it, but his roused feelings told him that the thing was dead, cold, nothing, the same kind of nothingness he had felt while looking through the slit at the men and women singing in the church.”
In other words, much like the empty form of a church that houses spectacle to make up for what it lacks in spiritual vitality relevant to contemporary lived Black experience, the empty form of modernity at first looks alive by housing the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, and as such we are “moved impulsively forward to save it”. And yet, from the lived positionality of the underground “snagged by debris and half-submerged”, modernity is inscribed with a structural-inert violence that negates the question of the meaning of human ‘being’ with an obsolete metaphysical thesis of “dead, cold” materialist determinism that reifies the surplus of nihilism within a vacuous litany of epistemic dogma that enshrines “the same kind of nothingness” which Wright informs us that Daniels observed while looking at “men and women singing in the church”.
Wright knowingly elucidates the ongoing struggle between Daniels and the normative gaze as such: “He flushed with a nameless shame and involuntarily took a step backwards and his lips moved in an effort to utter angry words against the whole configuration of the senseless world. This thing was his enemy; it condemned him as effectively as had those policemen. It made him feel guilty. But, at the same time, he felt that his guilt was futile, for what could he do in the face of this?” Indeed, what happens as the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ confronts the normative gaze of modernity, and as a result, destabilizes established structures of meaning? For Daniels, who wagers so much of his Black identity on the possibility of assimilation within the normative gaze; the answer is nihilism. “Maybe anything’s right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, too. Any action a man took to satisfy himself — theft or murder or torture — was right.”
After giving voice to such nihilism, Daniels continues digging around before attempting to disregard his own cowardice in the face of the police by engaging in Bad Faith[10] when he encounters another worship service with thoughts that berate those participating in devotion and song for lacking an “unrepentant” and “heroic attitude” that “yields no quarter in whimpering”. Then, after more guilt ridden excavation and self-exploration, Daniels finds access to a movie theater and ridicules an entire audience of moviegoers with more hypocritical disdain for the fact that they do “not rise up”.
And yet, against his own initial skepticism and the vicious mockery with which he expresses his alienation from the exasperating resignation of the bewildered herd who exist “sleeping in their living, and awake in their dying . . . in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that condemned him.” Daniels eventually finds himself “hovering between sleeping and waking,” before becoming unexpectedly overcome by “a ceaseless murmur, like a muffled hum” and then experiences a “deliriously happy” mood originating with a “rising and growing . . . slow strain of music”.
Is Wright here seeking to convey the situated consciousness of Black subjectivity realizing itself as defiance against the exhaustive materiality of existence mediated through the dialectic movement and socio-ontological depth of the Blues metaphysic enunciating the call of human ‘being’ and response of Black community to the disaster of history? Indeed, by means of the Blues metaphysic, Wright is able to incite the protagonist towards an existential wager that confronts nihilism through improvisational search for provisional foundations from which to engage questions of the human condition, reality, freedom, universality, temporality, Justice, mortality and the Divine without recourse to a preordained harmony or epistemic stability of established structures of meaning.
“Hovering between sleeping and waking, he heard a ceaseless murmur, like a muffled hum. His sleepiness made him confused and he looked about in the darkness, trying to locate the sound. Yes, it was coming from beyond the wall.” And as such, beyond established structures of meaning. “No doubt the church members had gathered there, just as once he had gathered with others in Reverend Davis’ church to sing and pray. Then the muscles of his body jerked taut as a loud, surging hymn broke forth, sonorous and magnificent in its expression of melancholy renunciation.” And what is this “melancholy renunciation” that Wright discloses, if not the undifferentiated venture of intentionality as the irreducibility of agency and irreconcilability with the Real that defines the affirmation of the human condition itself?
“Involuntarily, he rose to his feet, as though rising to meet his fate. Surrounded by darkness, groggy from lack of sleep, he could not resist the tides of melody that drenched him. He felt within himself a vast and old conviction seeking to rise again. It was as though he had forgotten something and, in the act of trying to remember it, could not; but still the memory lingered. He shrank with fear from this nameless feeling that was trying to capture him, for he felt that it possessed such unlimited power that, once its prisoner, he would never be free again.” Wright thus reveals lived Black experience as a horizon of no return, “this nameless feeling” of being condemned to shoulder an emancipatory burden of universality, “for he felt that it possessed such an unlimited power” as a syncopated point of departure from which, by way of the Blues metaphysic, the disaster of history is confronted with a radical ontological freedom – a lived rhythm of praxis unconstrained by the need to replicate the mythic stability of a traditional past, “for he felt that it possessed such unlimited power that, once its prisoner, he would never be free again”, hindered by a closed teleological guarantee of a restorative future. For lived Black experience speaks to irrecoverable loss as a socio-ontological imperative towards an unprecedented universality of human ‘being’ constituted through emancipatory praxis against a western imperialist continuum.
As such, the emancipatory gravity of lived Black experience is too much for the timorous Daniels to handle. Wright makes it clear that Daniels prefers the calm of respite, but not the turbulence of rupture, generated by the Blues metaphysic that calls into question the unreflective imposition of power upon structures of meaning by which we approach and thus constitute the Real. Daniels ends up battling against a “fatigue and sleepiness” that almost tempt him to retreat into “the long ritual of routine” as a way back “into characteristics of everyday life aboveground” and as such would allow him to succeed in “washing his hands” of “the black depths of the underground” and “this mood that threw everything into such a peculiar light.” Within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, “this mood” is experienced as anguish that introduces the possibility of anxious freedom moving towards authenticity. Within the underground of modernity, “this mood” is experienced as dread that introduces the conditions of possibility of defiant freedom moving towards confrontation with established power. This presents a conundrum for Daniels, who is depicted by Wright as too sincere to retreat from this recently discovered epistemic defiance, yet at the same time too accommodating to harness its emancipatory imperative to Revolt.
However, Wright describes vividly how the Blues metaphysic ultimately commits Daniels to “a strange and new knowledge” of human ‘being’ as presence towards self, engagement in the world and intersubjective resonance towards one another that ultimately “overwhelmed him: He was all people. In some unutterable fashion he was all people and they were he; by the identity of their emotions they were one, and he was one with them. And this was the oneness that linked man to man, in life or death. Yet even with this knowledge, this identification with others, this obliteration of self, another knowledge swept through him too, banishing all fear and doubt and loss: He now knew too the inexpressible value and importance of himself.”
Thus, The Man Who Lived Underground culminates as a literary admonition regarding the ambiguity of existence that situates the human condition. For even as Daniels comes to the realization that “He must assert himself”, he does not fully embrace or understand the emancipatory gravity of the exceptional antagonism against established structures of meaning generated by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. For “he was propelled to do something, to devise means of action by and through which he could convince those who lived aboveground of the death-like quality of their lives.” Indeed, had not the Blues metaphysic ruptured the hold that the normative gaze exerted upon him “with waves of song battering at the cliffs of his consciousness”?
Wright also reveals to the reader that Daniels certainly “knew that at some time in the near future he would rise up from this underground, walk forth and say something to everybody. He did not know what he would say or how; but he had no doubt that he would soon forsake this haven and emerge again. He could not question what he felt, for he was it and it was he.” In using such language, Wright’s narrative shows us that the emancipatory weight of the question of the meaning of human ‘being’ in the face of the normative gaze of modernity and its surplus of nihilism exert a tremendous influence upon Daniels, yet influence is not causality, and it is Daniels himself, who naively chooses to think that the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, the aboveground, needs to be convinced “of the death-like quality of their lives” and so sets in motion the events that lead to his own meaningless death.
For although according to Wright, “He stood between that terrifying world of life-in-death above him and this dark world that was death-in-life here in the underground”, Daniels still succumbs to the miseducation of soul that characterizes assimilationist Black identity in its ignoble quest for validation from the normative gaze of established power. “He knew where he was. In his mind he saw an image of the police station and at once he turned and walked north. Yeah, that’s where I’m going, he said aloud as though reminding himself of something temporarily forgotten. He would go to the station, clear up everything, make a statement. What statement? He did not know.” Ignorant of the Real that is endemic to a western imperialist continuum that situates his freedom, Daniels chooses to double down on securing the stability of Black identity through assimilation of the normative gaze. “He was the statement, and since it was all so clear to him, surely he would, in one way or another, make it clear to others.”
As a consequence, Wright describes Daniels’s appearance at the same police station, where his once potentially liberating journey to the underground began, as a rational appeal to win the validation of the normative gaze. “Now they would see what he had seen; they would hear what he had heard; they would feel what he had felt. He would lead them into the sewer and take the bricks out of the holes he had made.” Indeed, it is the desperate search to recuperate the stability of Black identity within the normative gaze that leads to new socio-ontological reconfigurations of coloniality in the Raw between imperial mainstream-as-civil society and the underground of modernity. Daniels cannot conceptually grasp that he is not being oppressed by established power out of ignorance of Black humanity, for that would justify a fight for recognition. Rather, the socio-historical consistency of western imperialist power is itself predicated upon the unambiguous recognition of Black humanity, without which, it would never have been so successful in guaranteeing the violent systematic structural negation of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ as the essential basis of its sovereign legitimacy.
Wright’s prose thus menacingly reveals the quixotic nature of the oppressed who seek recognition from the oppressor, inasmuch as The Man Who Lives Underground discloses the impossibility of posing the question of human ‘being’ without taking into account lived potentialities of Black liberation against western imperialist power. For in the face of sudden police indifference to his existential plight as he is told that the murder case against him has been dismissed and he is even free to go, Daniels responds to this exoneration as an attempt to undermine the authenticity of the discovery of his lived positionality as the underground of modernity and resolves “to force the reality of himself upon them” by officially sanctioning the re-criminalization of his assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. “‘I’ll sign some more papers,’ he told them, leaning forward and speaking with all the fervor he could muster. ‘I’m guilty . . .’ ‘I’ll be damned,’ Lawson muttered. ‘You’re off your nut.’” However, is there any difference to the normative gaze, between the recognition of being innocent yet objectively condemned by structural-inert violence to a lived positionality as the underground of modernity, and being diagnosed as psychologically unstable due to an atrophied connection with the Real that is outside the scope of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, and therefore beyond the boundaries of human consideration, ethical treatment and legal redress?
“Come on, you-all,” he yelled at them, casting his voice about the rustling at his feet. He saw Lawson raise the gun and point it directly at him and there was a thunderous report and a streak of fire ripped through his chest. He was hurled into the water, flat on his back. He looked up at the white faces. The grey water was flowing past him, blossoming in white foam about his arms, his legs, his head, his body. His jaw sagged and his mouth gaped open soundlessly. A sharp pain seized his head, a pain that gradually squeezed out the light and let in darkness. “You-all shot me,” he mumbled, breathing hard. He heard excited voices. “What you shoot ’im for, Lawson?” “I had to.” “Why?” “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They would wreck things.”
For although there is a plethora of social struggles based on a fight for recognition whose aim is to assimilate more effectively within the imperial coherence of modernity towards better distributions of the economic surplus of Empire as more efficient and inclusive reconfigurations of global capital, the question of Black liberation arises from the underground of modernity as irreconcilable within the normative gaze of western imperialist power, and thus constitutes an exceptional antagonism that opens out towards unprecedented horizons of epistemic rupture, ontological relevance and geohistorical insurgency rather than foreclosing the project of human freedom within the tried-and-true stability of political oppositions seeking hegemony within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.
(based on a lecture originally presented as part of a panel on "Richard Wright, Surplus & Struggle" at the Marxist Literary Group's Institute on Culture and Society 2023 at UMASS-Boston on June 14. 2023.)
[1] Although certainly in dialogue with Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity, (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996), who examines global dynamics of Empire through colonial relations of spatiality between center and periphery, the concept of the underground of modernity builds upon the work of Harold Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American”, Rebellion or Revolution?, (New York: Apollo Editions, 1968) and Eldridge Cleaver, “Domestic Law and International Order”, Soul on Ice, (New York: Delta/Dell Publishing, 1968, 1991) in their emphasis upon dynamics of Empire through structural relations of close proximity and topographical positionality as ‘domestic colonialism’ that implicates lived Black experience.
[2] For a thoroughgoing examination of Wright’s existential orientation see Katherine Sophia Belle (formerly Katherine T. Gines), “The Man Who Lived Underground: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Philosophical Legacy of Richard Wright”, Sartre Studies International, Volume 17, Issue 2, 2011: 42-59.
[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, (New York: Schocken Books, 1946, 1965) p.152.
[4] Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973, 1993) pp.326-327.
[5] Sartre, What is Literature? and Other Essays, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1948, 1988) pp.195-196.
[6] Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America”, Nepantla: Views from the South 1.3, included in Coloniality At Large, edited by Mabel Morana, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jauregui, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), see also The Brotherwise Dispatch Vol.2, #17, Sept-Nov/2015.
[7] Sartre, “The Republic of Silence”, Lettres francaises, September 1944. Republished as “Resistance and Coloniality”, The Brotherwise Dispatch, Vol.2, Issue#17, Sept-Nov/2015.
[8] Lewis R. Gordon, “Below Even the Other: Colonialism’s Violent Legacy and Challenge with Respect to Fanon”, The Brotherwise Dispatch, Vol.2, Issue#14, Dec/2014-Feb/2015.
[9] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1847, 1995) pp.121-2. Frederick Douglass, “The Nature of Slavery”, My Bondage & My Freedom, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 185, 1855, 2005) pp.328-9.
[10] Bad Faith here refers to the Sartrean notion of self-deception as a way of evading responsibility for the radical ontological freedom that characterizes the human condition. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1943, 1956) pp.86-116.
No comments:
Post a Comment