Time and Crisis: Questions for Psychoanalysis and Race

In the triumvirate of personalities and motives—from Wright and Baldwin to Coates—we encounter the essential elements of the “crisis” that configures black passage in the New World. These lines of kinship, both consanguineous and ineffable, travelling from father to son, from uncle to nephew, from one generation to the next, lend us a figurative rhythm that grasps the notion of the processional—the traversal of time and space that remains fundamentally mysterious, just as we can put our finger directly on the problem—black life is still as endangered and precarious as it ever was. If one regards such passage as a “crisis,” then it is precisely because it is riddled with turning points, sudden ruts and rifts in the road when the way seemed smooth and clear—those moments when decisions must be made—and from that perspective, African-American cultural apprenticeship offers, by definition, crisis not as a state of exception, but rather, as a steady state, given historical pressures that bear in on it and that become, as a result, intramural pressures. What I wish to do in these remarks is to clarify one of the questions engendered by this predicament, and that is to say, the riddle of identity and how it matters, but even more than an inquiry into the identitarian, I am searching for a protocol through intramural space

Born Again: Faulkner and the Second Birth

When DuBois formulated his concept of “double consciousness,” he explicitly had in mind the psychic dilemma of historical subjects relatively new to the conditions of freedom. By 1903, the year of the publication of DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, where his “double consciousness” is elaborated, African-Americans were entering their second generation of emancipation; about seven years later, Faulkner’s Quentin Compson will enter the freshman class at Harvard University, and in the course of that fateful year will rehearse and hear rehearsed the narrative of his grandfather’s good friend, Thomas Sutpen; but in the astonishing course of Absalom, Absalom! Sutpen “becomes” Sutpen only when he discovers something akin to “class,” as the black servant drives the small barefoot white boy away from the front door of the Big House. We would be justified in calling the epiphany that violently strikes the consciousness of Sutpen a “second birth,” the next step that the subject takes after the first one. “ ‘Born Again’ “ explores the implications of the “second birth” for this writing and its relationship to the DuBoisian “double consciousness.

A IDEIA DE CULTURA NEGRA

Hortense J. Spillers aborda de forma crítica a Cultura Negra em seu artigo “A Ideia de Cultura Negra”, mesmo sendo consciente que esta ideia de cultura ainda estar por vir. Nesta perspectiva, a autora aborda o que exatamente pode ser entendido por Cultura Negra na nossa era contemporânea, e quais os motivos de ainda não existir uma “Cultura Negra”. Spillers inclui em seus estudos, teóricos como Williams, Du Bois, entre outros, que também abordam a ideia de Cultura Negra. A partir de uma análise desses trabalhos teóricos, Spillers faz uma crítica ao Afrocentrismo e propõe uma nova visão da “ideia de Cultura Negra” como um objeto de estudo crítico conceitual e instrumento prático de transformação e desenvolvimento social.