There Is No Us

A review of None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, Stephen Best, Duke University Press, 2018.

This essay stands at the intersection of black studies, queer theory, and literary criticism and art critique. Its title, None Like Us, is taken from a sentence in David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, arguably the most radical of all anti-slavery documents written in the nineteenth century. The quotation, put on the book’s opening page, describes the wretched condition of coloured people in the United States as observed by the author. It ends with a prayer to God that “none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.” Who is the “us” that the epigraph dooms to self-extinction and oblivion? Is there a collective subject when humans were treated as objects and disposed of as pieces of property? Can one write the history of people who did not exist, or whose existence is forever predicated on a negative relation to history? How does that “none like us” leave open the possibility for an “I,” the first singular person of the art critic, the historian, the queer subject? As Stephen Best writes, “None Like Us begins in the recognition that there is something impossible about blackness, that to be black is also to participate, of necessity, in a collective undoing.” Whatever blackness or black culture is, it cannot be indexed to a “we.” The condition of being black is rooted in a sense of unbelonging: “forms of negative sociability such as alienation, withdrawal, loneliness, broken intimacy, impossible connection, and failed affinity, situations of being unfit that it has been the great insight of queer theorists to recognize as a condition for living.”

A non-communitarian manifesto

None Like Us sometimes reads like a manifesto. The incipit: “a communitarian impulse runs deep within black studies,” sets the stage in almost Marxian fashion—one is reminded of the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto. The specter of communism that is haunting Europe leaves way for the ghost of communitarianism that permeates African American scholarship. Also evocative of Marx and Lire Le Capital is the epistemological break that Stephen Best effectuates. He substitutes the “melancholic historicism” that characterizes black historiography with what he calls a “queer unhistoricism” that interrupts the connection between the past and the present. He breaks away from a century-long attempt to recover archival traces of black life under conditions of disavowal and silencing, to read the archive as a repository of lost traces and muted voices. Stephen Best also distances himself from all kinds of identity politics based on collective struggles and individual resistance. A politics of recognition cannot be predicated on a “we” that does not exist. Identities have to be radically deconstructed in order to assert freedom from constraining definitions of blackness and gender roles. A “gay black male” is an assemblage of three predicates, “gay,” black,” and “male,” that are equally problematic in assuming an essence that is only constituted through negation. As a non-communitarian manifesto, None Like Us is also an aesthetic treatise: the author engages in art critique and literary criticism, not to fly away from historical realities, but to induce us to “think like a work of art.”

A central tenet of African American studies rests on the thesis that black identity is uniquely grounded in plantation slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. The afterlife of slavery makes itself felt in the black political present and delineates a future in which reparation and redress are forever deferred. Recent historiography, to which Stephen Best contributed, has drawn our attention to the silenced voices that make themselves heard through the archive: the fugitive, the renegade, the maroon, the socially dead. Out of these enquiries emerged an obsession with “displacement, erasure, suppression, elision, overlooking, overwriting, omission, obscurantism, expunging, repudiation, exclusion, annihilation, and denial.” Like in Foucault’s essay “The Life of Infamous Men,” these figures emerge through the archive as “lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down” as if “they had appeared in language only on the condition of remaining absolutely unexpressed in it.” According to this melancholic view of history, “recovery from the slave past rests on a recovery of it.” To recover from past trauma, historians have to return to the scene of the crime, a crime imagined as the archive itself. Drawing from Freud’s definition of melancholia as an inarticulable loss that comes to inform the individual’s sense of his or her own subjectivity, Stephen Best writes: “Melancholy historicism provides for the view that history consists in the taking possession of such grievous experience and archival loss.”

The black radical tradition

Against this “traumatic model of black history” in which the present is merely the repetition of past humiliations, Stephen Best advocates a radical break with all attempts to recover a “we” out of the loss embodied in the archive. He borrows from what Cedric Robinson and others have called “the black radical tradition” in which violence is turned inward and rebellion leads to self-destruction. Examples mobilized by Robinson include the mass slaughter of cattle and destruction of crops ordered by the Xhosa prophetess Nongquawuse in 1856; the vanishing quilombo settlements of runaway slaves, mulattos, and outcasts on the Pernambuco coast of Brazil in the seventeenth century; and the 1915 uprising in Nyasaland (now Malawi) led by Baptist minister John Chilembwe who vowed to “strike a blow and die.” Exploring suicide and rumor in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archives of slavery, Stephen Best offers his own selection of vignettes and anecdotes. A “suicide bombing” occurred in 1659 when a besieged African chief blew up himself and his Dutch assailers by setting fire to a keg of powder. Archives of the Middle Passage tell tales of slaves hanging themselves, or starving themselves, or drowning themselves to end their living apocalypse, or holding their breath or swallowing their tongue in attempts at self-strangulation. People who consciously suppressed themselves in acts of self-immolation cannot be enrolled as subjects of history: theirs is “a history of people with whom we fail to identify, who appear stuck in the past beyond the reach of our historical categories.”

When it comes to black identity and the politics of race, the slave past was not always thought to explain the present. Stephen Best singles out the year 1988 and the publication of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the moment when slavery emerged as the constituent object of African American studies. Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize that year, was not a unique occurrence: Alex Haley’s novel and TV series Roots had prepared the ground for a reappraisal of the slave past in popular culture, and in the late eighties and early nineties several history books anchored African American identity in “a continued proximity to the unspeakable terrors of the slave experience.” But the rise of Beloved moved the entire field of literary studies to a central place within African American studies, and this move redressed the “trade deficit” that cultural critics had accumulated with the discipline of history. Toni Morrison spoke of the slave past as a “carnage,” a “devastation” that will always be with us: “this is not a story to pass on.” But Toni Morrison’s more recent novel A Mercy (2008) opens the door for another appreciation of the slave past as it falls away and collapses into its own undoing. A Mercy is not an easy read: the chapters oscillate, confusingly at first, between a first-person narration and a third-person omniscience, reinventing the epistolary novel with dead letters whose failure to arrive comes from having never been sent. It is anchored in a world in which racial distinctions have not yet formed and much is up for grabs: the racial scripts and beliefs that are said today to make up slavery’s legacy have yet to settle into a lexicon. As the critic notes, “If Beloved incites melancholy, A Mercy incites mourning”: in Freud’s terms, melancholia is doomed to endless repetition, whereas mourning ends with a kind of forbearance.

Queer is the New Black

None Like Us is listed on the back cover as an intervention in “African American Studies” and “Queer Theory.” Stephen Best sees a high degree of complementarity between the two: “It startles how easily queerness percolates out of the condition of blackness.” Queer and slave historiography appear to be on the same page: the queer acknowledgement of non-relationality between the past and the present, what literary theorist Leo Bersani calls an “anti-communal mode of connectedness,” echoes the epistemological rupture that Best advocates. A queer orientation toward the past may preserve cultural critics from the melancholic turn that characterizes recent historiography. Black life and queer life are also intimately related through the experience of estrangement, alienation, and disaffiliation that Elizabeth Povinelli sees at the root of all progressive politics. None Like Us begins with a discussion of the different ways that both Best and James Baldwin found themselves, as young men, estranged from their fathers. Although their estrangement stems from opposite sources—Baldwin’s father’s disdain for his son, the pride of Best’s father at his son’s graduation ceremony—, there is a shared orientation toward a selfhood that occurs in disaffiliation rather than in solidarity. Part of this queerness comes from the experience of coming out of the closet as gay. As the author remembers from his tormented youth, “If I come out as gay, I will die in the eyes of my father, but I realize that a part of me is already gay and that he cannot not see that, too there must be a part of me that is already dead.” This skeleton in the closet precludes the possibility of a “we,” whether queer or black.

The chapter that opens the book’s part “On Thinking Like a Work of Art” begins with an address to the reader: “You” is the person who is put in front of the artwork and who experiences a kind of epiphany as one physical substance transmutes into another. In the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s richly woven tapestries, what initially presents itself as precious metal appears upon inspection to be throwaway-aluminum constructions of bottle caps and copper wire: “What was gold now reveals to be mere thrash.” In the layered paper canvases of the Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford, fragments of cardboard advertisements and printed materials are soaked into water and mixed with trash objects to generate relief within the surface itself: “What was originally ‘print’ finds itself transformed into ‘paint’.” Gwendolyn Brooks’s free-verse poems generate another kind of commentary that also mobilizes the tropes of conjuration, transmutation, and alchemy. Here the office of art is to afford a repetition of the artist’s gesture that “repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience.” And the curator, who mobilizes a rich array of sources and commentary listed in the endnotes, puts the “you” of the viewer in direct contact with the materiality of the artwork. Absent from the commentary are all the mediations that constitute art as an object of aesthetic value. Between the “I” of the critic and the “you” of the viewer, there is no “we” that would allow for the emergence of a community of value. When Foucault stated that “we have to create ourselves as a work of art,” or when Best proposes that “we must begin to think like artworks,” what they mean by “we” is mostly themselves.

Uncharted territory

Or so it seems to me. I could not relate to the book’s emphasis on art as embodied thinking or concepts brought into matter, and discussions on contemporary art brought me to uncharted territory. I had no prior knowledge of the visual artists that are commented in the book (I missed the El Anatsui’s retrospective at La Conciergerie in Paris as part of the Saison Africa2020), and I have not read a Toni Morrison novel since Tar Baby. Nor am I versed in recent historiography of the slave trade, and in the most recent discussions about black identity in the United States. I was more familiar with some of the literary criticism the author mobilizes, especially since literary criticism in the United States seems to be identified with France and French studies. Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida—all listed in the index—are household names in academic circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and they point toward a common horizon that I was happy to share with the author. Also familiar was Stephen Best’s evocation of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, that famous passage in which Benjamin gazes upon Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and imagines that the Angel of History is looking toward the past and bears witness to history’s “piling wreckage upon wreckage.” This mix of familiar and unfamiliar shaped my reading of None Like Us, which I am happy to share with others.