Sorrow as the Longest Memory of Neglect

Sorrow as the Longest Memory of Neglect

Alfred Frankowski

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 28, Number 2, 2014,pp. 154-168 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

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journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 28, no. 2, 2014Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Sorrow as the Longest Memory of Neglect

Alfred Frankowski northeastern illinois university

abstract: African American history and the history of antiblack violence in this

country have been plagued with different modes of forgetting and outright neglect. As a

result, absence, silence, and breakages mark a particular layer and structure of memory

that contextualizes this form of neglect. In this article, I use the work of Billie Holiday,

W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter Benjamin to argue that the more we have objects of

memory of the African American past, the more antipathy toward present antiblack

violence grows. I show that African American memory of antiblack violence has been

marked by an aesthetic of sorrow just as much as it has been an intrusion into the

public space. I further argue that it is important to critique the function of neglect and

to reenvision the political power of allegorical modes of memory not only to provide a

context for what is neglected but to emphasize that this neglect is a symptom of a newly

unfolding crisis.

keywords: Du Bois, sorrow, Davis, “Strange Fruit,” aesthetic memory, antiblack violence

We were stolen, sold, and brought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each other’s excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown

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overboard together. Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy.

—maya angelou, quoted in the epigraph at the foot of Abigail Jordan’s Monument to the Forgotten Slaves, Savannah

Within the last seven years or so, the development of postracial politics has been based on and grounded in a central contradiction found in public memory. On the one hand, therefore, we can address our racist past as a collective. On the other hand, political policy and discourse seem to indelibly invoke tropes of color blindness and reverse racism to further the subjugations of nonwhites and to continue to sterilize areas in which white privilege may be redressed. This poses a particular problem for how we think about the current violence that nonwhites—and particularly blacks—face. The problem is not one of recognition, representation, or redistribution but, rather, one of neglect. What the postracial position requires to prove either thesis, but evades, is the contemporary relevance of its long history of violence and the way that history is continuing in a variety of forms in the present.

The question of remembrance is not one that can be relegated off to particular studies or communities. It is fundamentally a question of perspective and justice at the same time. How do we collectively remem-ber violence against our own community? How do we reconcile the former violence with the present community in a way that does not disgrace the dead or the forgotten? How do we remember violence that is claimed to be past and yet is still present? All of these questions point out that how we remember is as problematic as what we fail to remember.

In this article, I examine how the precarious line between remembrance and forgetting, and remembrance and neglect leads to several blockages for reconciliation politics. I think that these blockages are as social as they are aesthetic, as historically embedded as they are formative of new forms of violence, and all constitute the corrosive aspects of postracial discourse. They require that what is remembered is also a type of forgetting. In what follows, I will argue that fighting against neglect and forgetting have a dual history that is not foreign to black reconciliation efforts, although it is only now that the distinction needs to be thematized in a way that links remembrance to forgetting and remembrance to neglect.

The Maya Angelou quote that begins this article, used as the text that was placed at the foot of Abigail Jordan’s Monument to the Forgotten Slaves in Savannah, Georgia, underscores this anomaly. Jordan, a white artist,


alfred frankowski 156

undertook the task of creating a memorial to those people lost during the Middle Passage. She placed this work in Savannah as a reminder that the wealth of that port owes its prosperity to both the slaves who made it to America and those who died on the way. For Jordan, the leg-acy of slavery in Savannah had become an invisible story that had “been publically forgotten for too many years.”1 Despite what had already been remembered about slavery, this served a different function. It emphasized how memory shifts from the explicit representation to the implicit mean-ing. While the artist fought to establish the memorial for over a decade and faced many struggles along the way, it is the matter of the quote that is most significant here in highlighting the active role of neglect. For the quote first appeared on the monument with only the first three sentences. It was these sentences that ultimately threatened to undo the representa-tion of a history that comfortably neglected the past. In response to public outcry, Jordan added the last sentence to cast the passage in a more posi-tive light. But in a strange way, the recasting of the quote made the memo-rial both visible and invisible at the same time. What I want to focus on is how, in her struggle to provide a place for the remembrance of forgetting, Jordan also situated how remembrance is prey to an active form of neglect.

This anomaly is doubly important, since it illustrates how aesthetical relations and how we remember structure forms of social neglect and how this neglect reinscribes violence. In this sense, the remembrance of slavery, of Jim Crow, and of antiblack violence is not only a recollection of the past but also a recollection of that incommunicable cleavage between the survivors who were enslaved, between subjugated and reconciled. When the continually subjugated is assumed to be reconciled, then there is no way to raise the question of reconciliation justice. I think that it is fair to say that postracial remembrance really stands for neglect in this sense.

In this article, I examine how neglect requires consideration of how acts of remembrance appear along with a decontextualized aesthetic sensibility. I think that by privileging aesthetics, the subtle elements of antiblack violence can be illustrated in ways that a political analysis on its own would lack. Paying attention to these subtle aspects of antiblack violence allows us to counter the way we accept or put out of play the extreme tragedy of the continuation of antiblack violence in the present.

I use the term aesthetic in this paper in its broadest sense to refer to “sensibility.” This includes not only what appears or can be sensed but also what does not appear and cannot be sensed. In this regard, remember-ing the forgotten is primarily a remembrance of neglect. I will argue that



this is an issue of how both aesthetics and politics continue the struggle for remembrance against the ways neglect instills forgetting, but I worry that there is a proliferation of memorials to select themes of this past that facilitate forgetting much more than remembrance. I argue that black scholars, activists, and artists have forged subversive forms of remembrance that highlight how antiblack violence has been cast into a decontextualized past, and is conceived of as a freak accident of an unenlightened society, or otherwise a moment that has been overcome, when this violence still remains at the heart of the divisions present in American social and political reality now. Thus, throughout this discussion, I will focus on how an aesthetic of neglect and sorrow is essential to recognizing the way antiblack violence persists and in the way remembrance is depoliticized or continued into the present as an object of neglect.

This analysis refers to several moments where neglect is made sensible by reference to history in a different and more allegorical mode. First, I refer to Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit.” I use Angela Davis’s analysis to provide the context for developing an aesthetic of sorrow that has its roots in African American political philosophy and aesthetics. Second, I refer to W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of sorrow songs as a mode of remembrance. Third, I refer to Walter Benjamin’s work on allegory. I argue that it is through an aesthetic of sorrow and of allegory that the neglect reinforced by postracial memory is resisted.

Strange Fruit: Transformation and Neglect

Southern trees bear a strange fruitBlood on the leaves and blood at the rootBlack bodies swinging in the southern breezeStrange fruit hanging from the poplar treesPastoral scene of the gallant SouthThe bulging eyes and the twisted mouthScent of magnolia, sweet and freshThen the sudden smell of burning fleshHere is a fruit for the crows to pluckFor the rain to gather, for the wind to suckFor the sun to rot, for the tree to dropHere is a strange and bitter crop

—Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”



Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” remains a startling, dynamic jazz composition and a striking statement that captures the horrors of living within the shadow of random and senseless violence. It is curious, however, that the song still possesses the spirit of antagonism against the way white political memory neglects its history of antiblack violence. In what follows I want not only to examine what this song recalls but to further examine how remembrance and forgetting, remembrance and neglect, are in tension in this song. I will use Davis’s analysis of the song to further develop its political importance.

In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Davis argues that Billie Holiday’s music has such an enduring quality because it capitalizes on the power of the aesthetic transformation of oppression. Furthermore, he argues that understanding the importance of several early blues women requires serious critical reflection on their philosophic, aesthetic, and political impact. Central to her argument is her focus on the work of Holiday because it embodies the strong, defiant, and surprisingly subversive nature of the musical style, fusing themes of hope inverted by the disappoint-ment that seems to be at play in many of Holiday’s songs. Ultimately, with Holiday’s music, Davis illustrates how the music itself transformed a set of social relations that were and are politically rigid and often lack sites of expression or representation. She writes, “[Holiday’s] message is able to escape the ideological constraints of the lyrics. In the music, in her phrasing, her timing, the timbre of her voice, the social roots of pain and despair in women’s emotional lives are given a lyrical legibility.”2 Davis holds that these songs articulate a life that, prior to this, had no forum for articulation. In this sense, Holiday’s music prefigures forms of consciousness-raising and many other themes that became part of civil and human rights–era politics. Her musical style can also serve as a way for contextualizing the transformations in the politics of the 1960s. For instance, Holiday’s music transgresses norms and forms a fluidity of boundaries, between happy and sad, song and language, past and present.3 Therefore, while Holiday had the ability to transform a song that was full of clichéd images into a critique of its own content, she cleared the space for the expression of life gone silent.4

Along these lines, Davis argues the significance of Holiday’s aes-thetics further by recognizing the way black aesthetics links to politics by making fluid the boundaries between discursive domains. She holds that Holiday’s transgressive aesthetics places a tension between Eros and



Power within a political dream that African Americans have no part in.5 She argues that Holiday’s approach to aesthetics is bound to the flexibility and transformation of boundaries and classifications.6 Hence, it follows that it is this tension that suspends a fixed state of reconciliation, making the present a fluid boundary through which a transformative reconfiguration takes place. And thus this style and the works that are distinctly Holiday’s are important moments of transforming oppression into new aesthetic configurations. Davis follows this line of thought through to her interpretation of Holiday’s politically charged “Strange Fruit,” for example, holding that “Strange Fruit” is primarily a protest song against the antiblack violence of white supremacy that Holiday lived through. Davis’s interpretation seems right given the timing of the song, but this does not identify in what way the song aesthetically continues these protests.7 And what about the tension between the sensible and the insensible? What about the tension between remembrance and forgetting? What about the tension between the erotics of lynching and the normative spaces of production? In all of this, it seems to me that Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” traverses uncharted territory.

“Strange Fruit” itself frustrates a postracial sensibility. While it is true, as Davis argues, that the song evokes the horrors of lynching at a time when black people were still passionately calling for allies in the campaign to eradicate this murderous and terroristic manifestation of racism,8 this song is not easily explained in reference to this history. It does not reconcile this history, nor does it perform the work of remembrance. Instead, it frustrates these modes of interpretation. We must also think through how the song makes the normative violence strange and to see how its aesthetic presenta-tion is also a type of political discourse with neglect.

While I agree that this is at play in Holiday’s music and in “Strange Fruit,” I suggest that aesthetic sorrow does more than make oppression aesthetic. To think about how the song is not simply a representation of protest, I think that we must first consider how “Strange Fruit” is a site of conflict between remembrance and neglect. This can be illustrated by focus-ing on how the song displaces what memory would grab onto: it makes inaesthetic exactly what would be the object of remembrance. For instance, Holiday sings, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the polar trees / Pastoral scene of the gallant South / The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.” What are inaesthetic in this stanza are



the event, the particularity of the person, and any details about the action. Moreover, subjectivity is not in play here; only the brutal materiality of the situation is put on display, and Holiday only sings the aftermath. To say this slightly differently: She sings the world of violence in its mode of neglect; the lynching she “describes” is only the violence inscribed by silence. Holiday’s silence refuses to resolve the dissonance between Southern beauty and Southern horrors, between violence and peace, between a then and a now—and thus functions allegorically.

It is the intertwining of neglect and remembrance that makes the song one that continues the work of undoing remembrance. In the following stanza Holiday sings, “Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh / Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.” While the scent of magnolia may mask the smell of burning flesh, or the smell of burning flesh may overpower the scent of magnolia, neither is cancelled, and both are embedded in one another. Moreover, the smell of burning flesh is also sudden, unexpected, disruptive—a shock to the images that precede it. Furthermore, in the closing lines of the song, Holiday sings, “Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck / For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck / For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.” The song cannot be a remembrance, because it does not disclose a content; rather, it is a tracing of an omission. It is a tracing of the neglect of a state of affairs, an atmosphere, or a set of aesthetic relationships. It traces what Du Bois called sorrow in his pivotal work, The Souls of Black Folk. For this reason, I want to shift attention toward the way Du Bois opens the space for an aesthetics of sorrow to be developed as a strategy of resisting ongoing oppression both aesthetically and politically.

Du Bois and the Sorrow Songs

My turn to Du Bois at this point is deliberate but somewhat unconventional. While Du Bois is generally praised for his astute analysis of cultural history and memory, or his incisive contributions to political activism, his aesthetics is often characterized at best as underdeveloped. In his brief 1926 essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” he argues that art that has no political con-tent and is of no concern to him, thus seemingly reducing the importance of art to its significance for politics.9 The fact that he does not give much attention to the arts in general furthers this characterization. Following this



sentiment, Arnold Rampersad points out that Du Bois had little judgment in terms of appreciation of art, and thus it follows that he regarded art as insignificant.10 Likewise, Keith Byerman argues that Du Bois’s idea of art is primarily concerned with social, political, and historical realities and not with philosophical aesthetics.11 According to both commentators, “art” for Du Bois is only a tool for politics rather than a distinct domain of human and social experience. Byerman argues that art, according to Du Bois, is for the purpose of transcending human suffering and is significant in that it produces an image of an ideal beyond the constraints of present suffering.12 But this is not a rejection of how aesthetics relates to politics or to memory. Du Bois rejects discussions of art, or the philosophy of art, without reject-ing aesthetics in its broader sense. As aesthetics does not simply refer to art but, rather, sensibility, aesthetics is the main issue in Du Bois’s thought, from the second sight of the Negro to the invisibility that blackness under-goes in the sight of whiteness.

Despite these objections, I think that a general case can be made that the aesthetics at play throughout Du Bois’s work is one predicated on politi-cal disjuncture—but I will not make that case here. Instead, I want to show that in his main work, The Souls, this aesthetic is at play and designated by the term sorrow. Not only is sorrow a precise term employed at the end of the text, but Du Bois makes sure that at the head of each chapter, he places a phrase of music. It is music rather than images that does the work of introducing memory as sorrow. In Du Bois’s last essay in Souls, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” he holds that the central importance of songs to African American lives is twofold: these songs are songs of memory and the first truly American music. As a music that is related to memory, it retains that which is forgotten. What is forgotten is exactly why this music is the first American music: it retains that sensibility of being broken from a place of origin. The sorrow songs are not about sadness but, rather, the interruption of forgetting.

For most of Souls, the goal of Du Bois’s political work is to seek to recover a history that has been left out and, at the same time, to correct forms of social misperception that underlay much of the racism of his time. “Of the Sorrow Songs” does not seem to achieve the end of recovery, however. Rather than recover a past that has been lost, it seems to expose a present as broken. Du Bois writes, “They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and



hidden ways.”13 The songs shaped a texture of life in memory and out of place. Shannon Zamir argues that, for Du Bois, the sorrow songs and spirituals are used as a “living recollection that continues to speak to the disgraces of the present that has by no means severed its link” to the past.14 According to Du Bois, it is because of this dual character of these songs that the present becomes shaped by loss, the continually ruptured or left out, and the distance between reconciliation and recognition.

To see how and why sorrow is at play here as a form of memory, we have to ask what the message of the sorrow songs is. Du Bois writes “What are these strange songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these are the articulate mesage of the slave of the world” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 538). I think that we have at least two options on this score. First, as Byerman argues, the songs might suggest that these historicized slave expressions are really counterhisto-ries to dominant culture.15 Second, as Robert Gooding-Williams argues, the present is justified, but only to the extent that it is asked to respond to this message. He writes: “To respond to the message of the sorrow songs, white Americans must acknowledge their implications in the lives of black Americans by heeding the message of the sorrow songs and extending to black Americans their civil and political rights.”16

The claim that the message of the sorrow songs offers a counterhistory or a politics of civil rights is fundamentally problematic. Both Gooding- Williams and Byerman tie the meaning of the songs to a distinct “message,” but that is exactly what is articulated by a present and active form of neglect. Du Bois holds the opposite, in that the sorrow songs make the present strange. Furthermore, according to Byerman and Gooding-Williams, sorrow restores a sense of former times, without abandoning the present. But this is to forget that, according to Du Bois, the music of the slave does not have a message distinctly shaped for our past but, rather, for the world. Its message is one that iterates a past suffering in the present. To say that they are songs of sor-row is not simply to say that they are about the sad or the unfortunate; we can-not say this at all according to Du Bois. But we can say that these strange old songs—with words we no longer know the meaning of, though we know well the meaning of the music—these strange old songs that are the message of the slave to the world, are songs that suffer the present.

Furthermore, Du Bois writes that “the songs are indeed the sift-ings of centuries” and that they are the “voice of exile.”17 But they speak



to the present as that which is continually exiled. And thus, aesthetic sorrow traces a memory underwritten by politics, although it itself is not a memory but a movement between the politics and the aesthetics of memory, in the politics of the present. Sorrow as the translation of exile seems to be what is significant in Byerman’s observation that Du Bois’s aesthetic employs increasing sensitivity toward a sense of distance, when one of proximity would be expected.18 The songs call to public attention the continuation of a limit to reconciliation, an impossibility implied in, and an infinite distance from, the political discourses in the present. If I am right in this interpretation, then I think that it is fair to say that sorrow makes use of both what is remembered and what is forgotten allegorically to form a resisting–oppression relation.19 It is in this sense that Zamir thinks that the sorrow songs are a form of resistance to recon-cile community within a totalizing ideal.20 If music is the transmission of memory, then it is a memory without content. Du Bois states, “The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so for two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words mean, but know-ing well the meaning of the music.”21 The neglected in history and how this neglect is reinforced in the present are made aesthetic in Du Bois’s treatment of these songs.

The aesthetics of sorrow provides a contextualization of a situation in which normatively is there but has become decontextualized and therefore has gone silent. Aesthetic sorrow marks the breakage that persists within the present as a continuation of the social fabric that unites the cultural memory of the past. Therefore, aesthetic sorrow is the aesthetic sensibility that retains that which remains as the remains of former times. Indeed, this relation is one that reinforces a tension between two modes of remembrance, one directed toward reconciliation and one directed toward neglect.

In the next section, I will reconstruct Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory in order to show why these allegorical uses of memory are important for interpreting and problematizing remembrance when neglect is produced as the condition that allows for memory to appear. In doing this, I suggest that Du Bois’s and Benjamin’s aesthetics are far closer than what is usually assumed. More importantly, I want to suggest that this particular use of allegorical memory is exceedingly important to us today.



Sorrow and Allegory

Much like Du Bois’s use of aesthetic sorrow, Benjamin’s focus on allegory agitates the aesthetic domain of representation, and in doing so it is suited for being an art that reveals how where remembrance fails, oppression is continued. In Benjamin’s early study of an obscure form of late baroque German drama called “mourning plays” (Trauerspiels), he argues that allegory is the philosophical and aesthetic form that is employed in times of political crisis—that is, in times when authority, power, and organization are in the process of, or in need of, transformation.22 In general, allegory is thought of as a stylistic variation of art, or a technique of reading and interpreting that is heavily symbolic. Contrary to this characterization, Benjamin writes, “Allegory . . . is not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, as writing is.”23 It follows from Benjamin that allegorical expression recasts new relations, holding different significances, ordering different patterns, and thus requiring a different interpretation within the context of domination. This is why, for Benjamin, allegory works by disjoining images, domains, and references to normative forms of representation and thus is an aesthetic that does not represent representations. And it is in this sense that Benjamin argues that the baroque mourning plays depend upon allegory because it is the art that exposes the decay or inversion of the representational itself. This is further illustrated in his “On the Concept of History.”

In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin argues that historicism, or the act of memorializing history, is always tied to its politics. The way to make these politics appear, however, is to break with historicism by infusing it with a healthy dose of materialism. He argues that the historical materialist should be likened to the “chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones.”24 What seems to be important here is that the narrative of history is never complete; the breakage between events is manifest where the class relations are not. Likewise, Benjamin argues that historical materialism is a process of empathy that attempts to learn from the philosophy of the oppressed.25 It is in these passages that the violence of a normative structure and its role in memory leave the material of history to seize upon what has been erased and thus introduce an allegorical relation to memory.

Furthermore, Benjamin’s theses on history illustrate how sorrow politically contextualizes the actual residue and residual aftershocks



of the violence. Benjamin writes, “Among medieval theologians, acedia was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote, ‘Few will suspect how sad one had to be to under-take the resuscitation of Carthage.’ The nature of sadness becomes clearer if we ask: With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers. The historical materialist knows what this means.”26 He further argues that it is through empathy that one interprets how the past is inflected into the present. This task is to proceed through the deep melancholy of acedia, which was thought to be the root of philosophy. It is sadness that resus-citates Carthage, a culture repeatedly destroyed by Rome but also a name meaning “New state.” Sadness, in this sense, has its political counterpart in the difference between the empathy of historicism and the empathy of historical materialism. The historical materialist traces where history breaks in ways that lay bear the cost and horror of every victory. And in this way, sadness orients the political feeling of empathy toward what has been necessarily neglected.

Like “aesthetic sorrow” for Du Bois, Benjamin holds that allegorical arts are always out of place and disruptive. Inversion and decay are not just the main themes in allegorical arts. They depend upon the expressions that are most significant but often mute, inept, or in a state of arrested develop-ment. The political aspect of allegory appears in how the allegorical content resists representation, resists forms of appearance, but all the same, does not fail to communicate its essential content.27 Susan Buck-Morss points out that, for Benjamin, this requires seeing history as continual transition and reproduction.28 She further argues that allegory rests upon a return to the decayed, the old, and the out of style, anew. This means not only that allegory is significant because it presents a voice of exile or exile as a state of affairs—like a rotting tooth or an old sore that flairs up once in a while—but that it is also a form that resists being framed in such a way that it can be quickly explained away; and it is in this sense that allegory clears the way for every political trope associated with valorizing the rare and extreme triumphs of the black community over systematic violence as fetishized politics. It results only in a politics of neglect—neglecting the material history and negating the framework for under-standing the present material conditions that reinforce the normativity of the former violence—and, in many cases, reverses those achievements.



Neglect explains away a present problem as a misunderstanding of history. This is resisted in the way that sorrow makes neglect a problem for itself. We have a memory culture of Jim Crow that provides it with a specific context, but this is predicated on a memory culture of neglect that would allow us to see the parallels between the implicit and explicit violence of that time. It does not allow us to see how our traditions, institutions, and normative sensibility are deeply connected to the traditions, institutions, and normative sensibilities of that time. It is because of this neglect that the political significance of the deep ways in which the new Jim Crow continues to touch aspects of our habits and lives.29

Furthermore, according to Benjamin, allegory is never detached from the representative but is implied in how this attachment is transfigured in the allegorical, resulting in new configurations of the political and the aesthetic. Benjamin argues that allegory can be seen as an intrusion that could be described as “a harsh disturbance of the peace and a violation of law and order in the arts.”30 And it is this violation of the genre type that forms a new combination or constellation through its own ruptures. We can say that allegory shows where fractured relations are maintained in order to efface the fracture itself.

What I want to point out is that it is this allegorical relation that allows for modes of withdrawal to be reinterpreted as modes of resistance within a still oppressing context. Where the postracial remembers, we see a necessary link to the way this remembering inscribes a type of forgetting. To take all remembering of antiblack violence as allegory for present forms of resisting is to reinterpret the space of reconciliation as an emerging space of crisis.

This is present in the fact that most memorials to the African American past compose a selective memory at best. On the one hand, there are memorials to Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and the civil rights movement in general. This is a great social advance and something extremely significant for social memory and efforts toward reconciliation. This forgetting is more aggressive and harder to identify in the atmosphere of hyperrepresentational memory. In short, we have the basis of postracial memory, which can be nothing more than a remembrance that forgets as it represents the past. Neglect politicizes the normativity that continues breakage, and it seems to be this point that indicates that as our current state of racial memory moves toward reconciling itself with its history, it is also



moving toward an ever-widening crisis that reentrenches its former values. This is a crisis that cannot be avoided even if it remains unrecognized.

notes

I am extremely grateful for the advice, comments, and mentorship I received from Dr. Naomi Zack. I would also like to thank Dr. John Lysaker and Dr. Sarah Hoagland for her comments and conversation on many of the themes contained in this article. Last, I would like to thank the editors at the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for their editorial assistance.

The last line of the epigraph on Abigail Jordan’s Monument to the Forgotten Slaves, Savannah was added to the original inscription after much public outcry. The monument itself was the topic of controversy for more than a decade. This was true of many aspects of the memorial, including the site. The first site the artist requested for the memorial was by the riverfront, and it was turned down because the city claimed that it did not own that property. The city then rented that same site to a developer to construct restrooms to accommodate large groups of tourist. See Derek Alderman, “Surrogation and the Politics of Remembering Slavery in Savannah, Georgia,” Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010): 90–101.

1. Ibid., 95.2. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey,

Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 177.3. Ibid., 174.4. Compare this suggestion with Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic

Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 2003), 170.5. See Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension. Toward a Critique of Marxist

Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 9–21.6. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 174.7. Ibid., 196.8. Ibid., 183.9. W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. N. Huggins (New York: Library of America,

1986), 993.10. Arnold Rampersad, “W. E. B. Du Bois as the Man of Literature,” in Critical

Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. W. L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 58. Also see Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). In both works, Rampersad critiques Du Bois as a writer of fiction and poetry but does not give an analysis of his aesthetics. Whether or not Du Bois’s fiction is “good” or “bad” ignores the question of what Du Bois’s insights into aesthetics really are.



11. Keith Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 29.12. Ibid., 31.13. W. E. B. Du Bois, 537.14. Shannon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought,

1888–1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 174.15. Byerman, Seizing the Word, 34.16. Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political

Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 126.17. W. E. B. Du Bois, 537–38.18. Byerman, Seizing the Word, 29.19. See Maria Lugones, “Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker,” in

Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).20. Zamir, Dark Voices, 181.21. W. E. B. Du Bois, 538.22. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades

Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 178.23. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 162.24. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected

Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 390.25. Ibid., 391–92.26. Ibid., 391.27. For Benjamin, origin does not mean an attempt to see things the way they

originally were; rather, he argues that origin means to trace the conditions that provide for a break from tradition. The original is that which breaks from the concept of the past and springs forth a past concept that was out of place as a now (Jetztzeit) that is embedded in the present. See Walter Benjamin, “The Epistemo-critical Prologue,” in Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 28–30.28. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 168.29. The New Jim Crow has become a popular term that attempts to introduce new ways of critically thinking through the racial dynamics of mass incarceration. For examples of this work, see Angela Davis, Are Prisons ObsoleteŒ (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012); Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).30. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177.


Sorrow as the Longest Memory of Neglect

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