HOLIDAY AND NECROPOLITICAL ENFLESHMENT

Set in the racially bifurcated town of Nazareth, Holiday opens by describing black lives in the town's black section, “Niggertown.” As John's mother says, their everyday lives are marked by slow death: “Chokin’ is de black man's life. Da's why he's black, I tell yo’. Choke a white man, he gets black too” (21). This necropolitical asphyxiation is literalized when a black man drowns in front of a white crowd, whose “laughter presses the black head down into a dirty bubble” (43). The death of the black man, registered in the white collective consciousness as “one of them Town niggers … They change ever’ week,” haunts the entire narrative, designating black bodies as nonsubject, fungible flesh (35).

Virginia, who reproached her brother Bob for his inaction at the scene of drowning, recollects the incident that night, imagining the fungibility of black flesh in terms of its unchecked breeding potential:

In the grammar of primitivism, the novel captures Virginia's preoccupation with the preternatural mattering of blackness. Bred by the night, the sun, the Earth, and God, primordial blackness grows rampantly to swallow whiteness that is death-laden, marked by a haunting phrase, “Perhaps death is white” (67, 68, 69). At the same time, the text imagines black flesh bred also by white “huntin’ lusts.” This vision of white desire for black flesh extends the logics of slavery, wherein the reproduction of slaves was immediately the reproduction of property. Even decades after Emancipation, the text suggests, the breeding of blackness creates fungible nonsubjects and sustains the machinery of racial subjugation.

In Holiday, marriage nominates the prime locus of this breeding and constitutes the central trope of black sexuality, or rather the lack thereof. Afraid that white townsmen would discover “de look” in John's eyes, John's mother desperately attempts to have him married to their neighbor, Mary Cartier (21). When John's uncle's eyes had a similar “look o’ singin’ freedom,” he had to flee from the lynch mob after his eyes accidentally met those of a white woman on the street (22). To have Mary, the mother says, will “wash away dat look … A man needs his woman. Else his eyes go lookin’” (26). John's reluctance to wed Mary, or more precisely his aversion to her “lovin’ flesh” that his aunt says will “wash de white fum yo’ eyes” (131), signals his awareness that coupling operates as an instrument of bio/necropolitical control. Mary's words – “Yo’ too alive yet, I reckon, fo’ marryin’. Only fo’ marryin’” – attests to the mechanism of administrative power that gulps individual bodies into population (29, italics original). For “[f]lesh joins this girl to him,” and the joining of flesh would bind John to the domain of necropower, having him resign his agency (60).

In contrast, this enforced fleshiness of blackness constitutes Virginia Hade's object of desire, seducing her with the promise of inaccessible eros. Past marrying age and managing the family business, she falls outside southern gender norms. In her father's words, while Virginia is “[s]mart enough to run this business by [her]self,” more capable than her brother, she “ain't smart enough to run the South” (97). Written out of patriarchy, her disembodied whiteness deprives her of bodily sensation. She repeatedly wonders, “I want to feel. What keeps me from feeling?” (141). Though the novel narrates Virginia's quest for fleshly sensation through her relation to John, their entwinement is not heteroerotically charged. In a reenactment of his uncle's encounter with a white woman, John's eyes accidentally capture the figure of Virginia as his eyes wander around the townscape on his way to work. Virginia's presence momentarily absorbs John, making him oblivious to the approach of her father, Judge Hade. Though Hade's thoughts murderously condemn John's penetrating gaze, he encounters the same look in his daughter's eyes shortly thereafter. He happens upon her as her gaze is transfixed on “negresses picking fruit” outside her office window. As she stares at “dark women flow[ing] and undulat[ing]” in the orchards, “her throat throbs visibly” (92). Hade reproaches his daughter and compares her to John:

The white male fear that Virginia perceives is, obviously, a panic over miscegenation and lesbianism. The text forges a homology between John's and Virginia's modes of desiring, which obliterate white men from the economy of desire. Such an eradication is unconscionable because white men claim a monopoly on the desiring gaze and its objectifying force. Southern patriarchy dictates that neither a black man nor a white spinster ought to attempt to appropriate desiring subjectivities.

While Virginia's spinsterhood and frigidity could readily be interpreted as signs of repressed lesbianism (this is her father's reading), it is important to note that her desire is kindled exclusively by the imagined fleshiness of blackness. Wandering into Niggertown, Virginia encounters Mary, who is oblivious to her approach. Mary's flesh, with “nipples red like coagulate blood upon the satin breasts” that peek through her shirt, lies open to Virginia's gaze (149). Mary's exposure – which allows Virginia to become a subject of desire – exemplifies what Spillers calls the “pansexual potential” of black flesh: “an open vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as male and/or female.”Footnote ²⁹ During this encounter, Virginia is immersed into black flesh and is appalled (“I am afraid of this girl!”), reestablishing herself as a white subject. Ordering Mary to sit next to her, Virginia hears her own voice as “so strangely white it startles her” (150). Caught in a double bind, Mary must conform to the white woman's order without seeing herself as her equal. Yet she “has the message of Virginia's eyes”: “Suddenly she flings her dark bare arms about Virginia's neck. The warm full lips press the pale ones … They could not sit together. But they could kiss!” (151). No law prohibits this fleshly binding, for the “hieroglyphics of flesh” are undecipherable to the dominant symbolic order, parrying its control precisely because of its illegibility. Virginia experiences the incident as a “perfect moment of communion,” restoring her to fleshly sensation (152).

Virginia's obtaining of the fleshly sensation sharply contrasts with John's disembodiment when he baptismally sheds his flesh in the river. As he plunges into a “maw of black,” he reaches an underwater cave where the “ledge incurves like the unfolding flesh of a woman loving” and its “lips … hold blackness pure from sun-flushed water” (157). John's near suffocation in the enveloping fleshly grotto reenacts both the text's opening drowning and the compulsory mating that chokes him. As the water voluptuously enfolds him, he hallucinates a naked black woman. With “[n]o flesh between her gleaming skin and her bones,” the ghostly black woman dances on John's body (157):

As he copulates with the apparition of black flesh, John seizes and reenacts the work of necropower for himself, rather than allowing it to lacerate him. In doing so, he becomes a nonsubject, “flesh that is he.”

Yet if enfleshment is a necropolitical operation of dehumanization, by turning himself into sheer flesh and becoming one with the “[f]lesh of her who is fleshless,” he becomes a being other than human, rather than just a nonhuman. As he surfaces from the deep water, he drags himself onto the ground, and thirstily sucks the udder of a cow. Nursed by the “[s]weet milk spray[ing] down his throat, thicken[ing] and stifl[ing] his throat,” John undergoes a resurrection (159). His initials J. C. (the same as Jesus Christ) and the town's name, Nazareth, underline John's other-than-humanness. Resurrected, the bounds of his corporeal self erupt and form a new whole as he communes with the landscape around him. In the otherwise “common trees” that surround him, John now finds agential animacy: “their roots have sense like clasping fingers, and their erectness is a subtle balanced thrust from their own muscled roots, like his erectness from his feet, from his thighs” (161). Observing sentience in nonhumans that is akin to his own, John phantasmagorically transcends taxonomic divisions between species and individuals, human and nonhuman.

In such an ethereal state of undifferentiation from the world surrounding him, John finds Virginia sitting under a tree. For him, “She is not stranger than the cows and the dancer,” but instead constitutes part of the landscape as she is “more moveless than the writhed trees that shade her” (161, 162). In John's mind, the “cruel naming clearness” that segments and articulates the otherwise “nameless” world of comingling disappears, and he and she become indistinguishable (75). The white woman enfleshed after kissing Mary and the black man disembodied have exchanged their assigned roles in the dominant symbolic order (“She is you!”) (163). As they sit together, their “warm bond throbbed less tense. It drew less taut. For they were closer, closer,” idyllically amalgamated (166).

However, the identificatory force transforms into an appropriative desire. Virginia's desire for black flesh and its imagined nearness to nature returns to her as she voices her impossible wish to swim as freely and nakedly as John. As she sees John's large knife, Virginia insists they exchange their knives. Seeing her knife with the “useless delicate blade” (169) encased in a sheath of mother-of-pearl, John refuses Virginia's demand in vain. In the forced exchange of phalluses, one charged with rugged virility and the other with opulence extracted from racial domination, their hands are interlocked: “As one, so joined, they rise up from the ground. They are close” (169). The scene, as Terris puts it, constitutes a “symbolic sexual act.”Footnote ³⁰ However, instead of having John penetrate Virginia (as Frank initially planned), the text frames the scene as Virginia raping him: “Within his eyes her body's moving forms invade him. He is transfixed, he is displaced and wracked and marvelously broken … filled with this sweet unbearable trample of her flesh within his breast, within his heart and loins” (170). Invaded by Virginia's flesh, John's disembodied self is once again enfleshed, and he surrenders to her with an ejaculative utterance as “[b]oth of his hands fall limp”: “ – I am John Cloud. Nigger” (171, original emphasis). Thus he is written back into the Jim Crow symbolic order.

While the act reinscribes John into compulsory fleshiness, interpellating him as a “nigger,” it also restores Virginia to her position in heteropatriarchy. Left alone, as if to respond to the voice persistently echoing in her – “I am your world. You cannot break from me” (173) – Virginia cuts herself with John's knife. With the blood staining her dress, she walks home “proudly,” “toward her wound's fulfilment” (180). For she knows that the “eyes of [her] menfolk” would immediately grasp the meaning of the bloodstain and John's knife in her hand. By staging herself as a rape victim, an object of a black man's lust, she casts off the suspicion of lesbianism without engaging in the actual heterosexual act. Attaining sexual subjectivity without sexual acts, she becomes a properly racialized subject: “I am clean. I am all white at last” (182). Here, Virginia's realization of whiteness enacts the coproduction of racial and sexual normativities that Siobhan Somerville sees in turn-of-the-century discourses of sexuality. Somerville argues, “Compulsory heterosexuality has been not simply parallel to discourses of racial segregation but integral to its logic.”Footnote ³¹ Thus Virginia secures racial normativity through sexual normativity, via the excision of her deviant desire for black flesh. As a properly racialized subject, “she is replete,” reclaiming control over her body: “She can stir a toe and watch it lift the linen … From her toe up to her eyes, her body lives. – That is me!” (227–28). She achieves the bodily sensation that she has long sought.

Crucially, through the eroticized lynching, Holiday binds the subjectification of a white individual (Virginia) into the larger process in which whiteness is forged as population. Upon seeing Virginia's bloodstain, white individuals form into an undifferentiated mass: “The crowd breaks into integrate parts. It is a crowd maturing. From its hearty will eyes muscles limbs are fleshed” (198). As it forms, it becomes simultaneously a body (Virginia's brother Bob is “the head”) and an instrument of necropolitics: “For the men have made a rope of themselves. Bob Hade is the head. He strides and the men are a rope, taut, writhing after. Thick men and lean men and callow youths, strange to their first ecstasy, rope out and away toward Niggertown” (205–6). Frank's use of the word “ecstasy” here suggests “the sexuality of population,” collective rather than individual sexuality.Footnote ³² The novel underlines this sense that sexuality coagulates the men into a population when it refers to them repeatedly as a snake (“the man rope snaking to Niggertown,” “The man snake slides,” “bearing snakewise into Niggertown” (209, 208, 208)). As the mob marches on, becoming ever more unified, the word “white” is added to the signifiers “man,” “rope,” and “snake” to suggest that lynching forges and consolidates white sexuality, fictionalizing it as an undifferentiated unity (“[a] white snake twists,” “the white rope twists,” “white man rope”) (209, 210, 210). As the men become an instrument of necropolitical murder, they become a biopolitical population worthy of life.

CANE’S BLAZON SUBJECTIVITY

As Holiday’s Virginia illustrates, Frank's portrayal of the double operation of bio- and necropower reveals the ways in which Foucauldian sexuality is constructed through the enfleshment of blackness. Designed simultaneously as the key to deciphering the hermeneutics of the subject and as a powerful tool for producing and animating the population, sexuality constructs subjectivity in back-formation, consigning fungible fleshiness to black nonsubjects. Holiday’s deployment of modernist stream of consciousness is, in this sense, apt for Frank's depiction of the birth of sexuality. The diurnal structure of the novel seamlessly delineates Virginia's subjectivity formation, creating the illusion of tapping into her desire for black flesh as the reservoir of her innermost secret, while merging it with the white collective unconsciousness that purges her wayward desire.

But perhaps its stream of consciousness is flowing too seamlessly – especially when it comes to its portrayal of the black protagonist. In his surprisingly lukewarm 1923 review of Holiday, Toomer insinuates that Holiday’s “subjective design” ultimately fails to capture the reality of race relations in the South.Footnote ³³ Especially problematic for Toomer was Frank's arbitrary interposition of his authorial, white voice when he narrates John's unconsciousness – contrasted with his black speech in dialogue – in order to streamline the narrative flow of the text. Toomer's final, throwaway commendation is telling in this regard: “as an art form, Holiday is clean, superb.”Footnote ³⁴ Perhaps, too clean, like the white protagonist of the novel who achieves her subjectivity through purging her messy desire for blackness.

Where Holiday depicts this birth of the white subject in an unbroken diurnal cycle, Cane’s sections each feature pictorial representations of a broken sun-like semicircle, which, even when put together, wouldn't make a perfect circle. In its unequivocal embrace of the messiness of form – an assemblage of prose, poem, and drama – Cane destroys the possibility of seamless subjectivity that Holiday narrativizes. As Wesley Beal succinctly summarizes, “collage's principle of juxtaposition” has become a preferred scholarly optic to understand Cane’s generic instability and apparent lack of clear narrative logic.Footnote ³⁵ While each textual element is independent, the recurrence of images (cane, cotton fields, smoke from a sawdust pile), characters (King Barlo, Old David Georgia), and themes (lynching, miscegenation, infanticide), create “text-to-text, node-to-node relationships that are the ligatures of the text.”Footnote ³⁶ In so doing, Cane’s interdependent elements “illuminate one another” while “the gaps that occur between them” are preserved without being integrated into the totalizing logic of the whole.Footnote ³⁷

The montaged face in “Portrait in Georgia” personifies this collage principle and functions as a microcosm of Cane itself. The poem offers a shattered mirror image of Holiday’s depth model of subjectivity:

As has been noted, the poem participates in the Petrarchan blazon tradition, which celebrates the beauty of its female subject by enumerating her body parts. As Paul Stasi observes, the poem stages the representational violence of objectification inherent in the genre in reversed form, painting the face of a white woman in the lexicon of lynching.Footnote ³⁸ As if it were a portrait of Virginia Hade sleeping with her “scar” and breathing in the sweet repose of the reinstated racial boundary, the woman's hair is figured as “a lyncher's rope” and her eyes are “fagots” burning “black flesh.” From the ash of this flesh, white subjectivity rises like a phoenix. Thus the poem suggests that “the elimination of black flesh … creates the white body.”Footnote ³⁹ However, in contrast to Holiday’s portrait of Virginia, who finds her body integrated at last through the exorcism of blackness (“That is me!”), the poem disjoints such a purgative subjectivity (Holiday 229). Rather than a uniform, static subject, the woman is configured as a vibrant scene of lynching, in which a medley of elements swirl together. The black flesh, its “old scars, or the first red blisters,” are imbricated into the white woman's lips, from which “the last sweet scent of cane” emanates even after it was burnt.

The blazon structure of “Portrait of Georgia” forges the poem as a mise en abyme of Cane’s narrative form. Crucially, however, if the poetics of Petrarchan blazon rest on the dismemberment of its object, Cane’s blazon re-collects, re-members, and thus re-animates the dismembered pieces of flesh as heterogeneous compositions. Another blazon, “Face,” exemplifies the way in which Toomerian blazon enacts an alternative formation of being:

Upon first reading, the poem deploys the blazon's inherent capacity for desubjectification. Through its itemization of body parts, reminiscent of slave advertisements, it enfleshes blackness. Unlike the more generically conventional “Portrait of Georgia,” the gender of the subject has to be clearly demarcated (“Her eyes – ”), for otherwise the old black woman's “channeled muscles” toughened by sharecropping render her illegible in the dominant gender system. In short, “Face” is a portrait of decaying flesh: lacerated, ungendered, and soon to be decomposed by worms. Yet when read alongside other pieces of Cane, the portrait becomes an amalgam of dismembered flesh scattered throughout the text. The brows knitted in pain rhyme with the twisted lips of Fred Halsey's great-grandmother in “Kabnis,” “somehow beautiful in its pain” (87). The misty eyes that dimly reflect the undulation of agony evoke the eponymous heroine of “Fern,” the town's common woman, of whom the narrator says “the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes” in “plaintive ripples” (17, 16). The overripe, purple grapes of taut muscles are clustered with other strange fruits from “Song of the Son,” “Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums” (14). Distant remembrance of these disparate pieces thus creates a Frankensteinian conglomerate of desubjectified, dismembered flesh in “Face.” What is produced, however, is not a simulacrum of humanoid subjectivity. Rather, the face of a black woman is transformed into a scene throbbing with affect: a misty waterscape with a canoe and an old grape tree, dimly lit by the sun at dusk.

Cane’s poetics of re-membering the dismembered – and ultimately, its enactment of new ontologies outside traditional modes of subjecthood – is illuminated by queer-of-color critique's theories of assemblage. In Terrorist Assemblage (2007), Jasbir Puar vexes intersectional models of identity, propounding instead assemblage as a new ontological frame. Paradoxically, in its endeavor to destabilize monolithic identity, studies of intersectionality often encase differences in separable analytics (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.), and in effect reify subjectivity as a formulaic summation of differences. However, since blackness has been and continues to be scripted as a conglomerate of “deviances” in physiology, language, patterns of affect and of desire, bodily practices, or class-, religion-, kinship-informed customs, it is impossible to pull out as a separable category or axis of being. Puar propounds assemblage as an ontological optic that captures the imbrications and contingencies of being in their variegation, describing being as “a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks.”Footnote ⁴⁰ If perceived components of identity – race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. – are grids constructed for regulating the messy flow of being, according to which identity is molded in back-formation, then there remains a torrent of affect threatening to implode that entity from within. Thus, in assemblage “the entities, particles, and elements [that] come together, flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are defined through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from interactions.”Footnote ⁴¹ This perpetual interfacing quilts together new modes of being within bodies and forges relays between them.

“Face,” as a microcosm of Cane, instantiates one such mode of assemblage-relationality. The black woman's face becomes an interface of affect, onto which flesh scattered throughout Cane forms a cluster of sorrow, reverberating together with the quiver of pain. When assembled, it ceases to be a portrait of one coherent subject; instead it becomes an open-ended circuit that conducts affect throughout the text. If assemblage nominates “an affective conglomeration” that summons and mobilizes the state prior to the identitarian interpellation, the loose and even haphazard connectivity performed in “Face” – and by extension in Cane itself – shows us that such wayward mobility becomes possible because blackness, by design, eludes the grids of identity.Footnote ⁴² That is, if blackness is constructed as an assemblage of residues abjected by the sociopolitical processes that constitute normative subjecthood, then affective forces, with their messy flows of being, are left comparatively unregulated within blackness.

Perhaps we could call assemblage's force to forge errant relationalities, its wayward connectivity performed through Cane’s blazon-esque structure, one form of necropolitical intimacy. Decidedly different from the Foucauldian model of sexuality that produces subjects in back-formation, this intimacy is akin to what Shane Vogel terms “public intimacy.”Footnote ⁴³ In the context of Harlem Renaissance street life, Vogel maps a zone where bodies and affects intersect to produce alternatives to “a privatized sexual identity informed by white-racialized middle-class norms.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In contrast to the logic of containment inherent in the notion of sexual identity (epitomized by its master trope, the closet), Vogel's spacious reimagining of intimacy is not predicated on “the sharing of discrete subjectivities,” or the relation of “two coherent selves.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Instead, it exemplifies assemblage's messy, flowing affect, uncompartmentalized within identitarian grids, privacy, or the body.

Inasmuch as publicness constitutes one condition of black sexual lives in Cane, the necropolitical mating that we discussed earlier in relation to Holiday surfaces again as a crucial trope in Toomer's text. “Karintha,” for instance, describes how the lack of privacy in the “two-room plan” of Georgia houses exposes the eponymous girl to the scene of her parents’ lovemaking, causing her to mature too early and “to mate with” men who covet her beauty (3). Likewise, “Fern” thematizes the publicness of sex wherein “black folks were made to mate” (17). At the same time, however, “Fern” opens up another crucial dimension of publicness that unbinds private selves. Fern's vacant and yet magnetic eyes constitute the central site of this intimacy. Fern's eyes draw in everything: from the contours of her face, to men who look at her, to even “the whole countryside [which] seemed to flow into her eyes” (17). In short, Fern's eyes are a “common delta” into which “mobile rivers” of desires and affects “flow” together (16). Such commonness underwrites Fern's status as the town's common woman. Countless men have sex with her because her eyes “sought nothing … and they gave the impression that nothing was to be denied … Fern's eyes said to them that she was easy” (16). Like the commons that function as a shared site for the public, her commonness means both that anyone can inhabit her and that no one can own her. That is, her desirelessness avails her to anybody's access, and yet it keeps her from being possessed. For even after she lets men have her, she is regarded as “a virgin” in the community; the men who left her “felt bound to her,” “attached to her,” and vow “to themselves that someday they would do some fine thing to her” (16). As William Boelhower astutely argues, their relation to Fern is “governed by [the] gift economy,” exceeding the logic of exchange.Footnote ⁴⁶ Because her eyes seek nothing, “no gift is adequate”; thus they facilitate the “continuous flow” of gift circulation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Drawn into such a gift economy, “Men in her case seem to lose their selfishness” (18). In their impossible desire to “fulfill an obligation which they could find no name for,” they seek opportunities to send her “magnificent somethings with no name on it,” and are submerged into the impersonal intimacy that environs Fern (16).

As Boelhower further argues, “the oft-used verb ‘to flow’” in this story not only marks this circuit of obligation, but also “signals the act of transport,” of which Fern's eyes become “a conduit to other levels of reality.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In the story's climactic scene, the moment the narrator holds her in the canebrake, “where reddish leaves had dammed the creek a little,” the affective flow hitherto drawn into Fern violently pours forth:

As several critics have commented, the unnameable “it” that overflows from Fern “[l]ike boiling sap” and “burn[s]” her is the memory of racial violence, be it “the script of slavery written on racialized skin through whips, torture, and brands” or that of a lynching victim whose “body burns like the cane syrup cooking over an outdoor stove.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Fern's openness – the cavernousness of her undesiring eyes – allows not only men's desires but also anonymous racial memory to flow inside her. As such, Fern becomes a site of the wayward connectivity of unnameable affects, as signified by her unidentifiable voice that sounds like “a child's,” “an old man's,” or that of a “Jewish cantor.” Thus Fern, an assemblage, liquefies the grids of age, gender, or even race.

Such public intimacy generated through Fern is, of course, double-edged. For one thing, the commons’ apparent generosity operates only because Fern functions as an empty vessel of male desire; its alternative name might well be homosociality, although its shape is more complex and elusive than that of a Sedgwickian triangle. Even the narrator's act of telling Fern's story, dramatized by his occasional addresses to the urban reader (“You and I know,” “I ask you, friend,” “Your thoughts can help me”), implicates the reader into this intimate structure that sustains itself through the vision of an eroticized, feminized, and irretrievably lost South (18). Furthermore, as Catherine Keyser argues, the narrator's final narrative act, in which he reveals Fern's full name, signals the narrator's attempt “to name and hence contain her.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The name Fern – that obscure, hermaphrodic undergrowth simultaneously singular and plural – is overwritten as the proper noun “Fernie May Rosen” in the story's closing moment. This revelation and biologization of her Jewishness, which her aforementioned “aquiline, Semitic” nose and her comparison to “a Jewish cantor” hinted at, aims to block the story's ever-flowing affect (19, 16). That is, while the narrator experiences the engulfment into the affective immersion, undergoing the jouissance of “sacred transport and even religious observance,” he must – and he can, as a northern-born tourist to the South – distance himself from assemblage's immersion to maintain his subjectivity.Footnote ⁵¹

Cane’s second part further dramatizes the affective containment necessitated by the gradual process of subjectification that the black urban population underwent after the Great Migration. As suggested by the refrain in the opening piece, “Seventh Street” – “Who set you flowing?” – the messy flow that ruptures Fern in the canebrake runs into the northern cityscape (41). With the surge of the Great Migration, it is “[f]lowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street,” yet its stream is now regulated by the street grids, stagnated “in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets,” finding no outlets, and “[e]ddying on the corners” (41). “Rhobert,” too, narrates such gridded affect; it describes Rhobert as a man who “wears a house, like a monstrous driver's helmet, on his head” (42). The pressure – psychological and financial – to sustain the house weighs on him to the extent that he is “sinking as a diver would sink in mud should the water be drawn off” (42). Rhobert's drowning under home-ownership indexes the prolonged effect of what Saidiya Hartman calls “scenes of subjection.”Footnote ⁵² Rhobert's house epitomizes what Hartman calls “the new form of bondage enabled by proprietorial notions of the self,” by which descendants of former slaves, albeit generations away, were held responsible for their suffering under the aegis of nominal equality and disciplinary discourses of individuation.Footnote ⁵³ Even though his helmet-like house threatens to squash him, “the minute that he pulled his head out” he would be crushed too, because property ownership defines his subjectivity within the structure of possessive individualism (42).

As suggested by the strong presence of grids in the titles (“Beehive,” “Theater,” “Box Seat,” and the telephone lines of “Her Lips Are Copper Wire”), much of the second part performs such compartmentalizing double-binds. Enclosures define the boundaries of black lives, instituting their liberal subjectivity, and the black urban subjects thus constituted are throbbing with liberatory desire. At the same time, as epitomized by a phrase in “Box Seat” that we quoted earlier, the nascent subjects find themselves shackled anew: “Slavery not so long ago” (67). A story of an unsuccessful courtship, “Box Seat” illustrates how the privatized mode of sexuality – especially when espoused within the discourse of respectability – functions as the primary locus of control over nascent liberal subjects. Dan Moore, a southerner who comes to Washington, DC, pursues an upstanding schoolteacher, Muriel (59). He tries to follow the formula of urban subjectivity, as he tells himself standing agitated in front of Muriel's bathroom: “People must have their privacy” (60). Yet he fails to “fit in” the grids of middle-class norms of containment; the throbbing flow of affect eddying inside him constantly urges him to rupture the private sphere (“Break in. Get an ax and smash in”) (61, 59). In contrast, Muriel establishes herself as an exemplary Foucauldian subject by internalizing disciplinary control, embodied by her landlady's surveilling presence: “What has she got to do with me? She is me, somehow. No she's not. Yes she is” (61, original emphasis). Muriel's vexed identification with the landlady marks her, as Dan puts it, a “she slave,” fettered by the discourse of respectability, while Dan himself becomes a “[h]e slave. Slave of a woman who is a slave” (66). Here, Dan describes sexuality as the center of disciplinary control. Because of its eminently personal and corporeal mode of operation, sexual desire functions as selfhood's chief signifier; as Foucault puts it, sexuality became “that secret which seems to underlie all that we are, and … to reveal what we are and to free us from what defines us.”Footnote ⁵⁴ While the discourse of sexuality thus administers the individual body, it also became a means of controlling the life of “population.” Cane’s representations of mating and respectability illustrate how the black necropolitical workforce is reproduced and prepared for capitalist exploitation through the operation of sex.

The recurring image of the theater in the second part (“Box Seat,” “Theater,” and the dancing hall in “Bona and Paul”) signals the permeability of black nascent subjects – their construction through sexual surveillance and their resulting vulnerability to public encroachment. The idiosyncratic usage of speech prefixes in the second part (not to indicate character's speech, as in theatrical performance, but to mark their inner monologue) indexes the black urban subjects’ precarious theatricality. Similarly, the third section, “Kabnis,” foregrounds the difficult negotiation of privacy, publicness, and intimacy in its generic uncertainty. The densely poetic language, free-indirect discourse, and stage directions of “Kabnis,” nominally a play, which seem to be extensions of “the consciousness of Kabnis himself,” make it difficult to perform and have led many critics to term it a closet drama.Footnote ⁵⁵ A scene where Kabnis, a teacher in a small Georgia town, is caught drinking in his room exemplifies the fraught relationship between public and private inherent in the concept of closet drama. While Kabnis insists on his claim to privacy (“A fellow can take a drink in his own room if he wants to, in the privacy of his own room”), the principal, Hanby, dismisses them: “I cannot hinder the progress of a race simply to indulge a single member” (95). Here, Hanby underlines the porousness of black nascent subjects. That is, insofar as their subjecthood is deeply enmeshed in the collective, “a race,” their privacy is contingent on public sanction, vulnerable to forfeiture at any moment. As Kabnis perceives, his room is covered with the “[d]ust of slavefields, dried, scattered,” and under the indefinitely elongated shadow of racial oppression, there is no privacy: “where they burn and hang men, you can't smoke. Cant take a swig of licker” (84, 86).

Kabnis finds himself in limbo, where neither the idyllic model of public intimacy nor the cruel optimism of private sexuality avails. “The Hall,” the moonshining cellar of the shop owned by his friend Fred Halsey, embodies this intermediary space assigned to black part-subjects. There Kabnis revels with Halsey, two townswomen Cora and Stella, and Lewis, a visiting northerner. Halsey describes Lewis as a “queer cuss, queer feller, queer possums”; his queerness stems from, as Lewis himself suggests, his “lack of opinion,” his persistent inquiry into and recording of black lives without “his lips mov[ing] once” (91, 101, 91). Lewis is, as Barbara Foley surmises, likely “an NAACP investigator,” and Halsey's party is planned in part to bring out Lewis's secrets.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even though Lewis's queerness primarily consists of his indecipherability – his secret knowledge of black lives – the scene collates the queerness of the racial secret with that of the sexual; or rather, the displacement of the former by the force of the latter. Kabnis is agitated by what he imagines as Lewis's desire to know him, and reacts by urging Lewis to have sex with Cora and Stella (108). While Kabnis strategically, albeit unconsciously, (con)fuses Lewis's queer desire to know him with his sexual desire, trying to redirect them to the women to cure his queerness (“That's what you need. I know –”), Lewis declines and forces Kabnis to face his own racial past (108).

Lewis, the supposed reservoir of the queer secret, now occupies the position of confessor rather than confessant. Stella tells him how she became a “[c]ommon wench” after a white man raped her mother and drove her father to death (110), then Halsey describes how he was forced to “[p]lay dumb naturally t white folks” to survive financially. Shortly Kabnis bursts into his soliloquy on his biracial ancestry of “a family of orators,” which urges him to “feed th soul,” giving words to the unspeakable suffering (111). Yet he knows that existing words would work only to bottle up the uncontainable anguish, wishing only “some lynchin white man ud stick his knife through it an pin it to a tree” (111). Cora presses her breasts on Kabnis's face, striving to stifle his outpouring anguish, while Halsey forcefully takes Stella. Lewis leaves this part-orgy, part-confessional, for “[t]heir pain is too intense” for him (112). This drama of confession demonstrates that the secrets drawn out in the closet-like space of the Hall are not individual ones, but the collective memories of racial injury. Sex – the secret for the Foucauldian subject – is nothing personal for the Hall's inhabitants, instead functioning as a mere facade as they try to shield their racial pain.

While Lewis fails in his role as a confessor, the Hall remains “an unorthodox confessional space presided over by Father John,” a blind and mute former slave housed in the cellar.Footnote ⁵⁷ Left alone in the Hall with Father – the “symbol, flesh, and spirit of the past,” as Lewis has called him – Kabnis resumes his soliloquy (108). Kabnis realizes that Father's constant murmur “feed[s] that ornery thing thats livin on [his] insides,” the unborn soul that he tried to feed with his “misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words” (114, 111). Nurtured by Father's mumbling, Kabnis's soul is reincarnated. In his hallucination, he begins to see the cellar transformed into a “place they used t stow away th worn-out, no-count niggers in th days of slavery,” seeing himself as one of the slaves quarantined in the underground infirmary (114): “Why I can already see you toppled off that stool an stretched out on th floor beside me – not beside me, damn you” (115). Kabnis's nightmarish identification with a slave fulfills the prophecy of the drama earlier: “Kabnis, a promise of a soil-soaked beauty; uprooted, thinning out. Suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him” (98). Buried alive in the underground, Kabnis feels the touch of the soil, and becomes one with the fungible black flesh of slaves.

This impregnating touch that animates Kabnis's soul instantiates the affective touch of necropolitics that the text has earlier sung:

From the beginning, Kabnis has been susceptible to this fecund touch of “Night”: “There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and … tortures me” (85). He knows that what touches him are “fingers” of “the many dead things moving in silence” (86). It is not the touch of the sexual, but the touches of death that enliven him, which, “Like huge cold finger tips … touch his skin and goose-flesh it” (97). His fear-laden sensation reaches a fever pitch, when he envisions a lynch mob coming for him and begins to feel the apparition of the lynching rope on his skin: “I stumbled on a rope. O God, a rope. Their clammy hands were like the love of death playing up and down my spine. My spine … My legs … Why in hell didnt they catch me?” (93). Kabnis pines for lynching's necropolitical caress, which will re-enflesh him as black and release him from his purgatorial nascent subjecthood.

While this touch of fear provides a momentary respite, this sensation could not free him from the call of the racial past. At the end of the drama, however, Kabnis meets another affective touch, finally accepting the caress of necropolitics. When Halsey's sister Carrie K comes down to the Hall to feed Father, she approaches Kabnis. As Carrie tries to assuage him, Kabnis is “violently shocked at her touch,” and “crumples” as her palms envelop his face (116, 117). Rather than escaping from the racial pain or repressing it through sex as the revelers in the Hall attempt to do, Kabnis allows himself to be touched by it with Carrie K's help. Her touch makes Kabnis “fecund” and enables him to understand the assemblage of the southern landscape – “Cane- and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps, sawmills, and factories” and to follow its imperative: “Burn, bear black children” (105). Incorporating the memories of racial violence (allowing himself to be burned by it), black lives can be passed down and proliferated (“bear[ing] black children”), albeit in a form reminiscent of scorched flesh.

WHITE SEXUALITY/BLACK INTIMACY

This essay constitutes a preliminary sketch of necropower's deployment of sex and intimacy in “Holiday + Cane” and in the larger death-laden space of the post-Reconstruction United States. If Holiday provides a narrative of subject formation in which sexual normativity and racial normativity are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing, Cane’s errant relationalities conditioned by mutilation and assemblage provide an account of the modes of attachment outside sexuality. The proximity of death and disposability stimulate a very different set of intimacies than those available to the traditional biopolitical subject. In the maw of death, necropolitical intimacies often consist of less-privatized attachments (as in the eponymous figures in “Fern” and “Avey”) and are constituted by their surfaces, availability, absent motivation, and nonexistent desires as they unconsciously forge networks of affect and intimacy around them. Or such intimacies might not be organized around sex, but around care (a topic that has not received nearly enough attention from sexuality studies), as when Kabnis feels the comfort of Carrie K's touch. Rather than alighting upon a singular object, care might be multiply distributed and simultaneous; the caretaker vigilantly tends the body and watches over those in danger and those close to demise.

The two novels’ chiaroscuro portrayal of “death-worlds” – Holiday’s stream of consciousness constructing a white sexual subject and Cane’s modernist assemblage generating black “subjects” without sexual subjectivity – helps us to draw a map of the relationship between so-called queer-of-color critique and what Marlon Ross terms “(white)queer theory.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Understandings of sexual difference in (white)queer theory, Ross argues, are predicated on racial sameness. Such postulation effaces the role of racial difference in the construction of sexual difference, particularly in its focus on the privatized and interiorized model of the closet that he calls “claustrophilia.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This diagnosis points to a separation between these two fields in spite of their shared historical terrain and overlapping methodologies, figures, and lines of inquiry.

The parallax view of the two novels’ plotting illustrates the disjunction between the field imaginaries of (white)queer theory and queer-of-color critique, with the former focussed on sexuality, and the latter focussed on intimacy. Holiday’s narrativization of sexual subject making (Virginia Hade) illustrates the tacit assumption of (white)queer theory: namely that a series of new historical developments recoded individual bodies, sensoriums, sex acts, and erotic practices, reorganizing desires and pleasures into a new formation called sexuality. In contrast, the guiding imaginary of queer-of-color critique traces the effects of institutional, state, and colonial violence on minority and subaltern subjects. Much like Cane’s portrayal of intimacies that are forged precisely by their non-concretization around a subject, this scholarship charts how, in the wake of the brutalization that constitutes and underpins constructions of race, gender, and sexuality, sexuality is inadequate to describe the forms of bodily practice and corporeal intimacy that the field details.

Rather than focus on the differences between Frank's and Toomer's texts, however, we are struck by their complementarity, their shared vision of cross-racial sex. In thinking about carnal contact across the color line through this moment of collaboration and perhaps even of love, we hope obliquely to assuage some of the theoretical fissures between (white)queer theory and queer-of-color critique. As the nominations of these subfields imply, they under-attend to the traffic across the color line that forges Jim Crow as what Ross terms “a regime of sexual classification.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In theorizing sex under necropolitics, we seek to narrate the specific eroticization of the color line, thereby recording contact between black and white bodies often absent from both (white)queer theory and queer-of-color critique.Footnote ⁶¹ We hope, in attending to the sites of the color line's eroticization – lynching, miscegenation, plaçage, and artistic collaboration across racial lines, to name but a few – that new forms of being and new intimacies will surface of the kind that we see between Frank and Toomer. Frank felt he was “too immersed” in Cane, seeing Toomer as “too close and dear” to him.Footnote ⁶² Toomer, too, felt their personal intimacy and Frank's proximity to Cane: “You not only understand CANE; you are in it … mystically because of the spiritual bond there is between us. When you write, you will express me, and in a very true way you will express yourself.”Footnote ⁶³ Here, “Holiday + Cane” makes visible one new such relation, one new such assemblage, one that we hope marks the productive intersection of the conjoining of (white)queer theory and queer-of-color critique.