Black Canadian artist Camille Turner describes her performance project The Final Frontier as a chronicle of “the voyage of African Astronauts”, said to be the progeny of the Dogon peoples of Mali, West Africa (Turner Reference Turner2020). Following a ten-thousand-year absence, the astronauts have “returned to earth” with the design of “sav[ing] the planet” (Turner Reference Turner2020). Performed intermittently across Canada since 2007, the piece stages the African Astronauts’ attempt at planetary rescue from within the Canadian frontier. In this way, a nation long idealized as a benevolent site of African reprieve from the US system of plantation slavery (see McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006; Reference McKittrick2014) is reconfigured as the object of deliverance and as a recipient of Black good will. Because Turner defines her piece as an exploration of “the [racially] coded terrain of the mythic Canadian landscape” (Turner Reference Turner2020), we can further deduce that the fantasy of the Afro-Astronauts’ arrival from an ancient racial past also probes into the myths championed in a Canadian present. To be precise, as the space travelers’ performance of liberation plays with the ceaseless romanticism through which Canada figures as the antiracist harbor for the fugitive slave, their appearance brings scrutiny to Canada's trumpeting of multiculturalism as a contemporary emblem of antidiscrimination policy and practice (see Walcott Reference Walcott2003). Performed by Sobaz Benjamin, Karen Turner, and Lee Turner, as well as Camille Turner herself, The Final Frontier Trailer Version 2 opens with the recently earthbound African Astronauts’ slow trek across an expansive grassy plain. Chestnut-brown ponchos identically cloak each torso and swish heavily with every step. With eyes concealed behind the angular design of blue reflective sunglasses, the crown of each Afro-Astronaut is adorned with a canvas-hued headwrap that variably turbans, twists, or drapes about the head. The desolation of the pastoral scene unmistakably works to foreground the peculiarity of the astronauts in the midst of such a landscape. In accompaniment to the protagonists’ solemn traverse, we hear the artist's narration of her story of migration to Canada from Jamaica at the age of nine. Lyrically lamenting the compulsion to leave “the land of sea and sun for the great white north,” Turner quickly begins the work of scrutinizing Canada's racial actualities.
Here we learn that, contrary to the ideological abstractions that self-aggrandize Canada's ostensible capacity to “accept everyone,” the simple act of leaving one's home becomes an alienating event (Turner Reference Turner2020). For Turner, venturing out into the city of Toronto in her Black migrant body is enough to make her feel as though she is an alien. To put it differently, although the very spaces that Turner enters extol their facility (and perhaps, eagerness) to accommodate a plethora of diversity, the Black female subject is made acutely aware of the ways she is extraterrestrial to the life of the nation and the metropolis into which she has dared to present herself as participant. Multiculturalist ideals welcome the nonwhite stranger but do not fail to remind her that she is strange. In a statement that doubles as recognition and confrontation with this sense of alienness, Turner contextualizes her place among the striding Afro-Astronauts by explaining her resolve to journey across Canada “with some other aliens to see how people respond” (Turner Reference Turner2020). If to encounter Blackness within the places where whiteness reigns supreme is made synonymous with an alien encounter, Turner reshapes the alienating event by (1) converting it into a moment of Black affinity “with some other aliens”; (2) heightening the signifiers of the strange through the eccentric uniform of the space travelers; and (3) experimentally inviting the alienating gaze. In other words, Turner not only inhabits the alien but amplifies its features and reorients the field of vision. I begin this article with an extended analysis of Turner's work as a helpful preamble to my broader query into how and why one might come to willfully exacerbate the racial alienness into which they are read.
The seminal works produced by Black studies scholars and critical race theorists over the last two decades introduce understandings of racism and belonging in Canada that are decisively heterodox to the principles of racial, religious, and linguistic equality championed through the national ethos and glorified within the white Canadian imaginary (Walcott Reference Walcott2000; Reference Walcott2003; McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006; Thobani Reference Thobani2007; Haque Reference Haque2010; Browne Reference Browne2015; Maynard Reference Maynard2017). The racist anxieties, settler-colonial motives, and white-nationalist undercurrent of the Liberal government's 1971 inauguration of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act are extensively documented throughout such scholarship (see Bannerji Reference Bannerji2000; Razack Reference Razack2012). One of the critical points of consensus attests to the fractured or impossible belongings of Black people, migrants of color, and refugees as authenticated nationals. The national ideology operates through racial logics that instead contrive to renew white solidarities and uphold the hegemony of a white citizenry (Mendes Reference Mendes2019). In this regard, the newer national value of venerating racial-ethnic plurality (Harder and Zhyznomirska Reference Harder and Zhyznomirska2012) is not meant to supersede the longstanding project of European imperial conquer and Indigenous erasure through which the white subject/citizen continues to represent and fortify the white identity of the settler-colonial nation (Bannerji Reference Bannerji2000; Mendes Reference Mendes2019; Walcott Reference Walcott2019).
If we attend to Sunera Thobani's important theoretical contributions to this body of work, it becomes evident that the normative Canadian also occupies a singular ontological register. As a “particular kind of human being,” the white Canadian inhabits an “exalted” subjectivity that—following Thobani's incisive reasoning—is confirmed through their personification of the very best qualities of the nation (Thobani Reference Thobani2007, 5). The traits particular to the exalted (for example, tolerance, compassion, lawfulness [Thobani Reference Thobani2007]) give human form to the ideals promulgated by multiculturalism and substantiate their ontological separation from Black people and people of color, neither of whom can be the human subjects or full nationals that whiteness supremely embodies. Principles promoting diversity can be displayed through the avatars of nonwhite persons who are present within the city-nation, even as commitments to a white Canadian homogeneity remain unflagging. The ability to then summon nonwhite subjects as evidence of the nation's celebration of heterogeneity witnesses how Black and brown bodies become expedient repositories for white progressiveness. To borrow from Rinaldo Walcott, we must note that “to accept that multiculturalism is a successful policy of citizenry organization and administration is to accept the lie that whiteness in the Canadian state has decentered itself” (Walcott Reference Walcott2019, 397). Empirically, these racial logics mean that nonwhite people are invited to aspire for the reputed security and fellowship of citizenship at the very same time that the affects that work in favor of white homogeneity keep them at bay. Among these affects we find (1) resentment of migrants as cultural usurpers who menace the national identity and deceptively exploit the political benefits of citizenship (Dhamoon and Abu-Laban Reference Dhamoon and Abu-Laban2009; Park Reference Park2013; Mendes Reference Mendes2019); (2) fear of Muslims as illiberal, misogynistic Islamists who contaminate Canadian space (Razack Reference Razack2007; Zine Reference Zine and Zine2012); (3) the hatred and vigilant surveillance of a Black populace whose sloth dangerously exhausts the welfare system and whose propensity for criminality requires the defensibly fatal interventions of the police and border control (Browne Reference Browne2002; Maynard Reference Maynard2017).
For Black people in particular, the phantasm of Canada as a safe haven from racial tyranny is continuously undone by their exile from nation and humanity. The use of ontology to distinguish the supremacy of whiteness in Canada of course predates multiculturalism's exalted subjects by centuries with slavery's refusal of Black sentience and alienation of the Black subject from personhood. The residue of this uncoupling of Blackness from the human lingers. It takes shape through the militant technologies employed to patrol and deny the Black alien at the nation's peripheries (Browne Reference Browne2012). And, interminably, it appears through gestures of anti-Black racism within the quotidian sites of the city-nation that apprise Black people—such as Turner recounts—of their alienness to the humanity of nationhood. Given that Blackness is already isolated from the ontological criteria and ideological spheres used to distinguish a human citizenry, I suggest that the Black subject's reanimation of this outsiderness disrupts the formula of exile. Turner's hyperbolic strangeness thus provokes the query: How might performative acts and/or aesthetic representations that embrace Black negation and enhance the signifiers for the alien interfere with the oscillation of racist refusals and duplicitous promise that maintain white nationhood? To put it simply, this article contemplates the significance of willfully adopting even more strangeness than an anti-Black national imaginary would have reckoned through the possibilities that abound in visual and performance art. Attending to the affective mechanisms of white nation-making that variably coax and disdain migrant, Muslim, and Black persons, I also consider how exaggerated strangeness becomes interruptive when the nonwhite subject depicted through art appears to embody all three categories of difference as migrant Black Muslims. Employing artwork by Camille Turner and Riya Jama as case studies—wherein the alien sometimes becomes the monster or monstrous—I argue that art visualizes an ontological disobedience and affective rebellion against Canadian racial matrixes. Rather than asking how Black and Black Muslim subjects can find a way into human and national belonging, this article probes into what a nonhumanity can do for these persons as its inhabitance becomes willful and observably amplified.
The Nation as “Object of Desire”: Cruel Optimism and A Willful Strangeness
In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant offers a compelling framework for thinking about the painful futility, for some, of national attachments as she meditates on how the things we want can hurt. Following Berlant's reasoning, we attach to an “object of desire” through the “force” of optimism and seek to “bring [it] closer” as we strive toward the “satisfying something” it promises that we are unable to produce independently of the object (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, 1–2, 23). Optimism is not necessarily a pleasurable sensation in itself since its ambition can take immediate affective form through unsettling states of feeling (for example, dread, anxiety) (2). Nevertheless, we continue to reach towards the object in spite of this displeasure because optimism offers the “ordinary pleasur[e]” of fantasy from which we idealize and aspire for the “good life” (2). Where optimism slips into cruelty to become “cruel optimism” is when the something that we yearn for impedes our “flourishing” (1). Here the desired object is not good for us, although we attach to it as a source of future goodness. Even as the object of our wishful attachment can “threate[n] [our] well-being,” the loss of this attachment might be too great to bear. Mere proximity to the object ensures our continued nearness to the “something” that the object first promises. To be dispossessed of attachment's continuity of desire can therefore mean to lose hold of, in Berlant's words “what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world” (24). Considering what we know of the racial politics of belonging in Canada, I suggest that the nation and its authenticated citizenry can stand in for Berlant's “object of desire.” It is around this object that promises of national acceptance and an improbable futurity of ontological fellowship “cluster” (23). Because nonwhite persons are conjured as the designated beneficiaries of the unities, affections, and curiosities catalogued in the multiculturalism policy (Government of Canada 2020), the tenor of yearning slightly diverges from the force that propels optimism in Berlant's reading.
In many respects, the promises located in nation/citizenry are not simply sought after by the striving subject who is enamored with the aspiration of acceptance. The object of desire also possesses its own form of desire that actively calls out to bodies of color to persuade them to invest in the fantasies that sustain national ideals. To obtain the good life that comes with one's recognition within a human citizenry is not something that the racial outsider can generate independently. An optimistic devotion to the object of the nation would therefore have to persist and would likely be exhibited through dutiful acts of assimilation that differentiate them from the intolerable mass of menacing migrants (Mendes Reference Mendes2019). As I have since made clear, Black people populate a series of denials even as they are solicited by some of the nation's most captivating promises. Canada is then undoubtedly a “significantly problematic object” (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, 24) for the Black subject who is ever open to anti-Black humiliations as they ceaselessly await the pleasures of human citizenry. Even so, to relinquish this attachment might be too much to bear for those who already have an unstable hold on subjectivity and for whom the loss of optimism would do much more than interrupt a sense of what it means “to keep on living” (24). For Black people, desire is less a matter of continuity so much as it is one of germination: to at last come into the life of the world as a human being. In recognition of the existential costs that releasing an attachment to national and human belonging can provoke, actions that signal the forfeiture of human citizenry, as well as the heightening of exile through alien inhabitances and performative fantasies, become menacing provocations.
The endurance of human citizenry as a component of the object of desire has a deceptively twinned utility since it (1) keeps nonwhite subjects near to the promise as they await its eventual fulfillment, and (2) the interminable eventuality of the promise's realization keeps nonwhite people close enough to maintain the diversity that shrouds Canada's white-supremacist ethos. The Black subject's volitional withdrawal from this promise would thus impact the racial apparatuses used to preserve the latter. In her expansive analysis of willfulness, Sara Ahmed states: “any act of will would be designated as willfulness: any will is too much will when you are not supposed to have a will of your own” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014, 139). In the racist regime of willing, Black and Black Muslim subjects intelligibly will in ways that either criminally unravel the institutions of the nation or relentlessly aspire for a way into the “good life” of Canadian kinship. Artwork that visually magnifies the alien or monstrous likeness of Black and Black Muslim subjects enables us to imagine how an escalated and spectacularized inhabitance of difference becomes “too much” in the way of willfulness. The heightening of one's human and national exiles through the body aggravates the racist binary of harmful outsider/hopeful stranger meant to orient the direction of the will, since the alienated subject turns inward and experiments with the surface of the self.
Aliens and Monsters: The Artwork of Camille Turner and Riya Jama
Turner
Turner's performance pieces The Final Frontier and The Final Frontier Trailer Version 2 are intriguing for the kinds of questions that they lead us to ask about the reorientation of desire and the willfulness that can be found in the alien's nonbinary Blackness. To return to the action of the work, we are presented with a galactic scene from which we watch the Afro-Astronauts steer their spaceship toward earth from the expanse of outer space. What follows the protagonists’ introductory march across the grasslands is their sudden appearance among the residents of what is evidently a white-majority community somewhere in rural Canada. In interview fashion, the townspeople speak directly to the camera and offer indelicate testimonials that make clear that the arrival of this anomalous Blackness at a quintessential frontier of Canadian whiteness is viscerally provoking, visually arresting, and highly peculiar. In undecorated language they make remarks that convey (1) potent feelings of curiosity and a professedly inexplicable sense of being “drawn” to the strangers; (2) the strikingness of the African astronauts’ “skin color”; and (3) estimations that such a foreign display will benefit local children by enabling them to “experience different things.” As part of the spectacle of this advent of Blackness, we witness not only the gawking of bystanders but also an unabashed attempt to capture the image of this strange display as an older white woman nonchalantly snaps photos of the extraordinary visitors. Such racial and aesthetic strangeness fascinates as it simultaneously entices the desire to come near, to get a closer look, and to obtain an enduring likeness of the peculiar that otherwise has no lasting place in the natural surroundings of whiteness. This Blackness becomes a keepsake, a memento for the outsider, a souvenir of the rare alien encounter that is, by definition, fleeting. Despite the unusualness and abruptness of Black arrival, a local whiteness nonetheless knows how to ordinarily put Blackness to work as the visitors are promptly made of service to the curiosity and racial pedagogy of a homogeneous region. Even so, it is Turner and her astronaut fellows who first present themselves as spectacles to be looked at, and it is explicit that they anticipate a reaction.
To grasp the broader complexity of this enticement or summoning of the objectifying gaze, it is useful to briefly consider elements of Kodwo Eshun's readings of “Afrofuturism.” An insightful theorist of African Diasporic art and “alien futures,”Footnote 1 Eshun explains that “the condition of alienation . . . is a psychosocial inevitability that all Afrodiasporic art uses to its own advantage by creating contexts that encourage a process of disalienation” (Eshun Reference Eshun2003, 298). Going on, Eshun relates that “extraterrestriality” is deployed as a “hyperbolic trope” within Afrofuturism (298). Used to examine the “everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation,” extraterrestriality—of the Afro-diasporic cosmic figure in our case—functions as a “point of transvaluation” and a “resource for speculation” (299). It is then by allowing for temporal imaginings of Blackness at the very sites where Blackness is meant to have no future that the extraterrestrial repurposes existential and ontological alienation (294, 297). The hyperbole of the Afro-Astronauts is perhaps most immediately communicated sartorially. Cloth and clothing discernibly foreground their African diasporic peculiarity within a national terrain that interminably foregrounds the normativity of Europe. Turner's art registers the segregation of bodies like her own from the community of the nation. Even so, she does not attempt to remake the body with the hope of possessing the ontology of the exalted or satisfying optimism's aspirations for national acceptance; instead, Turner becomes weirder. The Afro-Astronauts willfully show up in the places where Blackness should have no place. They enter into a frontier of the exalted and play around with its racial codes through the Black extraterrestrial's open display of exaggerated strangeness (see Anderson Reference Anderson2016). Not only have the astronauts devised a mission that takes them beyond the ambitions of human citizenry, but they also depict Blackness through an imaginative narrative of space and time travel that is nonlinear to the logics habitually employed to surveil a Black populace, expel Black arrivals, or dismiss Black mortality. Furthermore, we see that alienness is not a condition of utter alienation. By joining in kinship “with some other aliens,” the theater of Black extraterrestriality is revealed as a disalienating site of collectivity so that strangers to human and national recognition meet in exile and mess around with the terms of their banishment (see Mayer Reference Mayer2000). The Afro-Astronauts would of course not be wholly removed from the degradations through which Blackness is routinely conceived within the white Canadian imagination and that first incite Turner's alien turn. The white townspeople still know how to put Blackness to work, however unexpected the strangers’ arrival may be. Yet the unfamiliarity of the astronauts (that is, aesthetic presentation, journey across national and cosmic space, apparent immortality) means that the white imagination loses some degree of control over what it is precisely that makes the Black subject strange.
Much is less certainly willful about Turner's performance, however. For instance, whiteness remains as the officiating device for the alien. Turner and her companions know that they are strange. And yet the exhibition of this extraterrestriality seeks the white gaze to mirror this strangeness back to them, as if to witness and acknowledge that they are indeed strange to and before Canadian whiteness. In other words, an attachment to the object of desire is released, but the verification of the detachment is to come from those who have an unwavering hold on the object and police the relinquished desire as proxies for the nation. The Black extraterrestrial is still acting in the world and in some respects remains bonded to its racial workings even through these techniques of opposition. Be that as it may, the appearance of contradiction and slippage does not immediately detract from the significance of the embodied refusal but is rather part of the fascination of willfulness. Ahmed emphasizes that her examination of the will is less to ask “what is willfulness?” so much as it is to pursue answers to what “willfulness [is] doing” and thus which subjects are read as willful (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014, 3). Understanding Ahmed to refer not only to the acts (that is, the “doing”) that locate us as willful but also to what willfulness gets done, I am inquiring into what willfulness accomplishes for the emphatically strange. Even as I critique the less disobedient aspects of Turner's works, the embrace of extraterrestriality and its performative pageantry remain deeply intriguing as willful acts.
Further still, Ahmed writes, “[t]he project of becoming unwilling to bear can be thought through the lens of willfulness” (139). The magnification and exhibition of the Afro-Astronauts’ alienness visualize an unwillingness to bear both the cruel solicitations of multicultural hope and the repetition of ontological refusal experienced anew each time the Black body enters into the city-nation. Willfulness here appears as the unwillingness to keep on willing as desire fatigues and the tolerance for continuous refusal wanes. Although the exhibition of extraterrestriality seeks the white gaze, we can also grasp a willfulness in (1) the baiting of a looking public that satirizes the exalted subject; and (2) the hyperbole of Afrofuturism that interferes with the authority of the spectator who is neither able to fully comprehend or control the strangeness that they see (see Anderson Reference Anderson2016). Fittingly, The Final Frontier Trailer Version 2 closes with the reflection “we travel[ed] across the country to encounter the Other and find ourselves.” It is willful to become weirder as alienated Black subjects unfamiliarly orient their bodies, hopes, and communions toward unanticipated ontological and cosmic terrain.
In this vein, I ponder whether the sartorial nod to the African continent symbolizes more than one component of the Afrodiasporic subjects’ strangeness. The layers of fabric that drape each striding figure's torso may be Turner's imitation of the traditional tunics worn by Dogon adults (Lane Reference Lane2008). Similarly, the cloth that crowns the head of each Afro-Astronaut is perhaps a creative appropriation of the garments of the Tuareg people who, like the Dogon, are also from Mali. In either case, we could simply interpret the costumes of the Afro-Astronauts as a performative, diasporic approximation of the clothing of West African culture and climate. Given that Mali is a Muslim-majority country and that Islam is practiced among both the Dogon and Tuareg (Straker Reference Straker2008; Schulz Reference Schulz2011), however, I am inclined to ask whether the Afro-Astronauts’ headwraps and style of dress double as a signifier of Muslim identity alongside Blackness. As briefly noted, Muslims epitomize one of the malignant threats against which the forces of white nation-making enthusiastically harden. In turn, the veil is often summoned as a herald for the liberal collapse and cultural disharmony that unassimilable Muslims promise (Razack Reference Razack2004; Jiwani Reference Jiwani2009). If Turner's characters can indeed be perceived as gesturing toward multiple exiled subjectivities, the familiar danger of the Muslim would become less familiar as it veils the already problematic bodies of the Afro-Astronaut. The headscarf in particular mingles the strangeness of Islam with an extraterrestrial Blackness in a way that adheres neither to the logics used to identify the perils posed by Muslims nor to the visual cues that facilitate the swift banishment of Black subjects. It is not that Muslimness is more strange than Blackness but rather that the Black Muslim alien would present a compounded difference that confuses the racial matrix and aesthetically augments their willful redirection of desire. I must concede that this coupling of Black and Muslim identity is not a claim that Turner expressly makes, nor is it a correlation that she necessarily intends her art to inspire. To apprehend the Afro-Astronauts as veiled Black Muslims therefore admittedly pursues an imaginative theorizing that not every reader may wish to indulge. Amid these admissions I remain inquisitive about where such a married strangeness might take us and what its disruptive dissonance can do for the subject who is outside of human and national belongings.
Jama
Somali Canadian artist and storyteller Riya Jama explicitly experiments with unconventional and interruptive representations of Black Muslim womanhood. Employing techniques of digital collage, the superimposed faces that are principle to Jama's works visually orient away from the fully human through physical features that reference the extraterrestrial, the cyborg, or the monster. Often depicting women and girls who wear headscarves or chadors, Jama represents variations of Black Muslimness through the strange display of green, turquoise, or purple skin; furry tails and pointed ears; and eyes with either a cat-like shape in unnatural hues of red and orange or with pupils that completely overwhelm the sclera's circumference. At other times Jama's characters appear with skeletal faces or android features whereby the incompletely human also begins to reference the dead.Footnote 2 Even as the artwork by definition invites the viewer's gaze, Jama commonly depicts subjects who rebuff the spectator. In contrast to the astonishing strangeness of the full-frontal character, the artist also portrays veiled and backward-facing figures who turn away from an audience and instead stare into stunning scenes of outer space. Counter to optimism's acute attachment to a sense of “being in the world” that Berlant describes (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, 24), Jama thus illustrates women and girls who face away from the world rather than seek to be a part of it as they look out onto an infinite elsewhere. In other renditions, Jama figures women as the galaxy itself by placing images of constellations in the very hollow of the hijab where we would otherwise expect to encounter a face. The folds of the headscarf thus harbor fragments of the universe so that the figure who does turn toward us is no more knowable than the cosmos that her visage displays. And yet the Black Muslim subject is neither wholly contained nor completely removed from the human since her strangeness still adopts human form (for example, the frame of the body, the slope of shoulders, the tilt of heads).
I focus here on two pieces shown in Jama's solo exhibition Riyadii Farxiyo held at Gallery 44 in Toronto (July 13–September 1, 2018): “Fanged Gabar” and “Hidden Gabar Yar.”Footnote 3 “Fanged Gabar” depicts a Black Muslim girl (no older than ten years old) in outer space. With her head and shoulders loosely covered by a visibly soiled brown scarf that is irregularly adorned with blue and pink embroidery, the girl smiles broadly with all of her facial features directly in view. There is, however, much that is startling about the image. In particular, the girl's skin is a rich and vibrant turquoise; her eyes shine a sinister red and the whites of the sclera are replaced by a solid black; in place of incisors, vampirish fangs protrude within a smiling mouth that is otherwise a bed of baby teeth. This little girl offers a striking if not simply frightening portrait. In an interview with Toronto Life magazine that ran in conjunction with her exhibition, Jama describes “Fanged Gabar” as an expression of her search for self amid the “limbo” felt between her Black and Muslim identities (Baker Reference Baker2018). Because she does not wear the hijab, Jama explains that her Muslimness goes unrecognized when in Black (non-Muslim) company and her Blackness is unacknowledged in the Muslim (non-Black) community (Baker Reference Baker2018). It is not immediately clear how or why the red-eyed, fang-toothed, hijabi child stands in for Jama's feelings of suspension. Considering the hyperbole identified in Turner's work, we can perhaps estimate that “Fanged Gabar” represents a dual alien inhabitance as the ontological denials of Blackness and Muslimness take alarming harbor in a single body. This figure is then not of the human but references the human, even as it can be assumed to nurse predatory aims against the fully human as the vampire or monster. That Jama locates herself within this form calls to mind Richard Kearney's suggestion that monsters (and other strangers) signify “fracture[s] within the human psyche” that, for instance, divide the familiar from the unfamiliar (Kearney Reference Kearney2003, 4) and “signal borderline experiences of uncontainable excess” (3). If Jama is unfamiliar and unrecognizable even when in fellowship with other human-nation exiles and inhabits multiple sites of ontological banishment, “Fanged Gabar” might then be a site for the monstrousness into which she deposits what she feels to be her strange excess.
In his seminal work, Jack Halberstam interrogates the ways the monstrous renders strange the familiar facets of existence. According to Halberstam, the categories that “we still cling to” such as “beauty, humanity and identity” collapse into the horrifying when they take form on the monstrous beings that we fear (Halberstam Reference Halberstam1995, 6). By way of an example, Halberstam meditates on the infamously tragic figure of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Shelley Reference Shelley1818/1998) and also examines the murderous, gender-fluid character Buffalo Bill in Jonathan Demme's film Silence of the Lambs (Demme Reference Demme1991). To put it briefly, Halberstam explains that (1) Victor Frankenstein's nameless monster incites horror through his physical repulsiveness, “status as anomaly,” and “essential foreignness”; and (2) the danger of Buffalo Bill rests in an “identity crisis” that seeks rectification through homicidally obtained “female flesh” (Halberstam Reference Halberstam1995, 6). How might these attributes apply to the aesthetic display of Jama's child monster and to the artist's own sense of peculiarity? As I have conveyed, Black and Muslim subjects are familiarly strange and dependably frightening through the affective registers that harmonize Canada's white-supremacist ethos with its antiracist principles (see also Ahmed Reference Ahmed2000; Mendes Reference Mendes2020). In this regard, the alien is not monstrous as long as it remains true to the denials that enable it to make existential sense. What “Fanged Gabar” quite possibly illustrates, however, is how the “essential foreignness” of the ontologically strange tips into a somatic repulsiveness and visual chaos to become the monster.
Frankenstein's monster is horrifying in part because his form comprises an amalgamation of decayed, misshapen, and borrowed human parts (see Halberstam Reference Halberstam1995, 38) that are at once unnatural and viscerally repulsive to withhold. As Jama's sentiment of “limbo” conveys, the Black Muslim female subject can constitute a collision of strangeness that evades intelligibility and embodies a crisis of identity through her incomprehensibility. Comparable to what we find in Turner's work, Jama does not attempt to remake the outsider so that the strange body can reach toward the human belonging she is so clearly outside of. Yet Jama takes us beyond the mere exacerbation of strangeness. By graphically fusing together Black social death (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016) with the terrorizing, death-producing Muslim (Razack Reference Razack2005), the artist's work scavenges from the graveyard of the dead, playing with both the hyperbolic and the repulsive to produce our red-eyed vampire. Ruminating on the horrors of slavery, Christina Sharpe calls us to acknowledge that the familiarity and tolerability of violence enabled the routinely monstrous acts of slavery to evade perceptions of what indeed comprises the monstrous (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2010, 3). If we can then agree that the unwriting of Black people from humanity is the first quotidian monstrous act through which Black subjectivity is alienated and rendered monstrous, Jama's work does not initiate monstrosity but steps into it. To riff on Eric King Watts's biopolitical interpretation that “black monstrosity is figured as an excess of excess” (Watts Reference Watts2017, 323), I argue that Jama's subjects inhabit the horror into which they have first been monstrously placed and use visual provocations to infuse additional strangeness into the horrifying figure. Further still, Jama's art toys with the “particular kind of human being” that forms the nation by toying with human anatomy and explicitly distorting features familiar to the human form. The fanged character is not quite human and yet physically signifies attributes of the human body. Contrary to the ambition to find a way into the promise of recognizable human citizenry, Jama rips asunder any integrative “female flesh” through the impossible turquoise of the gleefully fang-toothed child who radically estranges exalted imaginings of the human and ordinary imaginings of the human's Other.
The second work from Jama's exhibition, “Hidden Gabar Yar,” similarly engages with the disquietude ignited by the nonhuman with quasi-human attributes. In this piece Jama depicts a young girl, wearing a dark green chador and close-fitting black cap, comfortably wedged in between the bodies of robed women who stand in single file. The girl's right cheek nestles against a woman wearing a long purple veil while the young back softly meets the deeply violet torso of another woman whose hand gently rests atop the child's head. Aside from the placidly laid hand of this woman and the single arm of the other (adorned in henna-like floral swirls), we are refused access to anything above the shoulders of the adult figures. The viewer can presume through the presence of the veil that these subjects are Muslim and can also anticipate their Blackness since we know this to be the focus of Jama's art. By exceeding the edges of the page, however, the figures withhold themselves from our absolute knowing in a way that troubles the terms of neo-Orientalism that insist upon the knowability and visibility of the Muslim female body (Jiwani Reference Jiwani2009). The figures also evade Black women's knowability as sites of “exploratio[n] and conquest” (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006, xiv) through the artist's decision to eliminate pigment from the visible limbs. Hence, where we expect to witness the stranger's familiar tones of deep melanin, we encounter a void of color. Once more it is the child alone who meets our gaze, and akin to “Fanged Gabar,” there is something strange about this figure. Although partially obscured by shadow, the right side of the girl's face reveals dark brown skin and the familiar assemblage of (human) facial features (that is, nose, mouth, eye). The most pronounced attributes of this little hijabi's visage, however, are its robotic characteristics. The cool glaze of corrugated metal smoothes over much of her forehead, cradles around the bridge of the nose, and continues its sharp descent from the left cheekbone. Staring steadily and penetratively outward is a vibrantly red eye that seems to glow with the mechanical power of the cyborg's inner electrical source.
Playing on the title of his text, Halberstam explains that the Gothic novel performs something of a “skin show” since it is through this outer layer of the body—the skin—that we find that which alternately symbolizes the essence of the human or the irregularities that signify the monstrous (Halberstam Reference Halberstam1995, 7). In Halberstam's interpretation of the function of skin, the monster is revealed in the collapsing of the organic boundary that keeps the interior distinct from the exterior. The monster thus emerges when the body's most natural partition can no longer segregate its parts. In Halberstam's words, “the outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster” (7). The cyborg hijabi of Jama's “Hidden Gabar Yar” does not inhabit the same register of the monstrous as we find with the child of “Fanged Gabar['s]” technicolor skin and threatening incisors. The latter's treacherously doubled identity fully impresses upon the surface of the skin and has long since broken past the interior boundary. We know that we are looking upon the monster. The mechanical face of the girl cradled between the trunks of her elders displays the subject evicted from the humanity of the nation, but the deliberate perversion of this banishment materializes in observably different ways. In his deeply considered text on the ontological impossibilities of Blackness, Calvin Warren argues that the metaphysical tyranny of white supremacy renders Black people as human forms devoid of the life of the human (Warren Reference Warren2018; Mendes Reference Mendes2019). Drawing upon both Halberstam and Warren, we can surmise that the brown skin of the child's face in “Hidden Gabar Yar” already implies the nonhumanity of Blackness and therefore functions as an organic restraint of the dangers that racist forces of surveillance anticipate in its monstrous unleashing. The nonhumanity that is imagined to structure the genuine interior of Blackness (that merely has human form) is illustrated by the artist as incrementally escaping onto the body's exterior plane in the most literal of forms: the machine, the cyborg, the monster. To put it succinctly, the outer layer of flesh begins to unify with the inner condition of ontological alienation.
Returning to Ahmed, we learn that willfulness can be “willingly performed” when the body's “striking” and thus “obstructi[ve]” appearance is perceived as willful and one embraces the marks of somatic obstruction (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014, 161). In this way, the body that is already marked by stigma might willfully “double that inheritance” by further signifying the body's taintedness (161). Like Turner's, Jama's art does not seek a way out of the stigmatized body nor does it attempt to temper the taint. Rather, the artist doubles this inheritance by further visualizing the Black Muslim female figure's supposed contrariness to the human. Jama's subjects appear at ease with their strangeness and at home in strange company. The child of “Hidden Gabar Yar” can then conceivably be read as “saying yes” (141) to the commands of white supremacy that determine her denials from humanity. The fact that the subject is a cyborg, however, interrupts the completeness of this assent since the skin of the figure continues to gesture toward the human form rather concede to an absolute lack of humanity. Although I do not suggest that this gesture must be regarded as grasping for inclusion within human fellowship, I do propose that the dualism of the cyborg continues to trouble the boundary between the human and the nonhuman as she visually encroaches on both sides of this ontological divide.
Leaky Subjects: Subversion and the Fallibility of the Frame
The artwork of Turner and Jama brings us directly into conversation with Judith Butler's theories of “the frame” and “recognizability.” Writing on the frames that attempt to regulate what counts as normative existence, Butler suggests that those “living figure[s]” that are situated outside of what the frame determines to be “the norms of life” are of an uncertain ontology since they can be apprehended as “living” but are not “‘recognized’ as a life” (Butler Reference Butler2010, 8, 12). The “living figure” that is not contained within the realm of “life” is (1) a “problem” that the directives regulating normativity attempt to handle; and (2) an ontological anomaly that is “normatively . . . bound to reproduce” (8). Although frames determine the recognizability of life, Butler contends that the frame can be compromised by forms of “leakage or contamination” as that which should be relegated to the perimeters of the norm begin to exceed this limit (9, 10). As that “something” or “someone” “exceeds the frame,” the initial method of containment is revealed for its flaws since the frame that conveys normative life fails to make that something “conform to our established understanding of things” (10). The Afro-Astronauts of Turner's work and the monster hijabis in Jama's work present examples of figures that trouble the frame. Not recognized within the racial or national frames that define normative life even as they are reproduced as normatively Other, the Black and/or Black Muslim subjects depicted through art are outside of the realm of life that fortifies Canada's exalted national subjects. However, these subjects leak out of the frames that fashion their ontology as uncertain. That is, the willful disobedience of each figure's exacerbated strangeness contaminates the familiar profile of Black and Black Muslim strangers’ disparate or unverifiable ontology.
Amid the leakage that these embodied forms of disobedience catalyze we must also consider Butler's assertion that the frame is already conducive to collapse. Butler argues that the frame undergoes processes of “self-breaking” whereby it comes apart in the effort to define the content “it does not quite contain” (10). Said differently, the frame breaks in order to reassemble around the slippery matter it seeks to control. The frame is then already open to “reversal” and accommodative of “subversion” (10). As I have shown, the subversive representations found through Turner's and Jama's works plausibly trouble the frames that define Black nonhumanity as well as those that regulate the nation as an object of desire. Butler, however, compels us to acknowledge that the frame is prepared to reckon with and subsume these variations of ontology and desire. In other words, the frame is prepared to absorb the impact of the unanticipated inhabitances of the Afro-Astronauts and Black Muslim female figures by breaking apart and reintegrating these leaky subjects. As these figures attempt to redefine their social locations, the frame would simply reassemble and merge around any expanded, excessive, or exacerbated strangeness to again contain it within the frame.
Recounting Ahmed's query into what willfulness does, I propose that even as the frame is able to manage the leakiness of subversion by collecting around the changing figure, the ability to first incite the frame's fracture (which then necessitates it rejoining) might in itself witness willfulness's potential and thus mark a kind of “doing.” It perhaps becomes less important that the Black (Muslim) alien and Black Muslim female monster are disciplined by a reintegration into the frame since their willful hyperbole succeeds in triggering the frame's collapse, however impermanently. To reveal—in the moment of breakage—the fallibility and porousness of the racist norms that decide their human and national exclusions might be enough of a “doing” for the willful subject. Although each extraterrestrial or monstrous transgression will be reabsorbed into the frame, willful subjects can play at exhausting the frame by compelling its penetration and observing the fragmentation while still recognizing the transience of the collapse.
Cultivating Pain? Attaching to Oppression?
By provoking the frame's breakage through an increasing strangeness, Black and Black Muslim figures invest in their own extraterrestriality or monstrosity, which in turn devours the wish of human citizenry. Even with the agentic prospects of strange inhabitances, I question whether the subject who invests in their nonsubjectivity actually comes to attach to their subjugation. Here I ask: Are desires for human and national recognition refused solely because of the futility and cruelty of the promise? Or, does the exaggerated figure also depend upon their oppressions and cultivate the pain of ontological denial? Such queries are directly inspired by Wendy Brown's contemplation of emancipatory democratic projects in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Taking up Friedrich Nietzsche's logic of “ressentiment”—described as “the triumph of the weak as weak” (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche, Kaufmann and Hollingdale1967/1989, in Brown Reference Brown1995, 67)—Brown examines the contemporary “paradoxes of liberalism” and their effects on the psyche of the liberal subject (Brown Reference Brown1995, 70, 74). Contemplating the complexities of “politicized identity,” Brown elaborates that the subject acquires a form of “recognition” based on “its history of subjection” (70, 74). As a by-product of the “blaming structure” that liberalism first orchestrates, the subject finds “a site of blame” that harbors and explains their suffering. The political identity that correspondingly surfaces is thus a refusal of its “marginalization or subordination” within liberal society (70, 74). The primary issue with this affective sequence for Brown is that this vengeful, blaming subject (1) “redistributes the injur[y]”; (2) perpetually performs their suffering; and (3) situates a relentless and historically unresolved pain at the center of their claims for recognition (70, 74). Rather than waging a critique of liberalism (that is, of its “sovereign subject,” “blaming structure,” and methods of inclusion/exclusion), such subjects simply “reverse without subverting” these systems, says Brown (70). We are therefore to understand that “politicized identity” that claims a capacity for “self-affirmation” sprouts from and depends upon its continued rejection by “a hostile external world” (70).
Part of what I find to be curious about the Black extraterrestrial and Black Muslim monster is that they do not appear to strive to obtain the individualist triumphs of liberalism's beleaguered subjects since they do not make attempts for recognition. At the same time, some of the qualities of politicized identity that Brown so thoroughly critiques might still be found among the willfully strange. For instance, we might interpret the heightening of one's exile from a recognized human citizenry as the resignation of liberalism's sovereign subject to their failure to achieve the “good life” (see Berlant Reference Berlant2011, 2). Inhabiting and enhancing the traits that segregate them from Canada's community of exalted whiteness possibly exhibits the figure's absorption of this failure into the body so that it becomes the body. Through this reading, the extraterrestrial and the monster are embodiments of failure. At the same time, because extraterrestriality and monstrosity are initiated by the conditions of anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and white nationalism, it could also be argued that Turner's and Jama's subjects rely upon the continuation of these subjugations for their strange existence. Additionally, what Brown identifies as the urgent need to externalize blame might also be discerned if the purpose of the willful exaggeration is to displace the pain of refusal through the confusion or visceral upset the strange appearance catalyzes. In these ways, the disobedience of strangeness might not be so disobedient after all, particularly if the artists’ subversions persist on the plane of fantasy without also accomplishing political reversals that impact the conditions of living subjects.
The Limits of Brown's Critique: Afro-Pessimism and Imaginative Representation
Does any of this tangibly matter? Do Brown's critiques retain their full significance in the face of Black and Black Muslim persons’ efforts to claim the value of their existence under the conditions of white supremacy that deny their being at every turn? Furthermore, how are we to make sense of the call to divest from politicized identity and “unredeemable injury” (Brown Reference Brown1995, 73) if the lives of all Black subjects continue to be informed by the violence, unmournable deaths, and nonhumanity that persists in—what Sharpe calls—slavery's wake? (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016). Brown rightly acknowledges that for some identities, Nietzsche's suggestion of harnessing “the virtues of ‘forgetting’” might indeed be “inappropriate if not cruel” (Brown Reference Brown1995, 74). Although eliminating the memory of pain might offer an avenue out of ressentiment's cycle of “resubjugat[ion],” she concedes that the erasure of history is precisely what comprises the pain of so many oppressed subjects (74). Even with these concessions to the limits of releasing pain and its historical memory for oppressed persons, Brown's insights likely fall short when attempting to grasp the extent of Black existential and ontological refusal. Brown ultimately ask us to consider how a “radically democratic and emancipatory political culture” might work to reshape investments away from subjugating identities (75). I recognize the importance of this question for conceiving political alternatives to regimes of dominion such as Canada's white-supremacist, settler-colonial democracy. Moreover, I see a resemblance to Brown in Berlant's interrogation of how contemporary conditions of attachment can impede our flourishing within Western democracies.Footnote 4 And still I must ask: What would it mean to refuse a radical democratic optimism and turn away from aspirations of flourishing by seeking other forms of embodied existence? Is this always and only a mask of feeling? Does fantasy (as shown through art) not have radically liberatory possibilities? To fully answer these probing questions would take us beyond the scope of this article. Even so, some of the theories coming out of Afro-pessimistic thought offer us points for consideration. Most specifically, I am thinking here of Jared Sexton's account of how Afro-pessimism's treatment of Black social death can be interpreted as a form of “black optimism” (Sexton Reference Sexton2011, 37).
Intermittently engaging with Lewis Gordon's notion of Black pathology—or “blacks [as] pathology” (Gordon Reference Gordon2000, 87, in Sexton Reference Sexton2011, 27)—Sexton explains that in Afro-pessimism we find the active “acceptance or affirmation” of the pathological definition ascribed to Black being (27). Hereby, the self interpellated into a pathogenic existence and thus social death by an anti-Black world “willing[ly]” assumes this position. Contrary to deductive reasoning, Sexton argues that this acceptance is “not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world” but rather, an “affirmation of blackness” since the self willfully inhabits blackness despite all “social costs” (27, 28). One rejects a letting go of Blackness despite the influences of a world order that is organized by Black degradations and ontological denials. The self attached to “being black” therefore spurns even those idealized attributes that might increase proximity to “life” or “sociality” because these would demand a withdrawal from Blackness (27). Further, this school of thought, as Sexton interprets it, allows that Black “social life” exists exterior to this world so that there is a living of “black life” amid “social death” (28–29). Such logics are plausibly those that Brown and her contemporaries would readily contest. Despite this probability, Sexton's description of Afro-pessimism enables us to consider how the alien and monstrous Black (Muslim) figure can be an imaginative representation of the acceptance of the pathological interpellation as part of the willful embrace of Blackness as well as Black Muslimness.
It is then important to emphasize that the artists and their strange figures are not necessarily proclaiming that Blackness is inherently alien nor that Black Muslimness is intrinsically monstrous. Instead it is in recognition of an anti-Black world order that situates Blackness as nonhuman that the figures convey a refusal to relinquish Black being in spite of the social costs. These figures fully inhabit and visually heighten this site of social death instead of aspiring for a recognition that deceptively promises to bring them into human and national life. In this way, there need not appear the vengeful desire to redistribute pain nor must there be the effort to triumph over regimes of power and to escape hurt through a form of flourishing. The art examined in this article can most clearly be understood as both acknowledging the directives of an anti-Black world and depicting the refusal to denounce Black being by illustrating how Afro-diasporic (Muslim) figures resistively occupy and play with their estrangement, including as Black Muslims. By visually exceeding the racial perimeters that seek to decide and regulate their difference, the Afro-Astronauts and monster hijabis depicted in art reveal the porous nature of the frames that decide the normativity of their nonbelonging to full humanity and authentic Canadian citizenry. Even as these subjects can be disciplined for their insubordinate desires and bodies and thus reintegrated back into racist logics, the hyperbole of their strange inhabitances continues to incite the frame's moment of breakage and reveal the fallibility of racist norms.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, Kamala Kempadoo, and Jim Vernon for their comments on earlier versions of this text prepared for my dissertation.
Jan-Therese Mendes holds a PhD in social and political thought from York University, Canada (2019). Mendes is currently a postdoctoral fellow in studies of gender and race at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Stavanger and a 2020–2021 visiting scholar with the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam.
