Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements…always begin with the person.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son
Theories of blackness do not address particularities in lived experiences and instead generalize to universalities, as theories are wont to do, through black internationalism. As a result, theoretical standpoints such as Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism do not apply to the individual lived experiences that Black people have around the world. There is little scholarship on the social construction of the black self that takes into account particularities of national identity in that black internationalism. A comparative study of different national identities in the global exchange of ideas in the middle of the twentieth century, localized in Paris, could shine light on this social construction of the human, the nonhuman, and the black self. The essays of James Baldwin will serve as the primary source basis for this comparative study, along with historical study of the French colonial structures and subjects for a notion of selfhood in them.
Racial and national identities, among the intersection of countless other identitarian components, impact one another and directly affect the adherence to Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism as major theories of existence. By looking at intersectional identity formation in the face of larger theories such as social death, we can begin to conclude about the application of theories to the particular and vice versa. I argue that James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and No One Knows My Name serve as an indicator of Black self-consciousness as inherently connected to national identity prior to an international, universal experience of blackness. I am asserting therefore that Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism must take into account national complexities as well as universal notions of disenfranchisement, enslavement, and intergenerational trauma that have occurred in Black communities, necessarily implicating blackness as a social phenomenon that interacts with other sociocultural factors to generate black self-consciousnesses.
This study inquires into notions of black self and self-consciousness, as well as historical structures that would affect such identity formation. This study does so by navigating notions of embodiment, enfleshment, nationhood, citizenship, articulation, social death, habeas viscus, and décalage in order to address theoretical movements such as Negritude, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism in the particular context of Baldwin’s essays as a reaffirmation of articulations along national affiliation rather than racialized linkages.
One must begin with inquiry into the universal notions of critical theory. Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reasonasserts that “race is the foundation not only of difference in general but also of the very idea of nation and community, since racial determinants are seen as the necessary moral basis for political solidarity” (Mbembe 89-90). As such, race constitutes national and more broadly social difference, but the implication is that blackness plays a social role in identity formation, rejecting black social death, and Afro-pessimism by extension, as a viable notion in the role of blackness in the social, political, and national discourses. As a result, Black Optimism must enter to inquire into the political and social existences of black identity and how various national identities embrace blackness. Additionally, Mbembe’s idea of identity involves a Sartrean recognition, in that selfhood is instantiated in one’s acknowledgment of the self: “In both cases identity is unveiled and made public. But to unveil one’s identity is also to recognize oneself. It is a form of self-recognition. It is to know who you are and to speak it or, better, to proclaim it—to say it to oneself. The act of identification is also an affirmation of existence” (151). Sartrean recognition here also involves a process of consciousness raising both internally and externally that the lived experience of blackness exists within both national and universal humanities.
The reception of theoretical movements that preceded Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism demonstrates the importance of context to such movements and how they apply to the particular lived experiences. For example, “the theories or ‘movements’ such as Pan-Africanism or Negritude…were propounded outside black Africa” (Hord & Lee 87). Classism in these theories suggests that for the colonial elite “it becomes necessary to assert or reassert in the framework of the pre-independence movement a separate and distinct identity from that of the colonial power” (89). The colonial elite found themselves in a liminal conception, in which they had to decide to support either the colonial rule or the colonized masses through cultural practices that would reclaim a subjugated identity or the imposed French national identity. In other words, Liberation struggles from colonial powers connected identity formation to a reinvigoration of culture and expression against oppression. As such, the identity created and ascribed to is important both theoretically and particularly in order to know what serves as a rejection of the oppressive cultural expression.
Brent Hayes Edwards touches on a fundamental problem of universalizing the lived experiences of blackness that connects to the distinction between racialized and nationalized identities:
Black and brown encounters on the Seine were uneasy due to the African American habit of thinking about Paris as liberatory and “free of racism” precisely at the height of French colonial exploitation.[1]…In effect, transnational black solidarity is traded in for a certain kind of national currency, an anti-racism in one country. In this configuration, the very notion of “Paris noir” is paradoxical because it represents the elision of black French culture in all its forms, whether that of the Francophone African and Antillian workers, performers, and students in the metropole, or that of the expressive traditions and struggles of the populations in the French colonies themselves. (Edwards 6)
In order to condemn racism in the United States, ex-patriots had to profit from the French colonial exploitations. As such, Black Americans and African Blacks experienced the same time period in opposing ways, contradicting such a “universal” experience of blackness. As such, it is important to investigate the distinctions that prevent articulation between Black American and African Black experiences in Paris.
Gary Wilder talks about the African culture being antithetical to French citizenship, but French nationality was compatible with such cultural roots because they were already the dominion of French imperial rule (Wilder 2005 133-4). This suggests that French political rights were more valuable than French sociocultural identity to designate upon peoples. But the quest for French citizenship was complicated for someone who was already a national but not technically a political entity. The notion that colonial subjects were “incompletely French” due to this discrepancy between the national and legal legitimacies (135). The confusion inherent in these distinct identitary components led to problems that “the same colonial officials who had encouraged African civic individualism also passed decrees prohibiting associations and the free press, in order to prevent the formation of a colonial civil society” (139). This demonstrates the importance at the individual and particular levels of identity the soundness of theoretical frameworks of existence. Or as Wilder says later, “challenging the double bind of colonial racism would require [critical theorists] to insist on and refute both political universalism and cultural particularism” (145).
In addition, Gary Wilder designates the contemporary Negritude movement as “republican-national, Panafrican-transnational, and cosmopolitan-universal,” while later describing Senghor’s writing as occasionally “an essentializing understanding of race” (202, 251). This categorization of one of Negritude’s leaders suggests a focus less on the particular republican-national notion as much as on the cosmopolitan-universal that can disregard nuance in favor of a comprehensive theoretical framework. However, Negritude’s tripartite focalizations offer an end to social death because Senghor also “figured ‘being black’ and ‘living black’ as forms of being human that could transcend the conventional opposition between abstract universalism and concrete particularism” (Wilder 2015 51). That is to say, Negritude’s conceptualization refutes the validity of social death and Afro-Pessimism as a theory that applies to lived experiences of blackness at the level of particularity.
The relationship between blackness and national identity necessarily proposes a relationship between blackness and national or societal norms, and such a relationship addressing norms creates a methodology for interpretation of the intersection of identities when blackness is involved:
“We must [exit the world of Man] because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the ‘biocentric and bourgeois’ epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of ‘dysgenic humans’ (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), ‘a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians, as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,’ the disabled, and the transgendered” (Weheliye 28).
The exit from the world of Man as Weheliye describes it is an attempt to deconstruct all conventions of Western theory that might structure an identity formation process. As a result, the relationship to national or social expectations and ideals is bypassed in order to reimagine what an appropriate relationship might look like. Weheliye goes on to articulate blackness and national identity through the terminology used:
Replacing the designation black with African American signals foremost a turn away from a primarily political category toward an identitarian marker of cultural and/or ethnic specificity; diaspora suggests a concurrent de-emphasizing of specificities in the embrace of transnational frames of reference and a return of said particularities via the comparison of black populations that differ in nationality. (30)
The emphasis is placed on a comparative methodology that aligns with the notions of articulation and the comparison inherent in the notion of habeas viscus.
Wehehliye introduces the idea of habeas viscus as a political notion “in the absence of and in contradistinction to habeas corpus, how might the flesh incarnate alternate forms of liberty and humanity that dwell among us in the NOW” (132). The flesh characterizes social death in its stripping of the simulacra of life from the embodiment to which it refers. On the other hand, it asserts a humanity that contradicts the notions of social death. The theoretical conflict may reside in the fact that habeas viscus attempts to extract enfleshment from the field of law:
“Though the laws of Man place the flesh outside the ferocious and ravenous perimeters of the legal body, habeas viscus defies domestication both on the basis of particularized personhood as a result of suffering, as in human rights discourse, and on the grounds of the universalized version of western Man. Rather, habeas viscus points to the terrain of humanity as a relational assemblage exterior to the jurisdiction of law given that the law can bequeath or rescind ownership of the body so that it becomes the property of proper persons but does not possess the authority to nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh found in the traditions of the oppressed” (137).
As such, habeas viscus removes thinkers from the world of Man in order to examine the fundamental rights of humanity without the actual historical truisms of exploitation that pollute the political theory of habeas corpus that define humanity in many western legal institutions. Habeas viscus does so through poetics such as the essays of James Baldwin.
Even as an ex-patriot in Paris, James Baldwin found that the identitary crisis remains for Black Americans:
“[The Negro] finds himself involved, in another language, in the same old battle: the battle for his own identity. To accept the reality of his being an American becomes a matter involving his integrity and his greatest hopes, for only by accepting this reality can he hope to make articulate to himself or to others the uniqueness of his experience, and to set free the spirit so long anonymous and caged.” (Baldwin, “Encounter on the Seine: Black meets Brown” 121)
In Paris, the black American experiences articulation of her/his identity through Brent Hayes Edwards’ conceptualization because of its “function as a concept-metaphor that allows us to consider relations of ‘difference within unity,‘ non-naturalizable patterns of linkage between disparate societal elements” (Edwards 11). Mbembe confirms this idea of articulation, by suggesting that “what we must imagine is a politics of humanity that is fundamentally a politics of the similar, but in a context in which what we all share from the beginning is difference. It is our differences that, paradoxically, we must share” (Mbembe 178). In other words, articulation connects communities across the embodied and cultural differences of its members, since difference is the single unifying feature between all humans.
After referring to the décalage between the black American and the French African colonial subject, Baldwin suggests that white Americans and black Americans are articulated together rather than the former pair:
“Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles [white Americans and Negroes] have played in the lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced” (Baldwin 123).[2]
The evidence of articulation in Baldwin’s 1955 essay points to a connection established on the basis of national identity rather than that of racial identity in an ex-patriot scenario. Baldwin’s invocation of the flesh as the articulation between Americans simultaneously raises the comparative aspect of habeas viscus and its distension of conventional interpretations to create self-consciousness. It is also through this Sartrean recognition in which the black American and the African see one another and recognize themselves as distinct entities through the particularities that separate them, despite the similarity projected through skin pigmentation. Instead, this recognition leads Baldwin to identify more with white Americans, united on the basis of nationality rather than the universal of skin pigmentation. This contradicts the universalized rhetoric that would unite Black experience rather than nationalist perspectives, which leads consequentially to the suggestion of a black political life at the least.
Similarly, Baldwin’s collection of essays, No One Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, opens with an admission of why he went to Paris that involves his self-consciousness and identity formation. Baldwin “wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them” (Baldwin, “The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American” 3-4). Baldwin’s emphasizes his particular ex-patriot experience to create an identity for himself as a Black American, of which he maintains the national solidarity upon his return to the United States: “And the Northern Negro in the South sees, whatever he or anyone else may wish to believe, that his ancestors are both white and black. The white men, flesh of his flesh, hate him for that very reason” (“Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South” 99). In this way, Baldwin suggests that black Americans share a national commonality with white Americans which African blacks could not share, which distinguishes black Americans from black Africans and renders impossible a universalized notion of blackness in the mid-twentieth century even before the conceptualization of Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.
In summary, the particularities of national identity influence the notion of selfhood in James Baldwin’s writing, which distinguishes his lived experience of American blackness from the experience of African blackness. As such, the articulation of American identity despite racialized differences, and such articulation requires critical theories of blackness such as Negritude, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism, to take into account national particulars that would complement the ontology of blackness in identity formation. This necessarily precludes Afro-Pessimism as a viable critical theory, since a national identity, while not suggesting a political life through citizenship, functions as a type of social life in the construction of a national self. Particularity is essential to creating critical theories involving humanity that go to the universal plane, so that we encompass the entire range of lived experiences in what we determine to be universally human.
Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. The Dial Press, 1961.
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, 1955.
Cabral, Amilcar. “Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle (1972).” I Am Because We Are: Readings in Africana Philosophy, edited by Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee, University of Massachusetts Press, 2016, pp. 83–93.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Harvard University Press, 2003.
Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press, 2017.
Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press, 2014.
Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Duke University Press, 2015.
Wilder, Gary. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
[1] Edwards previously discussed the conscription of colonial subjects to fight in World War I by the tens of thousands.
[2] The understanding of décalage employed here comes from Edwards, where it signifies both a resistance to translation into English and “a resistance to crossing over” as incommunicable cultural structures (Edwards 13).
