Habitations of the Veil

Rebecka Rutledge Fisher

Description

In Habitations of the Veil, Rebecka Rutledge Fisher uses theory implicit in W. E. B. Du Bois's use of metaphor to draw out and analyze what she sees as a long tradition of philosophical metaphor in African American literature. She demonstrates how Olaudah Equiano, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison each use metaphors to develop a critical discourse capable of overcoming the limits of narrative language to convey their lived experiences. Fisher's philosophical investigations open these texts to consideration on ontological and epistemological levels, in addition to those concerned with literary craft and the politics of black identity.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Poetics of Being Black

I. Inhabiting the Veil: On Black Being

1. Being and Metaphor

A Philosophy of Ordinary Black Being: Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

2. African American Philosophy and the Poetics of Black Being

Crafting a Poetics of Black Being: Du Bois’s Philosophical Example
Whither Blackness? Du Bois, Black Culture, and the Contemporaneity of Black Being

II. The Poetics of Black Being Before and After Du Bois

3. Being and Becoming: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African

The Rhetoric of the Image: Being and Becoming in Equiano’s Use of Portraiture
Hope in Narrative: Equiano’s Biblical Turn
An Actuated Being

4. Remnants of Memory: Metaphor and Being in Frances E.W. Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life

The Evolution of Harper’s Vernacular Poetry
Between Metaphor and Black Being: Aunt Chloe’s Structure of Poetic Memory

5. A Technology of Modern Black Being: “The Conservation of Races” as a Critical Ontology of Race

Being in the Occasion of Discourse: “Conservation,” Metaphor, and the Historical Narrative of Race
A Technology of Black Being: “The Conservation of Races” as the Contested “Mediation by which We Understand Ourselves”
The Interpretation of Black Historicity: Reading “Conservation” in Context
“Conservation” and the Hermeneutics of Race

6. Habitations of the Veil: Souls, Figure, Form

Incipit and Excipit
Poem and Paratext: The African American Spiritual and the Strivings of Black Being
Inspiriting Time: The Spiritual and the Ontology of the Slave
Metaphors of Perceiving, Knowing, and Mourning
Metaphors of Journeying and Insight
Metaphors of the Temporal and the Atemporal
The Fundamental Mythopoetics of Metaphor in African American Religion
The Soul’s Biography: Metaphors of Transition and Transcendence
Navigating the Undulating Waters of Being: The Spirituals and the Possibilities of Metaphor

7. Symbolic Wrights: The Poetics of Being Underground

Incipit
Mapping Black Ontology and Black Freedom
“Blueprint for Negro Writing” in Context
Being Underground

8. A Love Called Democracy: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

By Way of Conclusion
Speaking for the Beloved
Love’s Habitation: Blackness, the Uncanny Maternal, and American Democracy
The Repression of the Black Maternal
The Irrepressible Dreamer: Reveries of Sexual Love
Sacrificing Sexual Desire
Black Being’s Moral of Love

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 12 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438449333
• Langue: English

Extrait

HABITATIONS
OF THE
VEIL
SUNY series, Philosophy and Race
___________
Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors
HABITATIONS
OF THE
VEIL
Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being in African American Literature
REBECKA RUTLEDGE FISHER
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Eileen Nizer Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge. Habitations of the veil : metaphor and the poetics of black being in African American literature / Rebecka Rutledge Fisher. pages cm. — (SUNY series, Philosophy and race) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-4931-9 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. Metaphor in literature. I. Title. PS153.N5F536 2013 810.9 896073—dc23 2013002463
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I dedicate this book with much love to my husband, Edwin B. Fisher, and my mother, Billie Rutledge Killens.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Poetics of Being Black
I INHABITING THE VEIL: ON BLACK BEING
1 Being and Metaphor
A Philosophy of Ordinary Black Being: Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
2 African American Philosophy and the Poetics of Black Being
Crafting a Poetics of Black Being: Du Bois’s Philosophical Example
Whither Blackness? Du Bois, Black Culture, and the Contemporaneity of Black Being
II THE POETICS OF BLACK BEING BEFORE AND AFTER DU BOIS
3 Being and Becoming: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
The Rhetoric of the Image: Being and Becoming in Equiano’s Use of Portraiture
Hope in Narrative: Equiano’s Biblical Turn
An Actuated Being
4 Remnants of Memory: Metaphor and Being in Frances E. W. Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life
The Evolution of Harper’s Vernacular Poetry
Between Metaphor and Black Being: Aunt Chloe’s Structure of Poetic Memory
5 A Technology of Modern Black Being: “The Conservation of Races” as a Critical Ontology of Race
Being in the Occasion of Discourse: “Conservation,” Metaphor, and the Historical Narrative of Race
A Technology of Black Being: “The Conservation of Races” as the Contested “Mediation by which We Understand Ourselves”
The Interpretation of Black Historicity: Reading “Conservation” in Context
“Conservation” and the Hermeneutics of Race
6 Habitations of the Veil: Souls , Figure, Form
Incipit and Excipit
Poem and Paratext: The African American Spiritual and the Strivings of Black Being
Inspiriting Time: The Spiritual and the Ontology of the Slave
Metaphors of Perceiving, Knowing, and Mourning
Metaphors of Journeying and Insight
Metaphors of the Temporal and the Atemporal
The Fundamental Mythopoetics of Metaphor in African American Religion
The Soul’s Biography: Metaphors of Transition and Transcendence
Navigating the Undulating Waters of Being: The Spirituals and the Possibilities of Metaphor
7 Symbolic Wrights: The Poetics of Being Underground
Incipit
Mapping Black Ontology and Black Freedom “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in Context
Being Underground
8 A Love Called Democracy: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
By Way of Conclusion
Speaking for the Beloved
Love’s Habitation: Blackness, the Uncanny Maternal, and American Democracy
The Repression of the Black Maternal
The Irresponsible Dreamer: Reveries of Sexual Love
Sacrificing Sexual Desire
Black Being’s Moral of Love
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I want first to thank my family for their continuous love and support. My husband, Edwin B. Fisher, has supported me unfailingly throughout the long durée of this project. I lovingly dedicate this book to him and to my mother, Billie Rutledge Killens, who has always been my biggest fan and most stalwart believer. Mommy, I love you and could not have done this without you. My father, Vince Rutledge, Sr., has long been a man of no-nonsense faith. I thank him for his calming presence and unstinting strength. My late grandmother, Mrs. Alice W. Smith, bequeathed me her love of books and words. She is still with me every day. My godparents, Deloris and William Bell, provided me the warmth and comfort of a home away from home during my graduate school days, and saw me through the first iteration of this project. Bill, the book is done! Friends and colleagues have provided support, wisdom, and cheer all along the way: James Coleman, María deGuzman, Gerald Early, Trudier Harris, Errol Henderson, Mae Henderson, Donald H. Matthews, Itabari Njeri, John McGowan, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Rafia Zafar. For reading parts of this project at various stages, and/or listening to presentations drawn from it and providing me invaluable feedback, I thank the following colleagues, who are also dear friends: Minrose Gwin, Ruth Salvaggio, Nahum Chandler, Hortense Spillers, Nicole Waligora-Davis, Hilary Holladay, and John Charles. The editors of SUNY’s Philosophy and Race series, Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, championed my project and believed in it from the start. Andrew Kenyon of SUNY Press provided a sage ear and lasting enthusiasm. An early draft of this book was completed with the support of the Spray-Randleigh Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a summer residential fellowship at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008): 55–74. A shorter version of chapter 7 appeared in Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora 11.2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 14–42.
Herein lie buried many things which, if read with patience, will reveal the strange meaning of being black
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Introduction
The Poetics of Being Black
The Souls of Black Folk (1903), from which the epigraph to this introduction is drawn, is but one instance of Du Bois’s particular brand of historical narration and metaphorical innovation, wherein he proclaims unhesitatingly, in a voice that should evoke an unsettling ring of truth as we survey our own contemporary political landscape, that “the problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” ( Souls 372). From the perspective of the present study, it is not simply Du Bois’s prescient political outlook that draws us near to him, and him close to us. Rather, Du Bois’s book, radical for its time and labeled “dangerous” by a number of Southern reviewers because, one Southern writer claimed, it would incite black men to “rape” white women, continues to be so very important to the present generation of readers because from our moment in history, we can see that Du Bois not only revolutionized the way racialized being (or, as Du Bois termed it, “being black”) was, and continues to be, discussed in this country; he also brought to bear upon his analysis of race exceptional, and perhaps unsurpassed, philosophical metaphors of “being black,” or, what I will refer to as “black being,” that were alternately (and at times simultaneously) spiritual, secular, historical, economic, feminist, and, importantly, humanistic in nature.
Indeed, the open-endedness of Du Bois’s ontological and epistemological metaphors—their fluid capacity to transgress categories of discursive signification (such as the category of race) and thus their ability to challenge social and theoretical commonplaces and generate alternative social and political meanings—marks them as an exemplary mode of conceptual expression, and allows me to place Du Bois at the core of my analysis of the philosophical possibilities of metaphor and its relation to concepts of black being in the African American literary tradition. The metaphorical processes at work in Du Bois’s seminal text continue to elucidate the philosophical trajectory of his discourse on black being, and thus they provide a firm foundation for the critical and ontological inquiry I undertake in this book.
In this study, I draw upon Du Bois’s conceptual uses of metaphor in Souls as a frame through which to examine how African American writers throughout the history of the tradition have long put into practice what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur would later describe as language’s—and specifically metaphor’s—knowledge of its relation to being. For example, when Ricoeur’s frequent interlocutor on the question of being, the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, writes that “language is the house of Being,” we are clearly reminded of Du Bois’s desire that readers of Souls should, as he writes, patiently “study my words with me” as they enter into the language of his text, which describes, in “vague uncertain outline the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive” (359). If language is the house of being, then being is likewise housed in the world of text and exemplified in narrative. For Du Bois, the worlds “within and without the Veil” collide in text and produce the existential and plural world of African American souls, which he portrays for the reader in fourteen essays that he calls “thoughts.”
It seems natural that Du Bois’s “thought” should assume a central role when one determines to examine the relation of metaphor and being in the African American literary