To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute.
—Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

But this is amazing, you know, the first black president. I know you're bi-racial, but, the first black president. You're proud to be able to say that: "The first black president." That is, unless you screw up. And then it's gonna be "What's up with the half-white guy? Who voted for the mulatto?"
—Wanda Sykes, White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, May 2009

I.

While many commentators have held forth on the possibility that Barack Obama might be our first "post-racial" president, and while others have subjected this notion to a perhaps deserved derision, few have been as interested in contemplating another, equally likely prospect: Obama would be, and now is, our first post-colonial president. This silence bespeaks the degree to which "empire" remains a name that is still, on most public occasions, forbidden to pronounce. And isn't the difficulty with registering Obama's relationship to the colonial-modern obvious, in the way that is so often the case with things conspicuous, yet hard to hold in one's vision, like the nose on one's face? Barack Hussein Obama has a Swahili first name, a Luo surname, and that notorious middle name. He was born in Hawai'i and raised there and in Indonesia. Only the best political image-making team money could buy could have convinced a critical percentage of the voting public to actively disattend—or remain sufficiently ignorant of—the postcoloniality of his blackness long enough to select him as their surrogate to redeem the national crimes of slavery, segregation, and anti-black racism. But now that American presidentialism has finally secured to itself the black male body that has so long served as its abject, generative foil, how is this interstice between the national and non-national to be navigated?

The "irony" of the first black president being born of a white mother and a black Kenyan father has been pointed out so often that one starts to suspect that said irony is really something else: a point de capiton, Lacan's term for the anchoring point in discourse "by which the signifier stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification."[1] The repeated national assertions that Obama's mixed-race birth is an irony subject to anxious and jokey allusion is one such anchoring point for the national imaginary. That is to say, as exemplified in the joke Wanda Sykes told before the gathered press, political and celebrity corps (see epigraph), American mixed-race discourse as a point de capiton gathers up the other amorphous discourses circulating around Obama's nativity, and halts the ceaseless spread of their signification just before they spill over onto non-national, postcolonial terrain.[2] Sykes' comic repetition of the phrase "first black president" deliberately taunts any who imagine they do black people any favors by looking "beyond" race, including, presumptively, those who fix such a gaze on a transnational horizon. Equally telling is Sykes' half-serious joke to revoke Obama's "firstness" should he disappoint. With this declaration, Sykes evokes a powerful, historically symbolic archetype in black feminist discourse: the black woman with the public capacity to name. Is it possible, I ask in this essay, to articulate this black feminist discourse within and against a U.S. national formation, with a discourse that does justice to the postcolonial trajectory that produced an outer-national figure like Obama?

To explore this question, we must account for how the phrase "Kenyan father" within the discourse of Obama's racial heritage is both an explanation and obfuscation. It anchors him to the sign "black" (to which, by contrast, the Republican rising star, Bobby Jindal, also of non-U.S., non-white parentage, is not stably secured). But paradoxically, it does so by partly obfuscating the sign "Kenya," which is wrested from its context only long enough to explain Obama's racial heritage, and stripped of its colonial historicity. In other words, the phrase "Kenyan father," as a new point de capiton within an American discourse about race, obscures the history and present of the Republic of Kenya.

Erroneously but frequently characterized as an immigrant (even by the Obama campaign itself), the elder Obama's student days in Hawai'i were narrated during the election as the story of one among the world's huddled masses gazing at America, yearning to breathe free. Anti-colonial desires for a future other than an American one—desires I explore further below—were excluded from this characterization. As a discourse, the fact of Obama's outer-national Kenyan paternity remained subservient to the more powerful symbolic significance of the American Dream—the national demand that the U.S. remain the object of the other's desire.

A brief glance into the mirror of paranoid U.S. xenophobia confirms the doubled logic of this exclusion. The conspiratorial right, determined to expose Obama as a Manchurian candidate sent to steal our national enjoyment (which is just a mirror image of the mainstream left's desire to see the world's admiration renewed in the election of Obama as president),[3] launched two lawsuits against his presidential victory. The less interesting of the two claimed that Obama was secretly born in Kenya, and had forged his birth certificate.[4] But the more intriguing suit began with the claim that Obama was born with a right to Kenyan citizenship as well, and therefore could not be what the U.S. Constitution intends by a "natural born" U.S. citizen. In truth, Obama was born merely with a paternal relation to the status of British colonial subject, because the Republic of Kenya did not yet exist in 1961.[5] What the lawsuit missed was how Obama's father traveled to the U.S. during, and precisely as part of, the transition from colonial rule to Kenyan national independence. Not an immigrant at all, he was part of the famous "Airlift" masterminded by the Kenyan nationalist and trade unionist Tom Mboya, who envisioned a cadre trained outside the colonial metropole who would return and govern the new nation.[6] The xenophobic claims articulated in the two lawsuits missed precisely this movement of postcolonial subjects out from under colonial suzerainty. The figure of the younger Obama as an alien being whose citizenship claims preyed upon the American heartland thus occluded the historical event of Kenya's emergence as an independent nation, (itself a complex, precarious, and ongoing political process that ran concurrent to the U.S. election in early 2008).[7]

As this glance into the mirror of xenophobia suggests, doubling back upon the question of Obama's nativity becomes a way of plucking out the point de capiton that secures his Kenyan paternity to a stable and finished African past, and of restoring to that event all the messy and multiply-determined set of discourses that are proper to it. The argument that follows takes its shape through a selective reading of Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. I do not believe any special acumen is required to predict that this book will, in years to come, be included among the canonical twentieth-century African American autobiographies. If it is so included, it will in part be for the unusual circumstance of its having been composed before its author settled on the political career that went on to make history. It is, for this reason, suggestive to a degree that a campaign book scarcely is. However, since I interpret this revealing text with the help of psychoanalytic theory, I should state up front that my intention is not to offer a psychological portrait of the president. My aim is rather to productively "hystericize" an American racial symbolic order—that is, to draw attention to its fundamental and underlying anxieties. To do so I draw upon black feminist theory, in particular upon Hortense Spillers' generative readings of the American grammar, to argue that the desire of the mother is at issue in a manner orthodox psychoanalysis is scarcely prepared to address. And because my agenda is to insist, in line with Saidiya Hartman, on the complexity of the historical, political, and discursive non-relation between African America and post-colonial Africa, I employ the desire of the mother, still traceable underneath the "paternal metaphor" of Obama's title Dreams from My Father, to bring me to my perhaps surprising conclusion that it is Obama's (white) American mother, as much as his (black) Kenyan father, through which his symbolic accession to the status of "first black president" of the U.S. is achieved.[8] In so doing, I turn briefly to a comparative reading of a classic black feminist novel—centered upon a child born to a white mother and black father, and similarly destined for a White House, therein—to serve as a privileged interpreter of national dreams or nightmares.

II.

Part one of Obama's memoir, entitled "Origins," begins with news of his father's death. While a college student at Columbia University, Obama is informed by telephone that the father he hardly knew has been killed in a traffic accident in Kenya. With this news, the possibility of future rapprochement is lost, the name of the father an enigma wrapped in a permanent mystery. For Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father is the fundamental signifier securing the entry of the subject into the symbolic order courtesy of a lineage, and instating Oedipal prohibition, the Father's Law. Its efficacy is not related to, and can indeed actually be increased by, the actual father's death or absence. Dreams from My Father thus becomes a memoir that is overdetermined by the Name-of-the-Father.[9] With the news that he will never know who his father was, and even more anxiously, that he will never know who he was for his father, paternity takes the shape of an "unclaimed experience."[10] Dreams from My Father revolves around the dilemma produced in a patriarchal culture (American, Kenyan) when patrimony goes unarticulated, but is nonetheless of great consequence. For the Name-of-the-Father, after all, is in this case also the (symbolic and given) name of the son.

The title of Obama's memoir seems to suggest recourse to a quasi-mystical faith in trans-individual organic memory to recover Africa as an unclaimed paternity. To grasp how the metaphor of an inheritable dream might serve as an anchoring point to a diasporic subject like Obama, we might usefully bring into play here Lacan's distinction between the symbolic father and the imaginary father. Obama's text seeks to interpret the non-relation between the symbolic fathers who order the American discourse of race and inheritance, and his imaginary father, the fatherly Imago, whose absence from his American (and Indonesian) upbringing indexes instead a mythic, exteriorized, Kenyan concern. Instead of the Father's Law, Obama receives merely his Name, and the contours of an absent presence he must somehow fill. The metaphor of the inheritable dream mediates this division between symbolic and imaginary, as Obama imagines that what he can inherit is, paradoxically, the ability to interpret the dreams—the fantasies and desires—of his own parents, whose brief transnational romance provides the primal scene he must confront if he would make his own way through this world.[11]

The circumstances in which Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Hussein Obama, senior, met and married, birthing one child before divorcing, place a productive pressure on the standard psychoanalytic scenario. That pressure is archived in the acoustic pattern of the hybrid Luo/Swahili/Arabic name that the younger Obama inherits from his father. While the name is obviously interlocked with multiple symbolic orders and imaginary registers (fanatic terrorist, corrupt African, multicultural America, hybrid savior, etc.) it also points to a bedrock anxiety in the speaking of language, one reflective of what Derrida terms, in my epigraph, "the originary violence of language."[12] The epigraph is extracted from a critique of the "proper name," which Derrida considers an improper notion, insofar as to name is to inscribe difference, in the process divorcing the subject from a self-presence that, he notes, was always an illusion anyway. This paradox is key to exploring the tension between Dunham's apparent assent to the patriarchal logic of assigning the father's full name to her child, and the fierce and feminist independence that must have accompanied her active insistence upon a larger world than that given to her by her prairie origins. More is enclosed within the Name-of-the-Father, it would seem, than its proper Lacanian function would intimate. We see, for instance, that despite his androcentric title, the parent that Obama consistently seeks to understand in Dreams from My Father is his mother, since it is her dreams that have made him as much as any others.

One of the consequences of the mother's desire is the awkward name itself, which the young Obama must perilously navigate through the shifting shoals of ignorance and interpellation on the playgrounds and schools of Indonesia, Hawai'i, and California. In Dreams from my Father, he describes temporarily mitigating his shame by accepting the Americanized nickname Barry (first used by the same grandfather who, originally desirous of a son, had named his daughter Stanley). Obama's memoir thus presents us with a case in which the name preserves "originary violence" through its postcolonial protrusion into the vernacular, foiling any effort to seamlessly integrate paternal lineage into the symbolic order.

This failure is especially apparent in liberal efforts at inclusion and toleration. Introduced into a new class in Hawai'i after his return from Indonesia, Obama encounters a friendly teacher who tries to reintegrate him into an American classroom by paying sensitive attention to his name and identity, saying:

I used to live in Kenya, you know. Teaching children just your age. It's such a magnificent country. Do you know what tribe your father is from?"

Her question brought on more giggles, and I remained speechless for a moment. When I finally said "Luo," a sandy-haired boy behind me repeated the word in a loud hoot, like the sound of a monkey. The children could no longer contain themselves . . ..[13]

Here, the sound pattern of "Luo" induces an acoustic image that is instantly mimed in a thrilling whoop of racist pleasure. As he hears the word describing his father's heritage spoken aloud, the son's intense shame and resentment touches upon his inability to either fill that sign with the proud content of cultural knowledge, or drain its acoustic proximity to the jungle.

Later on in the memoir, a post-adolescent Obama shares a drink with a friend and is addressed by another by a name that surprises her:

She stirred her coffee idly and asked, "What did Marcus call you just now? Some African name, wasn't it?"

"Barack."

"I thought your name was Barry."

"Barack's my given name. My father's name. He was Kenyan."

"Does it mean something?"

"It means 'Blessed.' In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim."

Regina repeated the name to herself, testing out the sound. "Barack. It's beautiful." She leaned forward across the table. "So why does everybody call you Barry?"[14]

Here, the sound pattern of the name, its foreignness, is tested in the mouth like hot coffee and found, to a more mature palate than that of the whooping sandy-haired boy, now beautiful. The sound of the name possesses a musical rhythm that sounds across oceans and beyond any effort at cross-cultural appreciation. For its beauty resides, as Regina instinctively acknowledges, only in a repetition that takes place after the revelation of it its proper meaning.

What remains constant in both these examples from the memoir is the fundamental ambiguity of the "vocative absolute," which alternately produces shame, hilarity, curiosity, and desire. As a politician, Obama learned to address the anxiety underlying this ambiguity with self-deprecating humor. Such was the approach of the video biography introducing Barack and Michelle Obama to the Democratic National Convention in fall of 2008. They both mocked his "funny" name in the context of recalling their first dates, implicitly allowing the nation to relax and laugh about it too. The joke, we were led to believe, was that even Obama finds his name funny. Mocking his name was scripted into this spectacle of a normative, meteorically upwardly-mobile couple, one in which Michelle Obama wryly presented herself as the mock-xenophobic African American initially unprepared to date someone with so strange-sounding a name. As many commentators have gone on to confirm, despite laughable right-wing attempts to scandalize her name, Michelle Obama's charisma has done much to confirm her husband's bonafides in the black American community. Key also is the manner in which her choice of and desire for her husband, and vice versa, secures to them both the powerful narrative of racial uplift.[15] Like Wanda Sykes, Michelle Obama performs the public authority of black women to name and confirm Barack as a brother.

How is this ability of the black woman to name related, if at all, to the broken genealogy of Obama's Kenyan patronymic? The successful normalization of the name Barack Obama might have left some to infer that it lacks any specific ethno-cultural roots. On election night, images of ululating Kenyans were crosscut with ecstatic dancers from the Japanese city of Obama, relaying the acoustic image of the name across and beyond any specific sign community. This global response to the name finds a grounding and echo in the phenomena of the "African sounding name" given by some African Americans to stand in for lost matrilineal and patrilineal connections to Africa. This latter phenomena both cuts and augments the name Obama as specifically Luo patronymic with what performance theorist Fred Moten calls an "invagination", which he describes as a "cut and augmented hermeneutic circle [that] is structured by a double movement." As he goes on to explain:

The first element [of this double movement] is the transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts and resists certain formations of identity and interpretation by challenging the reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical form. The second is the assertion of what Nathaniel Mackey calls "broken' claim(s) to connection" between Africa and African America that seeks to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures—maternal estrangement and the thwarted romance of the sexes—that he refers to as "wounded kinship" and "the sexual cut."[16]

The first element of invagination, as Moten describes it here, helps account for how the name as an ethnic identifier induces a transference in the subject for whom it must remain a "radically exterior aurality"—the sandy-haired child, Regina, even (the then) Michelle Robinson on first being romantically approached by Barack Obama—which disrupts and resists both identity and interpretation. Elsewhere I have reflected upon Barack Obama's public persona and the psychoanalytic concept of the transference.[17] Here, I want to link this transference to Moten's second element, wherein he suggests a double fold of "asymptotically divergent ruptures"—the divergent ruptures of the Middle Passage and African colonization—that manifest a wounded kinship between Africa and African America. Moten productively refigures the radical non-relation of the sexes, conveyed in the Lacanian maxim "there is no sexual relationship," into a more capacious image of the "thwarted romance of the sexes." I like this formulation because its syntax captures a crucial element, so often missed, of the American grammar book. In making "thwarted" the modifier and "romance" the noun, rather than vice versa, it better reflects the "heartbreaking" stakes of a black sentimentality.[18] Simply put, Moten's formulation allows me to augment my reading of the transference (the projection of fantasized characteristics onto an other as love) with and through a reading of racial kinship as sexual difference.

III.

In "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Hortense Spillers subjects Daniel Patrick Moynihan's notorious black matriarchal thesis to a powerful genealogical critique. Moynihan's thesis purported to explain racial subjugation in America by means of the supposedly inverted gender hierarchy in African American culture produced by chattel slavery. "In essence," to quote the Moynihan report itself, "the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is too out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well."[19] In a telling excerpt, the report names the advantages of patriarchy precisely in terms of how the symbolic father grants, through the transmission of his name, his children accession to the social order:

The white family, despite many variants, remains a powerful agency not only for transmitting property from one generation to the next, but also for transmitting no less valuable contracts with the world of education and work. In an earlier age, the Carpenters, Wainwrights, Weavers, Mercers, Farmers, Smiths acquired their names as well as their trades from their fathers and grandfathers. Children today still learn the patterns of work from their fathers even though they may no longer go into the same jobs.[20]

This explanatory discourse innocently installs "the white family" as the norm to which family life as such should aspire. This belies Moynihan's ostensibly inclusive gestures towards black American forms of life. The principle alibi for the white Name-of-the-Father that secures this ruse—its archaic relation to occupational status—is dropped just as quickly as it is raised, leaving the assumption that white rank in the racial hierarchy comes from "patterns of work" rather than through generations of discrimination with just a fig leaf of justification. Hidden in plain sight in the quote, of course, is a reference to the transmitting of property, to which we might add, the transmission of whiteness as property in an American vernacular.[21] More shockingly, it elides the former power of the white name to transmit enslaved black people as property, the magnitude of which it must somehow disavow if it is to maintain its tight focus on the pathology of the black family, rather than the necropolitics of slave life.

Spillers' work serves as a trenchant corrective to Moynihan's deployment of the patronymic as ruse. Instead of benignly attributing the cause of racial hierarchies to "patterns of work," her genealogy of race, gender, and embodiment reopens the traumatic wounds of enslavement and the Middle Passage as an alternative origin for racial capitalism:

The symbolic order that I wish to trace in this writing, calling it an "American grammar," begins at the "beginning," which is really a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation. The massive demographic shifts, the violent formation of a modern African consciousness, that take place on the sub-Saharan Continent during the initiative strikes which open the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century of our Christ, interrupted hundreds of years of black African culture. We write and think, then, about an outcome of aspects of African-American life in the United States under the pressure of those events.[22]

Insisting upon the historicity of the symbolic that more conservative readings of psychoanalysis might deny, Spillers rejects a facile retroactive and compensatory gendering of the enslaved African, insisting that, to the contrary, the calculus of violence and profit by which life was merchandised and consumed in the cauldron of Atlantic slavery targeted a violated, ungendered flesh. Partus sequitur ventrem, or the American "innovation" that proclaimed that the child born of an enslaved mother would also be enslaved (regardless of the condition of the father), inaugurated not an actual black matriarchy (that is, a social system in which black women dominate men) but rather, an emergent symbolic order of gender and race:

This human and historic development—the text that has been inscribed on the benighted heart of the continent—takes us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of American women's community: the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated—the law of the mother . . ..[23]

Spillers rejects, in other words, the Moynihan report's comparison between the white family and the black family as baseless in both theory and history, given the dependence of the historical production of the former on the destruction of the latter. What partus sequitur ventrem introduces (keeping in mind its status as a patriarchal law designed to protect the property rights of slaveholders) is not the comparability but rather an "inexorable difference" within "American women's community," an innovation upon gender Spillers calls the "shadow" or threat of a "law of the mother." That this synthesis has long since evaporated (but is perhaps still perfuming the air?) suggests a mystique that is also a mistake—the mistake, that is, of a patriarchal symbolic order, in writing into its legal codes the consequential presence of a female shadow power. As Spillers writes of the post-slave black woman:

This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to "name"), which her culture imposes in blindness . . ..[24]

I have already suggested how the insurgent potentiality of the black female social subject to "name" reversions Barack Obama as the Name-of-the-Father, endowing him with a symbolic black maternity that places the pressure of its "inexorable difference" on his actual white maternity. In my conclusion, I want to continue to think through this "inexorable difference" in relation to the "thwarted romance" Obama presents in Dreams from My Father, that between a white teenager from Kansas and a glamorous and worldly student from Africa. How are we to approach this apparent fusion or fission of the black family with the white, the black-white family, or really, the white family with one black/white child (and a later Asian/white child)? Where in the cut and augmented hermeneutic circle of blackness does the white mother belong?

Katherine Bassard has employed Spillers' formulation of an "inexorable difference" in American women's community to offer a suggestive reading of one founding text of black feminist literature, Harriet Wilson's 1859 novel, Our Nig. To be sure, Wilson's autobiographical protagonist Frado and Barack Obama are not at all similar characters. But as the children of white mothers metonymically "blackened" by their relation to black husbands and children, their shared location within the American racial symbolic order offers the former as a suggestive inter-text to the latter. Bassard reads Frado's origin story—born to a black father who dies of consumption, leaving her overburdened white mother to soon give her up to service in an unkind Massachusetts family home (a "Two-Story White House")—allegorically as well as autobiographically. For Bassard, Wilson's narrative of Frado's birth and childhood sets up an alternative black feminist origin myth that re-routes the imputed guilt of partus sequitur ventrem. If the slave law that makes the child follow the condition of the mother preserves "the vilification of black women as the originators of both 'blackness' and chattel status," then Frado's birth to a white mother dissolves this vilification, "denaturalizing the legal and discursive presumption of blackness with servitude and 'rescuing,' if you will, the black mother from originary blame."[25]

One possible implication of Bassard's reading, admittedly, is that the black mother needs to be rescued from the blameworthiness of her blackness by the intercession of white womanhood. While admitting this possibility, I am interested in pursuing the alternative implication that Frado's mother Mag is presented as desiring blackness—not simply accepting the stigma of racialization, but experiencing the transference of blackness as "a radically exterior aurality that disrupts and resists certain formations of (white) identity and interpretation." Since Frado is set up as the privileged interpreter of this desire of the mother, I want to use this alternative implication to read a highly suggestive moment in Obama's memoir, where he sets himself up in a similar position.

While Stanley Ann Dunham cannot in any way stand in for the black female experience, her Americanness is nonetheless marked by its non-relation to Afro-Americanness, as the scene I will read in closing powerfully suggests. The outer-national, antenatal, improper blackness she experiences in the following scene evades any blameworthiness passed via proper lines of descent. That she encounters this foreign blackness through a line of identification ultimately linked back to her own homeland, even to her own heartland, only reinforces the uncanny presence of the black female subject with the potential to name, a voice first heard in a space where shadows possess a particularly powerful mystique, the cinema.

Again from Dreams from My Father:

One evening, while thumbing through The Village Voice, my mother's eyes lit on an advertisement for a movie, Black Orpheus, that was showing downtown. My mother insisted that we go see it that night; she said that it was the first foreign film she had ever seen. [. . .]

We took a cab to the revival theater where the movie was playing. The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast, had been made in the fifties. The story line was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway through the movie, I decided that I'd seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depictions of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen [. . .] was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.

I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me.[26]

In this passage, Obama focuses on the images of "carefree birds in colorful plumage," his simile for a degrading, almost minstrel performance. And indeed, Black Orpheus (dir. Marcel Camus, 1959) contains plenty to embarrass and irritate the contemporary viewer, including a scene centering on the black man's bottomless appetite for sex and (what else?) watermelon.

But in reading this passage, I want also to recall the musicality and rhythm of Black Orpheus and reconsider the "sonorous envelope" it produces in the theater.[27] We are familiar with the sense of aquatic immersion that all surrounding, rhythmic music can produce, a synesthesia that psychoanalytic theory has related to "oceanic" fantasies of womb-like security. Black Orpheus, in which the sounds of carnival drumming are almost continuously audible throughout the narrative, and which affords the monolingual viewer the distinctive pleasures of immersing oneself uncomprehendingly in the exteriority of a foreign tongue, is a powerfully seductive sonorous envelope. We see, in the above passage, the difficulty Obama encounters when he must address a dream from his mother, one in which he must reckon with the originary force of her antenatal desire.

This unexpected and embarrassing encounter with the cinema as a primal screen produces a repudiation in the young Obama, as he attempts to reduce its meanings to "the simple fantasies" of "the unreflective heart of her youth." Black Orpheus, it would seem, must be repudiated because it "invaginates" the paternal line of succession, around which the memoir is organized, with a blackness that evades the natal occasion with a peculiarly insistent previousness,[28] a blackness that the "mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before" (my emphasis). Pregnant with great expectations born of the womb of carnival, Stanley Ann Dunham had "named" Obama even before she knew his name. She had dreamed of blackness (just as early modern European medical science feared she might), thus giving birth to blackness.[29]

So, what kind of African and African-American blackness irritated and embarrassed our future president in that revival theater that night? Shall we accept his Dorothy-in-the-Wizard-of-Oz explanation of a repressed Kansas girl with Technicolor dreams of the "warm, sensual, exotic, different"? Or, do we also hear in this irritation and embarrassment the undoing of the patronymic name? Do we hear echoes of Derrida's "loss of the proper [. . .] in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of"?[30] Perhaps. If we do, we might also recognize a detail omitted from Obama's summary of Black Orpheus that must surely have struck him at the time. Or at least, it strikes me in watching Black Orpheus today. Obama's generalized reference to "depictions of childlike blacks" omits the highly plausible identification his mother may have had with the lead female role Eurydice, the simple country girl who is shown, in the film's marvelous opening scene, arriving into Rio by boat. Obama never mentions that we enter into the world of Afro-Brazilian carnival through the eyes and heart of a young black woman. Neither does he name the ebullient, melancholic actress who portrayed Eurydice, born eight years prior to his mother, not in Brazil, but in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If Marpessa Dawn could show Ann Dunham how to dance the samba, what other "broken' [hearted] claim(s) to connection" might there be?

Endnotes

1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2005), 681. [Return to text]

2. To be sure, Lacan did not believe that a non-psychotic subject could do without anchoring points, so simply to locate one is not in itself to launch a critique of it. [Return to text]

3. The contours of this national desire are drawn with remarkable economy in the title of one post-election article in a U.S. marketing publication: Max Lakin, "The Question: Do You Think 'Brand America' Will Bounce Back with the Obama Administration?; 78% Said Barack Obama Can Bring Back Brand America," Advertising Age, 17 November 2008. [Return to text]

4. Why, if true, this would preclude him from being considered a "natural born" citizen was unclear, since he would have held a claim to U.S. citizenship through his mother, regardless of his place of birth. For instance, his rival for the presidency in 2008, John McCain, was actually born of U.S. parents overseas: on a military base in Panama. "Challenge to Obama Is Dismissed," New York Times, 6 March 2009. [Return to text]

5. Kenya became a republic December 12th, 1964. Barack Obama was born August 4th, 1961. [Return to text]

6. Tom Mboya, Freedom and After (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). [Return to text]

7. William Wallis, "Dodging the Ballot: How Stolen Votes Are Testing Africa's Faith in Democracy," Financial Times, 15 January 2008. [Return to text]

8. I am referring here to Hartman's powerful critique of how the "Door of No Return rituals, reenactments of captivity, certificates of pilgrimage, and African naming ceremonies" that form the content of a growing heritage tourism in West Africa frame slavery and dispossession "primarily as an American issue and as one of Africa's relation to her 'lost children.'" Hartman's rigorous refusal identifies this rhetoric of lost-found nativity as an emotive ruse that forestalls a harder engagement with the legacies of slavery in both African and diasporic societies. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 163. [Return to text]

9. But this without the psychosis Lacan believed would be consequent upon such a foreclosure: "For psychosis to be triggered, the Name-of-the-Father—verworfen, foreclosed, that is, never having come to the place of the Other—must be summoned to that place in the symbolic opposition to the subject." Lacan, Écrits, 481. [Return to text]

10. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience : Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). [Return to text]

11. Because Obama, senior, cannot symbolize the American racial order within which he nevertheless positions his son, he also takes on a specific relation to the third, enigmatic role Lacan speaks of: the real father. This is not the "biological father," or the father in reality, but the pressure of paternity asserted as a trauma upon the child in the form of rumor and reported speech—the man "said to be" the father. When Obama returns to Africa towards the close of his memoir, in search of the real father by way of the fatherly imago in other's memories of him, he is brought face to face with this trauma of the real father through the inconsistent reports of this person "said to be" the father, and must thus confront the possibility of his own non-relation, precisely through his filial connection, to this father in the real. [Return to text]

12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Corrected ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 112. [Return to text]

13. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, First Paperback ed. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 60. [Return to text]

14. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 104. [Return to text]

15. I thank my anonymous reviewer for concentrating my attention on this point. [Return to text]

16. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. [Return to text]

17. See the conclusion of my Amalgamation Waltz. [Return to text]

18. I must again thank my anonymous reviewer for the term "heartbreaking." [Return to text]

19. The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, March 1965. www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm. [Return to text]

20. Ibid. [Return to text]

21. Cheryl L. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993). [Return to text]

22. Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 209. [Return to text]

23. Ibid., 228. [Return to text]

24. Ibid., 228-29. [Return to text]

25. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds., Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 197-98. [Return to text]

26. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 123-24. [Return to text]

27. On music as sonorous envelope and its relationship to oceanic fantasy, see the first chapter of David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). [Return to text]

28. My formulation here is indebted to Fred Moten's In The Break. [Return to text]

29. Mary Fissell, "Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle's Masterpiece." William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2003). [Return to text]

30. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 112. [Return to text]