Diaspora at the Dawn of the 20th Century: Embodied Knowledge and Politics Reconsidered

I attended Brown in the mid- and late-1980s, so the literary reclamation of Zora Neale Hurston was well underway by that time. I read everything I could get my hands on. Their Eyes Were Watching God was the first book we discussed in my “Black Women Writers” class, and from there I moved on to Mules and Men, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. By the time I graduated and moved to New York City to dance, I had found in her, and in Katherine Dunham, kindred spirits of a sort: Black women who lived vitally and, moreover, who flouted the Black nationalist norms that were circulating in their moments. Many of Hurston’s books toured with me while I danced with the Urban Bush Women, and I mined them for insights about what it meant to be an artist and a cultural observer at the same time, and about how this union marked a kind of political action in which I was already interested and involved.

I did not encounter Tell My Horse, however, until I was in graduate school. Having landed, by very circuitous routing, in an masters of arts program in Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University, and having only then discovered anthropology, my eyes were turned toward the ways artists – and, in particular, dancers – were central to an anti-colonial program designed to reorient the ways in which Jamaicans approached their African cultural heritage. In other words, I wanted to understand something about the relationship between nationalism and cultural politics, to see how dancers, musicians, performers, and plastic artists established a web of institutions to promote research and training in, and performance of, Afro-Jamaican expressive arts forms. I also wanted to know whether and how this project had changed over time, and what new ideas new generations of artists brought. Finally, I wanted to know whether any of this really mattered to anyone who was not directly involved – how, why, and when did people attach to these projects, and when did not? What did they feel represented them most or least? What could this tell us about nationalism, globalization, and cultural politics more broadly?

By the time I identified these as research questions, I had already applied to continue my graduate studies in the Anthropology Department at New York University, and I spent hours upon hours in Bobst Library. Then, we still had card catalogs, and I spent my first year of my PhD program slowly making my way through every entry under “Jamaica.” I sat on the floor in the stacks paging through planters’ diaries; political science and economic texts; linguistic analyses of patois; early reports of research on racial mixing funded by eugenics supporters; and historical accounts of every period of Spanish, French, Dutch, and British imperialism in the Caribbean, of every enslaved people’s revolt, of peasant production and trade union development, and of the emergent nationalist movement. I read the little bit of literary criticism that was available on West Indian literature at the time, and then I saw it. Hurston had been to Jamaica and Haiti?! As an anthropologist?! And wrote about it?! I nearly cried.

Part travelogue and part anthropological analysis, Tell My Horse chronicles Hurston’s experiences in Jamaica and Haiti on two Guggenheim fellowships awarded in 1936 and 1937. She traveled to Jamaica in April 1936 to study West Indian “obeah” practices. In September that year, she went on to Haiti, where she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, and then continued her education in Vodou until March 1937. That May, she returned to Haiti on a fellowship renewal for an additional six months.

The mid-1930s were an important period in both Jamaica and Haiti, but for different reasons. Within Jamaica, this moment is often seen as the beginning of initial stirrings of rebellion – a banana workers’ disturbance in Oracabessa, a dock-workers strike in Falmouth – that would lead to massive region-wide labor riots by 1938. These riots would intensify the trade union movement, out of which nationalist parties were established. They would also precipitate the initiation of a process whereby Great Britain would relinquish these colonies, and support various kinds of self-government, under the watchful and increasingly interested eyes of the United States, which was now asserting its dominance throughout the Western hemisphere. In Haiti, 1936 marked two years after the US Marines left the country following an almost twenty-year occupation that began in 1915, just after the outbreak of the First World War in the face of growing German settlement in and control of the Haitian economy. Hurston begins the Haitian section of Tell My Horse with an allegorical retelling of the events that led up to the assassination of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam and the subsequent arrival of the USS Washington. Shockingly for our sensibilities today, she portrays the marine occupation as finally bringing peace and freedom to the Black folk of Haiti, who since the Revolution had suffered from one greedy president-for-life to the next. In Hurston’s rendering, the US Marines’s arrival “was the last hour of the last day of the last year that ambitious and greedy demagogues could substitute bought Caco blades for voting power. It was the end of the revolution and the beginning of peace” (72).¹ We now know that this first US occupation of Haiti created a devastating legacy with which we all still contend. Nevertheless, this was the context in which Hurston went to study obeah and vodou.

Certainly Tell My Horse gives us quite a few ethnographic meaty bits regarding Caribbean religious alterities. But, not surprisingly, Hurston tells us many other important things. She tells us, for example, about the peculiarities of Jamaican racial striving among the brown middle classes. “There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica’s black mass,” she writes, as she describes a kinship system that honors white ancestry so elaborately “that first, second, third and fourth degrees of illegitimacy are honored in order of their nearness to the sources of whiteness” (6). This is the kind of observation that would become central to later anthropological analyses of race in Jamaica. Jack Alexander, a structuralist anthropologist writing in the late 1970s, would also argue that middle-class Jamaicans reckoned their genealogies in relation to a common origin story featuring a non-legal union between a white slave-owner and a Black enslaved woman that produced illegitimate “brown” offspring who held a middling status between enslaver and enslaved.² At the initial point of this story, Alexander argues, class, status, and race are directly correlated, but the origin story achieves mythic status because it is seen as having operational value in the present, explaining not only the past but also the future, and rooting citizenship in being creole, which ended up being the dominant mid-twentieth-century ideology of middle-class nationalists. With her usual humor, Hurston lampoons the anxieties of this class. “When a Jamaican is born of a black woman and some English or Scotsman,” she writes, “the black mother is literally and figuratively kept out of sight as far as possible, but no one is allowed to forget that white father, however questionable the circumstances of birth … you get the impression that these virile Englishmen do not require women to reproduce!” (8).

In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, she continues this critique by arguing that Black folk love to mimic, and that even the Haitian Revolution was held “right behind the white one in France.”³ She continues:

As badly as the Ethiopians hated to part with Haile Selassie and freedom, it must be some comfort to have Mussolini for a model. By now, all the Rasses and other big shots are tootching out their lips ferociously, gritting their teeth and otherwise making faces like Il Duce. And I’ll bet you a fat man against sweet back that all the little boy Ethiopians are doing a mean pouter pigeon strut around Addis Ababa.

And right here in these United States, we don’t miss doing a thing that the white folks do, possible or impossible. Education, Sports, keeping up with the Joneses and the whole shebang. The unanswerable retort to criticism is “The white folks do it, don’t they?”⁴

The irony of her affect and her obvious commitment throughout her work to a deep Black sociality might lead us to ask whether she is playing the dozens here, lovingly mirroring her fellow folk (“My people! My people!”) while subtly pointing a more accusatory finger at the white world that looms but so seldom actually appears in the social horizons of her characters.

Hurston also reviews common kinship arrangements in Tell My Horse, and notes that Jamaicans often do not get married until they have spent a long time seeing if they “live well together” and even raising children to adulthood before tying the knot. They wait until they “have the money” and, in the meantime, “they live and work together like any two people who have been married by the preacher.”⁵ Today, however, we would not attribute this, as Hurston does, to the delayed elaboration of an aspirational norm toward respectable middle-class values. Instead, we would argue that in Jamaica, marriage is not universally seen as the basis of legitimate family formation.

When I first read the book, I also remember as very striking, and not a little titillating, Hurston’s description of the “specialists” in Jamaica “who prepare young girls for love” (18). She had heard of this “common enough” practice and asked to “study the matter at close range.” She observed one of these specialists – always old women “who have lived with a great deal of subtlety themselves” and who have passed “through the active period and become widows” – as she served in an “advisory capacity” for a young girl about to be married, or about to become the mistress of an “influential man.” “The wish,” Hurston writes, “is to bring complete innocence and complete competence together in the same girl.” She describes how this process is realized: “For a few days the old woman does not touch her. She is taking her pupil through the lecture stages of instruction. Among other things she is told that the consummation of love cannot properly take place in bed. Soft beds are not for love. They are comforts for the old and lack-a-daisical … In addition she is instructed at length on muscular control inside her body and out, and this also was rehearsed again and again” (19). On the day of the wedding, Hurston relates, the old woman bathes the girl in hot water with herbs. “No soap is used at this point,” she writes. “It is a medicinal sweating tub to open the pores and stimulate the candidate generally” (19). She continues: “Days before the old woman has prepared an extract from these roots in oil and it is at hand in a bowl. She begins and massages the girl from head to foot with this fragrant unction. The toes, the fingers, the thighs” (19). You can see where this is going, and I will make you look up the rest, which is quite exhilarating. All the more so because before reading Tell My Horse, I had never, ever, not once heard of this kind of practice. Perhaps this falls into the category of knowledge that is shared only on a need-to-know basis.

In Jamaica, Hurston goes on to tell us about a trip to the Accompong Maroons, the very same community that Katherine Dunham visited only a few months before, with whom she not only built a stove but also participated in a wild hog hunt. She also tells us about a curry goat feed prepared in her honor in St Mary, and she lets us know that this is something “that has never been done for another woman” (11). A group of musicians appears at the goat feed and begins to play, “all strong and raw, but magnificent music and dancing” (14). All along, she argues with Jamaicans about what she sees as their backward ideas about gender norms and women’s place, and she takes in the folk tales and “duppy stories” in a way familiar to anyone who has read Mules and Men.

Two analytic trajectories are key to a contemporary reading of Tell My Horse. The first has to do with where Hurston fits in relation to what emerges as a trend in the early years of the twentieth century: Americans publishing travelogues that outline their assessments of the new empire growing up quickly around them. Hurston is certainly not the first ethnographer to have explored the Caribbean. She is preceded by several scholars more properly characterized as folklorists, like Martha Beckwith, who gives us Black Roadways in 1929, and Walter Jekyll, who offers up Jamaican Song and Story in 1907. By the time Hurston came onto the scene, Melville Herskovits had laid out his programmatic vision for studying the “Negro in the New World” (1930) and had conducted research in Haiti, Trinidad, and Dutch Guiana, and Alan Lomax had spent a year recording traditional music in Haiti in 1936 and 1937. That the discovery of “Africanisms” in New World Black societies was an important political project within anticolonial contexts is reflected in Sir Philip Sherlock’s prefatory remarks to the 1966 edition of Jekyll’s book. Sherlock, a Jamaican historian, champion of the popular arts, and the first vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, positioned Jekyll’s efforts, and those of other scholars like him, as having bestowed value upon Anancy stories and folk songs within a “semi-feudal Jamaica of the old plantation … at a time when they were despised as ‘Negro talk’ and ‘old-time sayings.’”⁶ By 1966, four years after independence, these songs and stories would be repositioned as part of a legacy that has provided Jamaicans with a new identificatory certainty. As for Hurston, for these early folklorists these stories presented a theory of colonial life in a plantation zone, one that was peppered with tricksters, herbalists, and magicians – people who could make a way out of no way or, as we would say in Jamaica, “tun hand, mek fashion.”

Of course, other periods have also been marked by a proliferation of visitors, most notably the moment immediately after emancipation (1838), when many missionaries and government functionaries alike traveled to the Caribbean from Great Britain and the United States to see the results of the “Great Experiment.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, English visitors again arrived interested in the prospects (or lack thereof) for free trade and economic modernization. And after the Spanish-American War, as Americans came to be convinced of their manifest destiny not only westward but across the seas, many toured the islands during the 1920s and 1930s to write about their new sphere of interest. Jamaican political scientist James Carnegie, writing about political developments during the early twentieth century, notes that Jamaicans came to resent the “knocking” of their country, as “those most often ‘guilty’ of this habit were American writers in sophisticated and intellectual magazines.”⁷ For Carnegie, the “chief ‘knocker’” in the first decades of the twentieth century was Harry Franck.

Franck’s book, Roaming through the West Indies (1920), is an account of his more than six months’ journey through the Caribbean, in which he includes Cuba and Puerto Rico as “our” West Indies, as well as the southern United States, which he finds just as exotic as the Caribbean. Franck had traveled extensively throughout Latin America, and he often compares what he sees in the Caribbean to similar phenomena in countries like Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela. In Franck’s twenty-page chapter about Jamaica, he calls Kingston “the most disappointing town in the West Indies … It is a negro slum, spreading for miles over a dusty plain.”⁸ For Franck, Kingston is the height of insolence, petty crime, disease, degeneracy, delinquency, and loose manners; even the white officials are “slow, antiquated, [and] precedence-ridden,” in striking contrast, he argues, “to the young and bustling, if sometimes poorly informed rulers of our own dependencies.”⁹ Despite the obviousness of his racist assessments, Franck manages to excoriate the British for land scarcity among laborers, as well as an under-developed public education system. Like Hurston, he shares a certain faith that the future of the West Indies lies with America, a view that is also stated by some of the Jamaicans, both white and Black, he meets on his journey, but a view that does not become palpable until after the Second World War, when there is talk of forgiving Britain’s war debt to the United States by annexing its colonies.

Not surprisingly, Franck’s writings spurred both a defensive Jamaican pride and also an increased anti-American sentiment that was unmitigated by more balanced assessments of Jamaica, such as the one Raymond Buell penned in 1931 for Opportunity magazine and later reprinted in the Gleaner. Buell’s somewhat romantic take on the Caribbean – in his words, the “American Mediterranean”¹⁰ – betrays a commitment to the narrative of racial harmony espoused by many writers at the time who unfavorably compared American systems of racial apartheid to more fluid arrangements in the West Indies. To Buell, Jamaicans seemed “unusually contended” and “remarkably loyal to the Crown,” and thus uninterested, Garvey notwithstanding, in any form of self-determination.¹¹ US agribusiness was the culprit for Buell, and Jamaica, for him, stood in a much better position than Puerto Rico or Cuba “simply because the economy of the island is based not upon the single crop of sugar produced by foreign plantations, but upon diversified agriculture – bananas, sugar, coffee, pimento – much of which is in the hands of the peasant farmer.”¹² Jamaican peasants, in Buell’s view, were beneficiaries of several land reform programs and the general lushness of the island, leading him to assert that “nobody goes without food.”¹³

Buell’s argument here is reminiscent of that Lord Sidney Olivier makes in Jamaica: The Blessed Island (1936). Olivier, a Fabian socialist and advocate of communal land ownership, had been the governor of Jamaica on three occasions in the first decade of the twentieth century. He was convinced that the future of the West Indies lay in the support of peasant production and was eager for others to recognize what he saw unequivocally as an example of peaceful, multiracial development. Olivier thus invited William Macmillan, a Scottish-born South African historian who in 1934 resigned from the department he founded and built at Wits, to visit Jamaica, and the West Indies more broadly. Olivier knew Macmillan was at work on a book about development possibilities on the African continent, and suggested that the West Indies would provide a model for the newer African colonies to emulate.¹⁴ Macmillan, however, was appalled by the conditions of poverty and apathy in each of the islands he visited.¹⁵ While he granted that “race relations” were relatively harmonious, he nevertheless displeased Olivier by reporting that the intransigence of planters, coupled with the failure of the Crown Colony imperial government “to carry its burden of responsibility for the unrepresented masses,” provided no positive example for African colonial development.¹⁶ Indeed, his sense in the first edition of the text that emerged from this visit, titled Warning from the West Indies (1936), was that poverty; hunger; and the lack of provisions for public health, education, and infrastructure prevented the population from developing political consciousness.¹⁷ This latter argument was proven wrong when, after the book’s publication, the labor riots broke out across the British West Indies, beginning in Trinidad in 1937. This occurrence – previously “unthinkable” for him – prompted him to write a new preface for the 1938 Penguin paperback edition.¹⁸ There, he asserts that what happened in the West Indies was a “warning of what we are to expect in other parts of the Empire unless our responsibilities come to be deliberately accepted.”¹⁹

Macmillan’s enquiries took place just as Ethiopianism began to enjoy a revival as a result of Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, and right before Leonard Howell established his Rastafari commune at Pinnacle in 1940. In this late colonial period, a discourse of fear of these alternative expressions and imaginations of sovereignty was emerging among both the Jamaican white population and the respectable middle classes who were developing into a civically oriented group of professionals and businesspersons. Yet, nowhere in Warning does he mention the emergent Rastafari, nor a lingering Garveyism. Hurston seems similarly uninterested in these aspects of Jamaican social and political life at the time. Buell, too, misses the various strands of nationalism emerging among various classes in Jamaica and links this absence to the lack of a vibrant local cultural scene, writing, “The political dependence of the Jamaicans upon alien rule undoubtedly explains why the cultural and political life of the island is so scanty.”²⁰ No doubt this was because “they have attempted barrenly to pattern their lives after Englishmen.”²¹ This sentiment is implicit within Hurston’s observations of the Jamaican middle class, and it would also have been Jean Price Mars’s argument at that very moment in Haiti.

I am speaking here of Mars’s Ainsi Parla L’Oncle, published in 1928, which reevaluated and affirmed African-derived folklore in Haiti as the necessary foundation for nationalist development and cultural self-esteem within the context of the US occupation.²² While Herskovits had publicized the Africanisms paradigm, he was, as Kevin Yelvington points out, only one scholar out of a broader network who was concerned enough to think through the political uses of elaborating an African cultural heritage.²³ This network included Price-Mars, and Herskovits’s unacknowledged theoretical debt to Price-Mars is evident throughout Life in a Haitian Valley, in which he discusses the combite system of cooperative economic production, marketing, extended family systems and the institution of plaçage, deference toward elders, and especially Vodun as elements of a West African (specifically Dahomean) cultural heritage.²⁴ For Price-Mars, the politics of acknowledging vodou and other peasant practices as central to Haitian culture writ large relates to the rejection of not only US occupation but also what he calls “bovarysme collectif” among middle-class Haitians.²⁵

Price-Mars was not alone in seeking to jumpstart radical politics during and after the occupation. As field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, James Weldon Johnson mobilized a governmental mission to Haiti in 1920. Alongside DuBois, Johnson was extremely critical of the US occupation, and linked the overseas imperialist pursuit with the intensification of domestic racism, and therefore with establishing Haiti as a pillar of African American political consciousness during that period.²⁶ This pan-African sensibility was buttressed by African American artists like Langston Hughes, William E. Scott, Paul Robeson, and Aaron Douglas, who also traveled to Haiti during this period, inspired by a sense of diasporic unity and uplift.²⁷ Within Haiti, as historian Matthew Smith shows, a number of Marxist and noiriste organizations formed after the occupation ended in 1934. However, because these oppositional groups were divided in their attempts to grab state power, and because these attempts became increasingly violent, the noirisme that ultimately became dominant under Duvalier was not the political solution Price-Mars had envisioned, one of a shared national culture, rural and urban, rooted in a dynamic Vodou and other peasant practices.²⁸

Jamaica, for someone like Buell, remained the West Indies’s best hope. “When Jamaica is eventually given home rule,” he writes, “the people of the island, having lived under foreign tutelage for years, should start without any of the handicaps which have prevented Negro self-government in Haiti and Liberia for having a fair trial. It may be that Jamaica will be the testing ground for the capacity of the black race. It will be a great day for this race when Jamaica is admitted as a sister dominion to that great association of free nations, known as the British Commonwealth.”²⁰ For Buell, self-government in the Caribbean is inevitable, but Hurston in Tell My Horse takes Haiti’s example as a cautionary tale.

Based on her quotidian debates there, she argues that Haitians, regardless of class background, have a “marked tendency to refuse responsibility for anything that is unfavorable. Some outside influence, they say, usually the United States or Santo Domingo, is responsible for all the ills of Haiti” (84) and that the US occupation made a poor country like Haiti even poorer. As an example, she shares a conversation with a man whom, as she reminds him, had told her “that the Occupation brought a great deal of money here which you were sorry to lose,” to which the man responds that US Marines saw that their country was rich “and so they came and robbed us until we grew tired of it and drove them away.” She counters: “You evidently were very slow to wrath because they stayed here nineteen years, I believe,” and he responds, “Yes, and we would have let them stay here longer but the Americans have no politeness so we drove them out” (85). For the Haitian man, Americans are greedy and boorish, and thus uncultured though wealthy. Hurston does not entertain the implications of his critique, and instead writes, “All this was spoken with the utmost gravity … If I did not know that every word of it was a lie, I would have been bound to believe him, his lies were that bold and brazen. His statements presupposed that I could not read and even if I could that there were no historical documents in existence that dealt with Haiti. I soon learned to accept these insults to my intelligence without protest because they happened so often” (86).

What do we make of a statement like this? Or of her trip to Gonâve Island, where she meets a sergeant of the Garde d’Haiti, whom she often hears yelling things like “Jesus Christ!” and “God damn!” mixed up in his kreyòl. “When we became friendly enough to converse,” she writes, “I told him that I had heard him and said that it was remarkable to hear the ejaculations from him.” He tells her that he served with the marines during the occupation. She reports that she greets this tidbit of information facetiously, and replies, “then you are a black Marine.” He comes back proudly: “‘I am a black Marine. I speak like one always. Perhaps you would like me to kill something for you. I kill that dog for you.’ It was a half-starved dog that had taken to hanging around me,” she tells us. She argues with him to put the gun away and spare the dog, then sarcastically states that she later heard he was telling his friends he must be “just like an American Marine because the femme American had recognized the likeness at once.”

Again, Hurston refuses the critique of US imperialism and the implication that for the marines, Haitians were like mangy dogs. Remember, for her, the coming of the marines was the “beginning of peace” (72). In part, we might attribute this failure to more radically apprehend the political dynamics surrounding her to her sense that to be a woman in the West Indies was to always be an object, and thus to her suspicion that men were always lying to her: “If you try to talk sense,” she writes, “they look at you right pitifully as if to say, ‘What a pity! That mouth that was made to supply some man (and why not me) with kisses, is spoiling itself asking stupidities about banana production and wages!’” (58). For Hurston, it was no better to be a Black woman in the Caribbean than to be a donkey, whereas in the United States being born a girl means “you are born with the law in your mouth … The majority of the solid citizens strain their ears trying to find out what it is that their womenfolk want so they can strain around and try to get it for them, and that is a very good idea and the right way to look at things” (57). For anyone familiar with Hurston’s romantic history and struggles to maintain a career while loving, this would seem to be a strange assessment. But we might also remember her deep suspicion of the “Race Men” of her day, whom she famously dismissed as windbags and demagogues, as well as her hesitations about involving herself in her political moment. And we definitely should remember Alice Walker’s assertion that we do not love Hurston “for her lack of modesty … ; we do not love her for her unpredictable and occasionally weird politics; we do not, certainly, applaud many of the mad things she is alleged to have said and sometimes actually did say; we do not even claim never to dislike her … We love Zora Neale Hurston for her work, first.”²⁹

In the case of Tell My Horse, as in her other more anthropologically oriented texts, this means we love her for the life she brings to folk practices, which brings me to the second important analytic trajectory for a contemporary reading of Tell My Horse: her insistence on a view of Black sociality produced through the maintenance of life. “Voodoo,” she insists, “is a religion of creation and life” (113), and in both Jamaica and Haiti she goes to great lengths to document the funerary rituals characteristic of each locale, tying them also to practices in other areas of the diaspora.

In Jamaica, Hurston tells us that when a person dies, “it is a rigid rule that the whole district must participate” (40) in the ensuing rituals, called the “nine-night.” She shows how every precaution is taken to make sure the death is a good death, with a good death being a final one. The body has to be prepared, with limes and nutmeg rubbed on the deceased’s nose, mouth, under their arms, and between their legs; the body has to be fed, but never with salt because salt will make the body heavy and unable to leave the world of the living; the body has to be placed in the coffin with its head atop a pillow inside of which are sewn “parched peas, corn and coffee beans” (42); nails have to be driven through the cuffs of the deceased’s shirt and the heels of their socks; the coffin has to be “lowered with proper rituals and patted to rest in the earth” and “a trail of salt and ground coffee” must be laid “from the grave to the house door” (43); and songs are lined out hour after hour – all so that the “duppy” of the deceased – their ghost – will not return.

The duppy, one of Hurston’s Jamaican informants tells her, “is the most powerful part of any man.” “Everybody has evil in them,” he continues, “and when a man is alive, the heart and the brain controls him and he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of. It is not good for a duppy to stay among living folk. The duppy is much too powerful and is apt to hurt people all the time. So, we make nine night to force the duppy to stay in his grave” (43–4). On the ninth night after death, everyone in the district convenes at the house again, this time for singing and music and joviality, with the goal to give the deceased a happy send-off “so that he will rest well and not come back again” (48).

In Haiti, she says, duppies are called zombies; they are the living dead, bodies without souls, and she was privileged enough on her trip to photograph one, something she says no one else had ever done. Haitian zombies fascinate Hurston, and she is interested to find out why they are not allowed to rest. She is given many answers:

A was awakened because somebody required his body as a beast of burden. In his natural state he could never have been hired to work with his hands, so he was made into a Zombie because they wanted his services as a laborer. B was summoned to labor also but he is reduced to the level of a beast as an act of revenge. C was the culmination of “ba’ Moun” ceremony and pledge. That is, he was given as a sacrifice to pay off a debt to a spirit for benefits received. (179)

While the dead are called on to continue to labor (which would seem to be the real instantiation of Patterson’s “social death,” or Wynter’s “coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom”), she also reports that they are used as sneak thieves and, if we are to believe her informants, to marry off daughters.³⁰ Her argument is that, “if embalming were customary, it would remove the possibility of Zombies from the minds of the people. But since it is not done, many families take precautions against the body being disturbed.”

As in Jamaica, she describes ritual practices surrounding death: setting up watch in the cemetery for thirty-six hours after burial; cutting the body open; putting a knife in the right hand of the corpse, flexed “in such a way that it will deal a blow with the knife to whoever disturbs it for the first day or so” (191); and even poisoning the body. She discusses Guede, the entirely Haitian, that is to say nonsyncretized, loa, who is known to be a grave robber among other things. She also reflects on the subtleties of using graveyard dirt to main and kill: “Soil from deep in an old grave has prestige wherever the negro exists in the Western world” (238). She surmises that this belief may “come out of the ancestor worship of West Africa” (238), making it an “African survival” of sorts (239).

In Jamaica, Haiti, and “wherever the negro exists in the Western world,” the funerary ritual practices that Hurston documents stem from a strong belief in survival after death, “or rather,” as she argues, “that there is no death. Activities are merely changed from one condition to the other” (43, italics original). This is an insight that historian Vincent Brown states is encapsulated by the Akan adinkra “‘Nyame nwu na mawu’ (loosely translated, ‘God does not die, so I cannot die’).” In The Reaper’s Garden, Brown’s exploration of death and power in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, he argues that the notion that the dead “are active participants in the living world” reveals death to be “a transition between the physical and immaterial states of being.”³¹ In Jamaica, funerals revealed common cosmological orientations and generated a shared moral universe among enslaved people. By participating in funerary rituals, Brown writes, “they recovered their common humanity, they assumed and affirmed meaningful social roles, and they rendered communal values sacred by associating them with the dead.”³² Where Hurston documents early twentieth century practices, Brown describes those prevalent in the eighteenth century, as people from a variety of ethnic groups met each other on New World soil, continuing old and developing new rituals designed to “send spirits properly on their way to the other world”; to make sure they had sufficient foodstuffs, tobacco, and drink to nourish them on their journey; and to spur them on by song and dance.³³

In light of continued importance of these practices concerning death and burial from the eighteenth century to the twentieth (and yes, the twenty-first), I wonder whether Hurston can tell us something about Black life today, something about how death might be an ontological – and even hauntological – touchstone without being the definition of nonexistence or absence. Is it possible to be human – socially and politically – in the wake of the plantation?

To answer this question, many have looked to the ways in which early colonial elaborations of racialized notions of difference were established during the early period of settler and exploitation colonialism and then mobilized to serve late-nineteenth-century projects of indirect imperial rule throughout Africa and South Asia as well as emergent US imperialism. This has been the bailiwick of scholars of empire who, over the past thirty years, have chronicled the diverse legislative twists and turns that emerged to govern the forms of political, economic, and intimate relations throughout the long histories of Spanish, Dutch, and British colonial rule. Many have also turned attention to the ways anticolonial and nationalist projects sought to interrogate, critique, and ultimately revise these original delineations of the relationships between personhood, value, and political legibility through the development of new forms of community cultural consciousness, if not always substantially new economic arrangements. Indeed, the elaboration of continuities between imperial and nationalist modalities of governance has been a critical focus for these scholars, including attention – in the case of New World societies – to the ongoing forms of violence that continue to be enacted against Black bodies.³⁴

While these often-brilliant analyses yield trenchant critiques of the diverse vectors of subjectification, they frequently stop just short of the more sensory dimensions of subjectivity and have therefore left us largely unable to answer other pertinent questions. This is, in part, because much of this work – inspired by Foucault and Agamben – does not recognize the centrality of race and “racializing assemblages.”³⁵ This is Alex Weheliye’s term, which he uses to encourage us to reconceptualize the relationships among race, humanity, and subjectification “as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans.”³⁶ Race, here, as the organizing principle of modern capitalist production and labor regimes, always prefigures modern notions of what it means to be a human and, potentially, a citizen. It also thus undergirds what it feels like to be a problem, to have the need for “second sight,” to recognize the interpellation insisted upon by the phrase “Look, a Negro!”³⁷ If we do not account for the ways Afro-descended people find ourselves as objects “in the midst of other objects,” ontologically impossible without violence and exiled from the human relation, then we cannot fully account for subjectivity’s discursive entanglements. And if Blackness cannot stand on its own as humanity, but must always be recognized through, by, or vis-à-vis whiteness, then sovereign violence is, in part, the constant failure of “double consciousness.”

This would be the “Afro-pessimist line,” and it is a theoretically powerful one, moving beyond political economy (and therefore also beyond imagining the efficacy of particular forms of political struggle) and engaging the psychic foundations of the modern world as anti-Black.³⁸ This mode of theorizing importantly points to the limitations of both our analytics and our strategies, as it offers a logic of the centrality of the slave relation (one that transcends time and space), of how and why recognition of Black presence is impossible, where whiteness is not only always presence, but also “absolute perspectivity” (98). Like all logics, this is (as Lévi-Strauss says) “good to think with,” but of course logics must be understood as contingent. They can only exist in the world as engagements, always in motion, always entertaining the possibility of human action.³⁹

In his seminal article in the volume Biko Lives!, Frank Wilderson writes about having faced death threats in South Africa during a discussion in 1992 of an upcoming mass protest that would, by crashing through a fence, “liberate” people in the homeland of Ciskei.⁴⁰ During their planning meeting, they find out that the general of that homeland has stated that if the protesters cross the border en masse, he will open fire on them. When they hear this, they cheer and applaud. Why? Wilderson explains that “a threat in response to the gesture of our collective – our ‘living’ – will, made us feel as though we were alive, as though we possessed what in fact we could not possess, Human life, as opposed to Black life … we could die because we lived.”⁴¹ He argues that this was an affective, rather than discursive, response of ontological discovery. Wilderson uses this story to inaugurate a discussion of the logic that undergirds so-called Afro-pessimism. What is striking to me about this story, however, is that life is realized and recognized at the threshold of death. Hurston, too, preoccupied with the rituals surrounding death and the constant appearance (and antics) of those who should be dead, turns her most careful attention to those practices that maintain the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The ritual attention to this boundary tells us that there is something important about keeping death out of life.

Classically, this threshold marks the sphere of liminality, about which anthropologists have much to say. Victor Turner argues that ritual processes contain a moment of transition – for him, the “margin” or limen (“threshold” in Latin) – during which ambiguity reigns.⁴² The initiate, having been detached from the group and their previous state, now possesses neither the attributes of their past state, nor those of the state that will be brought into being. Liminality is the space in which norms of law, custom, convention, and ceremony are thrown up in the air. Liminal entities possess nothing: no status or property, no position within a kinship system, no individual will. Initiands are bound by the egalitarianism and comradeship of “communitas” as they confront “a ‘moment in and out of time,’ and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.”⁴³ For Turner, as for most structuralists, the liminal phase is part of a dialectical cycle whose resolution enters the initiate into the sphere of the properly social. But for Black studies, this is life on the threshold, on the run, underground, in the margins, a refusal of “the world that the world lives in.”⁴⁴

What is required to recognize this life? To enact disalienation? To restore relationality? To witness?⁴⁵ Wilderson’s articulation of the difference between finding space for being human within affect as opposed to discourse is an important one. In my own work, I am interested these days in assembling “archives of affect.” This is Gayle Wald’s term, one she mobilizes to understand the late 1960s and early 1970s television variety show Soul! as both a reflection of contemporary realities and also an embodiment of dreams for a “Black is beautiful” future.⁴⁶ Archiving, here, is not oriented toward the past and its preservation, but is intended instead to suggest new possibilities for social and political relations, relations that in this case are generated through popular cultural expression. Nadia Ellis calls this elaboration of possibility improvisation, an embodied affective register through which African diasporic people enact survival under conditions of unpredictability and multiple forms of sovereign violence. This is not quite witnessing, and it is not quite a counter-archive; perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that archives of affect are not beholden to the nationalist and masculinist discursive frames that often contextualize counter-archives.⁴⁷ Nor are they bound to the teleologies of time within African diasporic spaces that often render the past as a lost object that must be retrieved in order to imagine a future.

Instead, archives of affect, because they are nonlinear and thus unobligated to particular pedagogical and temporal predispositions, can be called upon to perform other urgent tasks. They can help us to understand how the practices and performances of state sovereignty – and the attempts to create life alongside, through, and in opposition to them – are embodied, and thus are transmitted both corporally and structurally. They can shift the politics of repair away from discretely local and legally verifiable events and toward the long and slow processes that undermine our ability to forge social and political community together. They can urge us to be more skeptical about nationalist narratives of perfectibility, whereby we triumph over past prejudices and injustices through a force of will and commitment to moral right. Instead, they can encourage us to train our vision more pointedly to transnational geopolitical and sociocultural spheres, and to the messy entanglements that characterize sovereignty at different moments. At the same time, they can help us to focus on the everyday ways people innovate life without constantly projecting today’s struggle into a future redemption. Finally, archives of affect comprise the immaterial ways in which we are called to recognize ourselves and each other, and to cultivate a sense of mutuality that not only exposes complicity but also demands collective accountability. They are, in the end, technologies of deep recognition, performing what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work,” the insistence of “Black life … from death,” enabling us to live in the wake but not stay in the hold. As she writes, “I am, we are, held and held.”⁴⁸

To my mind, these are the kinds of tools that Hurston gives us across the body of her work. In In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker famously characterizes Hurston as always upholding a sense of “racial health – a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings.”⁴⁹ To be undiminished in this way requires a healthy dose of irony, a robust sense of humor, a profound commitment to endurance, and a deep love. I, too, am moved to embrace love, a love, that like Cesaire’s return, Brathwaite’s submarine, or Benitez-Rojo’s islands, unites and repeats. I embrace love because I embrace contingency, process, disaggregation, playfulness, surprise, and improvisation. I embrace love because before I was an anthropologist, I was a dancer, and as all dancers know, there is that moment when body becomes spirit becomes something more, when we become consciously human by doing something – with our bodies – together. I embrace love when I am laughing, and then again when I am feeling mean and impressive. I embrace love in the little repetitions of everyday life: making breakfast, school drop-offs, teaching class, endless meetings. I experience these repetitions like the chants, thumps, or dances of Revival, Kumina, and other Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions in which repetition is intended to produce a state of trance. In this state, we communicate with beings and things unseen, we exceed our bodies, we time travel. This threshold state enables affective mutuality and gives us a sense of how, when, and why the feeling of freedom counteracts the constraints of historical violence in the present. To love is the most radical thing we can do today.

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (1938; repr., Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1981), 6. Further citations appear in text. [↩]
2. Jack Alexander, “The Culture of Race in Middle-Class Kingston, Jamaica,” American Ethnologist 4, no. 3: 413–35. [↩]
3. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, edited and with an introduction by Robert Hemenway (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 242. [↩]
4. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 243. [↩]
5. Hurston, Tell My Horse, 15. [↩]
6. Philip Sherlock, “The Living Roots,” preface to Walter Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story (1907; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1966), viii. [↩]
7. James Carnegie, Some Aspects of Jamaica’s Politics, 1918–1938 (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1973), 152. [↩]
8. Harry Franck, Roaming through the West Indies (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1920), 404. [↩]
9. Ibid., 407. [↩]
10. Raymond Buell, “Jamaica: A Racial Mosaic,” Opportunity, June 1931, 136. [↩]
11. Ibid., 137. [↩]
12. Ibid., 138. [↩]
13. Ibid., 139. [↩]
14. Bruce Murray, “W.M. Macmillan: The Wits Years and Resignation, 1917–1933,” South African Historical Journal 65, 2 (2013): 317–31; Mona Macmillan, “The Making of Warning from the West Indies: Extract from a Projected Memoir of W.M. Macmillan,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 18, no. 2 (1980): 207–19; and Mona Macmillan and Hugh Macmillan, eds., Mona’s Story: An Admiral’s Daughter in England, Scotland and Africa, 1908–51 (Oxford: Oxford Publishing Services, 2008). [↩]
15. Funded in 1934 by the Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York to visit the negro colleges of the southern United States, Macmillan was given additional resources by the Phelps-Stokes Fund to travel to the West Indies. His tour began in Jamaica, where he spent a few months before departing for Trinidad, Grenada, St Vincent, Barbados, St Kitts, St Lucia, and Montserrat. Macmillan, “The Making of Warning from the West Indies.” [↩]
16. W.M. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies (1936; repr., London: Penguin, 1938), 63. [↩]
17. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies. For Macmillan, this sense was true everywhere except St. Kitts, where riots had broken out in 1935, largely in his view as the result of a more politically aware proletariat, many of whom had recently returned from working in the United States. Macmillan, “The Making of Warning from the West Indies,” 214. [↩]
18. I am referring to Trouillot’s use of the term in describing the attitude toward the Haitian revolution just prior to its occurrence. Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Books, 1995). [↩]
19. W.M. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies, 12. Macmillan went on to write an even more trenchant tract against imperial neglect and supporting the move toward self-government for the colonies as the Second World War began. W.M. Macmillan, Democratise the Empire! A Policy for Colonial Change (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1941). While Warning was not well-received by local government administrators in Jamaica upon its original publication, the text is now acknowledged as the primary catalyst for a change in colonial policy toward the West Indies. Macmillan eventually returned to Jamaica in 1954 for a year-long post as a visiting professor in the history department at the University of the West Indies. [↩]
20. Buell, “Jamaica: A Racial Mosaic,” 183. [↩] [↩]
21. Ibid. [↩]
22. Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l’oncle: Essais d’ethnographie (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, Inc., 1928). During the 1960s and 1970s, West Indian scholars like E. Kamau Brathwaite and Sylvia Wynter built on Price-Mars’s points to reject the notion that a process of acculturation is what characterized Caribbean societies. They argued instead that the dominant European sector, often absent, did not provide a cultural and social scaffolding to which dominated Africans had to acclimatize, but that Afro-West Indians, in maintaining, reconstructing, and transforming their own cultural practices (especially those having to do with land use and religious expression), underwent a cultural process of indigenization that rooted them in the New World. For these scholars, it was the African heritage embedded within the folk culture of West Indian enslaved people that should be seen as the basis for Caribbean cultural creativity, and thus developed as a modern national culture. Kamau Brathwaite, Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (London: New Beacon Books, 1971); Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process,” Jamaica Journal 4, no. 2 (1970): 34–48. Elsewhere, I discuss the broader effects of and transitions within this kind of cultural politics in Jamaica, arguing that these “folk nationalisms” were, by the 1990s, supplanted by a form of modern Black nationalism. Deborah A. Thomas, Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). [↩]
23. Kevin A. Yelvington, “The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean: Political Discourse and Anthropological Praxis, 1920–1940,” in Kevin Yelvington, ed., Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2006); Gérarde Magloire and Kevin A. Yelvington, “Haiti and the Anthropological Imagination,” Gradhiva 1, no. 1 (2005): 127–52. [↩]
24. Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (1937; repr., New York: Doubleday, 1971). Herskovits had begun correspondence with Price-Mars after the publication of Ainsi and met him in 1928 en route to Suriname. Subsequently, Price-Mars assisted Herskovits in selecting a field site and reviewed his books. Yelvington, “The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean”; Magloire and Yelvington, “Haiti and the Anthropological Imagination.” [↩]
25. Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l’oncle, 10. [↩]
26. Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Brenda Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003). [↩]
27. While there, as Krista Thompson shows, many of these artists unexpectedly came face to face with their own diasporic difference. Krista Thompson, “Preoccupied with Haiti: The Dream of Diaspora in African American Art, 1915–1942,” American Art 21, no. 3 (2007): 74–97. We must remember, too, that it is not only political leaders, activists, and artists who traveled throughout the circum-Caribbean during the first decades of the twentieth century, but also “ordinary” people seeking a better life away from home during this crucial period in which the geopolitical arrangements that had been hegemonic were suddenly in flux after the First World War. The circulations that result from this movement – of people, of information and media, of cultural practices including religion, of popular culture, and of consciousness and solidarity movements – Lara Putnam argues, must transform our understanding not only of how ordinary people imagined the world in which they traveled (and their place in it), but also of how they made that world. Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). [↩]
28. Matthew Smith, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). See also Michel Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State against Nation, The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990). [↩]
29. Alice Walker, “On Refusing to Be Humbled by Second Place in a Contest You Did Not Design: A Tradition by Now,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1979), 1–2. [↩]
30. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – an Argument,” in Coloniality’s Persistence, ed. Greg Thomas, special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–338. [↩]
31. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4. [↩]
32. Ibid., 65. [↩]
33. Ibid., 66. [↩]
34. See, for example, Christen Smith, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Keisha-Khan Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); and Deborah Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). [↩]
35. They also fail to problematize a unitary notion of sovereignty, even as, in the case of Foucault, power appears diffuse and located within and through a number of institutional and non-institutional spaces. See Rutherford (2012) for an engaged critique of these formulations, and for an appeal to the importance of ethnographic investigations of the varied and precarious ways sovereignty claims are made and recognized. [↩]
36. Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 4. [↩]
37. The obvious references are to Du Bois and his classic question underpinning The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New York: Penguin, 1996), and to Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952; repr., New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967). [↩]
38. See, for example, Frank Wilderson, “Biko and the Problematic of Presence,” in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, eds. Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 95–114; Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jarod Sexton, “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control,” in Warfare in the American Homeland, ed. Joy James (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 197–218; and Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death,” In Tensions, 5 (2011), http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php. [↩]
39. I thank Vince Brown for helping me to think through this, and for directing me to Fred Cooper’s Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) as the critique of Scott and agentless abstractions. [↩]
40. Frank Wilderson, “Biko and the Problematic of Presence,” in Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson, Biko Lives!,  95–114. [↩]
41. Wilderson, “Biko and the Problematic of Presence,” 97. [↩]
42. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (New York: Aldine, 1969), 94. [↩]
43. Ibid., 96. [↩]
44. Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death,” 28. [↩]
45. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), I explore the implications of psychoanalytic theory for repair. [↩]
46. Gayle Wald, “It’s Been Beautiful!”: Soul and Black Power TV (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. [↩]
47. Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). [↩]
48. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 17, 97. [↩]
49. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 85. [↩]