#Sabine Broeck

[garadinervi]

Marion Kraft, Bonds of Sisterhood / Breaking of Silences. An Interview with Audre Lorde, in Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies, Edited by Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck, Designed by Sally Nichols, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst and Boston, MA, 2015, [pp. 41-54] pp. 46-47

[the-merricatherine]

"Gender and the Abjection of Blackness"'

Sabine Broeck on Mary Wollstonecraft's antiblackness / racism (pp. 57-60)

To illustrate the Vindication's textual and political saturation, even infatuation, with the slave as a troping device, I have contracted three paradigmatic passages, which illustrate the paramount value of slavery for Wollstonecraft's argument. These passages also amplify the process by which a progressive and libel-awry textual concept of women's genderedness—a concept to write woman into Enlightenment as a subject, that is, a mode to create intelligibility for the female complaint and her demand—emerges by way of writing woman as not a slave.  Wollstonecraft's project is white women's liberation from the constraints of early modern patriarchal society that renders them childlike, immature, bereft of property, education, and rights, subject to sexual exploitation and abuse, and submitted to legal, political, and social dependency on husbands or families. In order to realize this project, she needed to construct woman as a promising antagonist to man. Woman needed to be cast as a subject who could and would be able to struggle for and negotiate, As a call for the acceptance of her gender's humanity, the rights of women to participation in civil society and for equality with men in political, cultural, and social life. In order to create gender as a potentially successful site of struggle for the reform of modern views of humanity, that is in order to gender the human, Wollstonecraft needs to position white woman as human in the first place. The rhetorical device most immediately available, given Wollstonecraft's historical context, is the dramatic and proactive separation of his woman from the slave. Only if woman can be clearly separated from the slave, can she enter the discourses and practices of civil society as a human member, however discriminated against. This maneuver entails that, on one hand, the Vindication makes use of the slave as a richly productive metaphor in absurd profusion, but, on the other hand., that metaphor must be safely kept severed from its potential to signify actual enslavement of Black being. That means the metaphor must be kept within a referential horizon of the white female complaint. At the time of the Vindication's publication, however, this was by no means a settled issue; the material presence of the Black abject slave thing, and the late, of white women's closeness to slave, or slave-like status, always already threatened to destabilize the workings of gender as a manageable binary intrahuman contradiction. 

Shrewdly, Wollstonecraft positions white women as willing cooperands in what she considers their slavery and exhorts them to abandon the state of slavishness which keeps them fastened to patriarchy's reign. Only if women will abandon this slavishness—so their dramatic appeal—will civil society recognize white women as human agents, because they are not slaves, which they demonstrate by the very propagandistic refusal of their own slavishness. One needs to acknowledge the very political ingenuity and textual creativity to have lit upon anti-slavery to preemptively counteract the latent threat, in Wollstonecraft's moment, of women being left behind by the humanist, bourgeois revolutionary ferment emerging in Western societies, and abandoned to poverty, childbearing, and drudgery, or wealth and boredom. At our point in time, to see the woman-as-slave metaphor in operation might not strike one as particularly innovative, but for the late 1700s, with actual Black enslavement being a controversial fact of public life in enslavist nations like Britain, it must be considered a breathtaking textual breakthrough: to have found a rhetorical device which would speak to Wollstonecraft's potential female audience by appealing to their social, cultural, and political emergence as civic actors, thus giving them the horizon of futurity and a possible genealogy of freedom that the slave precisely could not have. It also launched a sense of white feminist avant-gardeness based on the textual installation of a necessary female abhorrence vis-à-vis the slave's assumed slavishness, that even at her historical moment could have—and did with Black protest—registered as an interested white fiction. And, last but not least, this device shrewdly enabled more progressive,  enlightened masculine potential support by way of illustrating to interested parties the social, political, and cultural waste dynamic that rapidly modernizing and capitalizing societies would risk by keeping woman in the state of frivolous, under-challenged and dependent ridiculousness of the slave's purported flippancy, incapacity, ignorance, and mental weakness. The gross anti-Black violence here lies in the supreme irony with which Wollstonecraft's astute observations of wealthy women's actual behavioral frilliness and inconsequential existence—kept as they were as ornamental appendages to their husbands and families—is being scripted back on the slave, making a specifically aristocratic version of white femininity the sign of the slave's inherent character. This rhetorical move of purposefully endowing the slave and his or her Black progeny with ascriptions of useless femininity attached to the adynamic commodity has lasted way into our contemporary moment. Here are the Vindication's passages (Macdonald and Scherf), which I quote at length and give together, for rhetorical effect: 

Is not the following portrait—the portrait of a house slave? "I am astonished at the folly of many women, who are still reproaching their husbands for leaving them alone, for preferring this or that company to theirs, for treating them with this and the other mark of disregard or indifference; when, to speak the truth, they have themselves in a great measure to blame. Not that I would justify the men in anything wrong on their part. But had you behaved to them with more respectful observance, and a more equal tenderness; studying their humours, overlooking their mistakes, submitting to their opinions in matters indifferent, passing by little instances of unevenness, caprice, or passion, giving soft answers to hasty words, complaining as seldom as possible, and making it your daily care to relieve their anxieties and prevent their wishes, to enliven the hour of dullness, and call up the ideas of felicity: had you pursued this conduct, I doubt not but you would have maintained and even increased their esteem, so far as to have secured every degree of influence that could conduce to their virtue, or your mutual satisfaction; and your house might at this day have been the abode of domestic bliss." Such a woman ought to be an angel—or she is an ass—for I discern not a trace of the human character, neither reason nor passion in this domestic drudge, whose being is absorbed in that of a tyrant's." (97-98) 

"A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind; and Mr. Locke very judiciously observes, that "if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken much by too strict an hand over them; they lose all their vigor and industry." This strict hand may in some degree account for the weakness of women; for girls, from various causes, are more kept down by their parents, in every sense of the word, than boys. The duty expected from them is, like all the duties arbitrarily imposed on women, more from a sense of propriety, more out of respect for decorum, than reason; and thus taught slavishly to submit to their parents, they are prepared for the slavery of marriage. I may be told that a number of women are not slaves in the marriage state. True, but they then become tyrants; for it is not rational freedom, but a lawless kind of power resembling the authority exercised by the favourites of absolute monarchs, which they obtain by debasing means. I do not, likewise, dream of insinuating that either boys or girls are always slaves, I only insist that when they are obliged to submit to authority blindly, their faculties are weakened, and their tempers rendered imperious or abject. I also lament that parents, indolently availing themselves of a supposed privilege, damp the first faint glimmering of reason, rendering at the same time the duty, which they are so anxious to enforce, an empty name; because they will not let it rest on the only basis on which a duty can rest securely: for unless it be founded on knowledge, it cannot gain sufficient strength to resist the squalls of passion, or the silent sapping of self-love. But it is not the parents who have given the surest proof of their affection for their children, or, to speak more properly, who by fulfilling their duty, have allowed a natural parental affection to take root in their hearts, the child of exercised sympathy and reason, and not the over-weening offspring of selfish pride, who most vehemently insist on their children submitting to their will merely because it is their will. On the contrary, the parent, who sets a good example, patiently lets that example work; and it seldom fails to produce its natural effect—filial reverence." (160-61) (continued...) 

https://books.google.com.ua/books?redir_esc=y&hl=uk&id=edVdDwAAQBAJ&q=wollstonecraft#v=onepage&q&f=false

[gravalicious]

In his review, Sexton filters much of his review through Wilderson’s application of psychoanalytic theory, though there are several ways to organize Afro-pessimist thought. My own treatment of the field is reflective of different ongoing threads of influence and theoretical emphases. As indicated above, one thread of Afro-pessimism reflects a strong intellectual heritage from Lacanian psycho-analysis (Lacan and Fink 2002), by way of Fanon (1952), in the works of Wilderson (2010) and Hartman (1997). Another thread is rooted at the nexus of race and biopolitics. In this vein, Sexton (2011) has fruitfully critiqued the work of Giorgio Agamben (1998) and also incorporated lessons from Patterson (1982) to build insightful commentary on contemporary racial politics and institutions surrounding black people. There is also a strong influence from, and critique of, recent Marxist theorizing in the works of Agathangelou (2010), Sabine Broeck (2016), Daniel Barber (2016), and Wilderson (2003a, 2003b). Finally, scholars focusing on historical approaches tend to argue that slavery, specifically in the Americas, forms a distinct starting point for understanding contemporary racial politics. This argument is apparent in the works of several key thinkers, such as Hartman (2008), Vincent Brown (2009), Katherine McKittrick (Hudson and McKittrick 2014), and even Loïc Wacquant (2002) (Carico 2016). Their historical approach is matched with a parallel analysis of African colonialism. It is useful to recall that Fanon and also Achille Mbembe (2008), whose works are frequently cited in Afro-pessimist literature, directly theorize the racial impacts of such colonialism as distinct from slavery in the Americas. I highlight just a few of these differences within Afro-pessimism to emphasize the diversity of thought within the approach as well as to outline the breadth of the field and its relevance to different aspects of sociological work at the nexus of race, institutions, political economy, and history.

George Weddington - Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives” (2018) [Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1–11, American Sociological Association]

[fansylla]

Even though legal ownership of Black flesh was abolished as a result of long and hard radical anti-slavery struggles, practices of anti-Black abjection have morphed and could thus continue into the lasting afterlife of enslavement. These practices range on a continuum from pejorative media, through ritualistic forms of Black debasement in advertisement, through aggressive exoticisms and ridicule in popular customs such as the Netherland’s Zwarte Piet, or the return of the Sarotti Mohr in German chocolate consumer culture, through what amounts to an overall denial of anti-racist change in institutions of higher education, to massive and indeed murderous forms of violence within and outside of the state apparatus, to criminal fascist attacks on Black people and to the anonymous death of migrants from the African continent in the Mediterranean, watched over by the FRONTEX regime. It is necessary for my argument to go beyond reminding us of the thousands of cases of catastrophic death in the Mediterranean sea and to foreground the point that in keeping with widespread European callous indifference towards the centuries-long and intense involvement in and profiteering from enslavism, the African migrants drowning in the Mediterranean have not been recognized as individual dead and lost human beings, let alone mourned as somebody’s lost sons, daughters, husbands, uncles, aunts, mothers, fathers, friend or lovers.

Sabine Broeck, Legacies of Enlavism and White Abjectorship

[tiny-newt]

The scholar Sabine Broeck suggests we understand slavery not as "safely entombed...deplorable events in the past," but as enslavism -- "the legacies of which are ongoing."

From Extra Men by Sharifa Rodes-Pitts

[processedlives]

[Beloved], in its inner ambiguity, claims that whereas African-Americans have been able to enter 'history' and have become the agents of their own historical memory there is a certain memory in the flesh, a pain so visceral it cannot enter consciousness, and a history so absent, it cannot enter the mediation of collective memory to cope with trauma. So that a writer can surrealistically gesture at it as do Beloved's monologues, but story, in the sense of emplotted memory, cannot reach it. One of Beloved's most stunning achievements, and the one most pertinent to a discussion about memory, is thus to pull two antagonistic impulses together in one text: the necessity and option to make memory to get beyond the haunting ghosts of history on the one hand, and on the other hand, a strategically failing attempt at writing historical trauma, to quote Shoshana Felman, to make the referent come back, paradoxically, as something heretofore unseen in history; to reveal the real as the impact of a literality that history cannot assimilate or integrate as knowledge, but that it keeps encountering in the return of the song. (Felman 276)

Sabine Broeck, Trauma, Agency, Kitsch and the Excesses of the Real: Beloved Within the Field of Critical Response

[garadinervi]

Lester C. Olson, Sisterhood as Performance in Audre Lorde's Public Advocacy, in Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies, Edited by Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck, Designed by Sally Nichols, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst and Boston, MA, 2015, [pp. 109-121] pp. 112-113

[garadinervi]

Gloria I. Joseph, Audre Lorde's Relationship and Connections with South African Women, in Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies, Edited by Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck, Designed by Sally Nichols, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst and Boston, MA, 2015, pp. 102-106

[processedlives]

"Abolish Property: the Epistemic Challenge of Black Feminist Desire" (by fBj8D3sU)