b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Daniel Greene – Digital Dark Matters

    Daniel Greene – Digital Dark Matters

    a review of Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015)

    by Daniel Greene

    ~

    The Book of Negroes was the first census of black residents of North America. In it, the British military took down the names of some three thousand ex-slaves between April and November of 1783, alongside details of appearance and personality, destination and, if applicable, previous owner. The self-emancipated—some free, some indentured to English or German soldiers—were seeking passage to Canada or Europe, and lobbied the defeated British Loyalists fleeing New York City for their place in the Book. The Book of Negroes thus functioned as “the first government-issued document for state-regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly linked corporeal markers to the right to travel” (67). An index of slave society in turmoil, its data fields were populated with careful gradations of labor power, denoting the value of black life within slave capitalism: “nearly worn out,” “healthy negress,” “stout labourer.”  Much of the data in The Book of Negroes was absorbed from so-called Birch Certificates, issued by a British Brigadier General of that name, which acted as passports certifying the freedom of ex-slaves and their right to travel abroad. The Certificates became evidence submitted by ex-slaves arguing for their inclusion in the Book of Negroes, and became sites of contention for those slave-owners looking to reclaim people they saw as property.

    If, as Simone Browne argues in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, “the Book of Negroes [was] a searchable database for the future tracking of those listed in it” (83), the details of preparing, editing, monitoring, sorting and circulating these data become direct matters of (black) life and death. Ex-slaves would fight for their legibility within the system through their use of Birch Certificates and the like; but they had often arrived in New York in the first place through a series of fights to remain illegible to the “many start-ups in slave-catching” that arose to do the work of distant slavers. Aliases, costumes, forged documents and the like were on the one hand used to remain invisible to the surveillance mechanisms geared towards capture, and on the other hand used to become visible to the surveillance mechanisms—like the Book—that could potentially offer freedom. Those ex-slaves who failed to appear as the right sort of data were effectively “put on a no-sail list” (68), and either held in New York City or re-rendered into property and delivered back to the slave-owner.

    Start-ups, passports, no-sail lists, databases: These may appear anachronistic at first, modern technological thinking out of sync with colonial America. But Browne deploys these labels with care and precision, like much else in this remarkable book. Dark Matters reframes our contemporary thinking about surveillance, and digital media more broadly, through a simple question with challenging answers: What if our mental map of the global surveillance apparatus began not with 9/11 but with the slave ship? Surveillance is considered here not as a specific technological development but a practice of tracking people and putting them into place. Browne demonstrates how certain people have long been imagined as out of place and that technologies of control and order were developed in order to diagnose, map, and correct these conditions: “Surveillance is nothing new to black folks. It is a fact of antiblackness” (10). That this ”fact” is often invisible even in our studies of surveillance and digital media more broadly speaks, perversely, to the power of white supremacy to structure our vision of the world. Browne’s apparent anachronisms make stranger the techniques of surveillance with which we are familiar, revealing the dark matter that has structured their use and development this whole time. Difficult to visualize, Browne shows us how to trace this dark matter through its effects: the ordering of people into place, and the escape from that order through “freedom acts” of obfuscation, sabotage, and trickery.

    This then is a book about new (and very old) methods of research in surveillance studies in particular, and digital studies in general, centered in black studies—particularly the work of critical theorists of race such as Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter who find in chattel slavery a prototypical modernity. More broadly, it is a book about new ways of engaging with our technocultural present, centered in the black diasporic experience of slavery and its afterlife. Frantz Fanon is a key figure throughout. Browne introduces us to her own approach through an early reflection on the revolutionary philosopher’s dying days in Washington, DC, overcome with paranoia over the very real surveillance to which he suspected he was subjected. Browne’s FOIA requests to the CIA regarding their tracking of Fanon during his time at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center returned only a newspaper clipping, a book review, and a heavily redacted FBI memo reporting on Fanon’s travels. So she digs further into the archive, finding in Fanon’s lectures at the University of Tunis, delivered in the late 1950s after being expelled from Algeria by French colonial authorities, a critical exploration of policing and surveillance. Fanon’s psychiatric imagination, granting such visceral connection between white supremacist institutions and lived black experience in The Wretched of the Earth, here addresses the new techniques of ‘control by quantification’—punch clocks, time sheets, phone taps, and CCTV—in factories and department stores, and the alienation engendered in the surveilled.

    Browne’s recovery of this work grounds a creative extension of Fanon’s thinking into surveillance practices and surveillance studies. From his concept of “epidermalization”—“the imposition of race on the body” (7)—Browne builds a theory of racializing surveillance. Like many other key terms in Dark Matters, this names an empirical phenomenon—the crafting of racial boundaries through tracking and monitoring—and critiques the “absented presence” (13) of race in surveillance studies. Its opposition is found in dark sousveillance, a revision of Steve Mann’s term for watching the watchers that, again, describes both the freedom acts of black folks against a visual field saturated with racism, as well as an epistemology capable of perceiving, studying, and deconstructing apparatuses of racial surveillance.

    Each chapter of Dark Matters presents a different archive of racializing surveillance paired with reflections on black cultural production Browne reads as dark sousveillance. At each turn, Browne encourages us to see in slavery and its afterlife new modes of control, old ways of studying them, and potential paths of resistance. Her most direct critique of surveillance studies comes in Chapter 1’s precise exegesis of the key ideas that emerge from reading Jeremy Bentham’s plans for the Panopticon and Foucault’s study of it—the signal archive and theory of the field—against the plans for the slave ship Brookes. It turns out Bentham travelled on a ship transporting slaves during the trip where he sketched out the Panopticon, a model penitentiary wherein, through the clever use of lights, mirrors, and partitions, prisoners are totally isolated from one another and never sure whether they are being monitored or not. The archetype for modern power as self-discipline is thus nurtured, counter to its own telling, alongside sovereign violence. Browne’s reading of archives from the slave ship, the auction block, and the plantation reveal the careful biopolitics that created “blackness as a saleable commodity in the Western Hemisphere” (42). She asks how “the view from ‘under the hatches’” of Bentham’s Turkish ship, transporting, in his words, “18 young negresses (slaves),” might change our narrative about the emergence of disciplinary power and the modern management of life as a resource. It becomes clear that the power to instill self-governance through surveillance did not subordinate but rather partnered with the brutal spectacle of sovereign power that was intended to educate enslaved people on the limits of their humanity. This correction to the Foucauldian narrative is sorely necessary in a field, and a general political conversation about surveillance, that too often focuses on the technical novelty of drones, to give one example, without a connection to a generation learning to fear the skies.

    Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788
    “Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788.” Illustration. 1788. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C.

    These sorts of theoretical course corrections are among the most valuable lessons in Dark Matters. There is fastidious empirical work here, particularly in Chapter 2’s exploration of the Book of Negroes and colonial New York’s lantern laws requiring all black and indigenous people to bear lights after dark. But this empirical work is not the book’s focus, nor its main promise. That promise comes in prompting new empirical and political questions about how we see surveillance and what it means, and for whom, through an archaeology of black life under surveillance (indeed, Chapter 4, on airport surveillance, is the one I find weakest largely because it abandons this archaeological technique and focuses wholly on the present). Chapter 1’s reading of Charles William Tait’s prescriptions for slave management, for example, is part of a broader turn in the study of the history of capitalism where the roots of modern business practices like data-driven human resource management are traced to the supposedly pre-modern slave economy. Chapter 3’s assertion that slave branding “was a biometric technology…a measure of slavery’s making, marking, and marketing of the black subject as commodity” (91) does similar work, making strange the contemporary security technologies that purport the reveal racial truths which unwilling subjects do not give up. Facial recognition technologies and other biometrics are calibrated based on what Browne calls a “prototypical whiteness…privileged in enrollment, measurement, and recognition processes…reliant upon dark matter for its own meaning” (162). Particularly in the context of border control, these default settings reveal the calculations built into our security technologies regarding who “counts” enough to be recognized. Calculations grounded in an unceasing desire for new means with which to draw clear-cut racial boundaries.

    The point here is not that a direct line of technological development can be drawn from brands to facial recognition or from lanterns to ankle bracelets. Rather, if racism, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, is “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” then what Browne points to are methods of group differentiation, the means by which the value of black lives are calculated and how those calculations are stored, transmitted, and concretized in institutional life. If Browne’s cultural studies approach neglects a sustained empirical engagement with a particular mode of racializing surveillance—say, the uneven geography produced by the Fugitive Slave Act, mentioned in passing in relation to “start-ups in slave catching”—it is because she has taken on the unenviable task of shifting the focus of whole fields to dark matter previously ignored, opening a series of doors through which readers can glimpse the technologies that make race.

    Here then is a space cleared for surveillance studies, and digital studies more broadly, in an historical moment when so many are loudly proclaiming that Black Lives Matter, when the dark sousveillance of smartphone recordings has made the violence of institutional racism impossible to ignore. Work in digital studies has readily and repeatedly unearthed the capitalist imperatives built into our phones, feeds, and friends lists. Shoshanna Zuboff’s recent work on “surveillance capitalism” is perhaps a bellwether here: a rich theorization of the data accumulation imperative that transforms intra-capitalist competition, the nature of the contract, and the paths of everyday life. But her account of the growth of an extractive data economy that leads to a Big Other of behavior modification does not so far have a place for race.

    This is not a call on my part to sprinkle a missing ingredient atop a shoddy analysis in order to check a box. Zuboff is critiqued here precisely because she is among our most thoughtful, careful critics of contemporary capitalism. Rather, Browne’s account of surveillance capitalism—though she does not call it that—shows that race does not need to be introduced to the critical frame from outside. That dark matter has always been present, shaping what is visible even if it goes unseen itself. This manifests in at least two ways in Zuboff’s critique of the Big Other. First, her critique of Google’s accumulation of  “data exhaust” is framed primarily as a ‘pull’ of ever more sites and sensors into Google’s maw, passively given up users. But there is a great deal of “push” here as well. The accumulation of consumable data also occurs through the very human work of solving CAPTCHAs and scanning books. The latter is the subject of an iconic photo that shows the brown hand of a Google Books scanner—a low-wage subcontractor, index finger wrapped in plastic to avoid cuts from a day of page-turning—caught on a scanned page. Second, for Zuboff part of the frightening novelty of Google’s data extraction regime is its “formal indifference” to individual users, as well as to existing legal regimes that might impede the extraction of population-scale data. This, she argues, stands in marked contrast to the midcentury capitalist regimes which embraced a degree of democracy in order to prop up both political legitimacy and effective demand. But this was a democratic compromise limited in time and space. Extractive capitalist regimes of the past and present, including those producing the conflict minerals so necessary for hardware running Google services, have been marked by, at best, formal indifference in the North to conditions in the South. An analysis of surveillance capitalism’s struggle for hegemony would be greatly enriched by a consideration of how industrial capitalism legitimated itself in the metropole at the expense of the colony. Nor is this racial-economic dynamic and its political legitimation purely a cross-continental concern. US prisons have long extracted value from the incarcerated, racialized as second-class citizens. Today this practice continues, but surveillance technologies like ankle bracelets extend this extraction beyond prison walls, often at parolees’ expense.

    A Google Books scanner’s hand
    A Google Books scanner’s hand, caught working on WEB Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Via The Art of Google Books.

    Capitalism has always, as Browne’s notes on plantation surveillance make clear, been racial capitalism. Capital enters the world arrayed in the blood of primitive accumulation, and reproduces itself in part through the violent differentiation of labor powers. While the accumulation imperative has long been accepted as a value shaping media’s design and use, it is unfortunate that race has largely entered the frame of digital studies, and particularly, as Jessie Daniels argues, internet studies, through a study of either racial variables (e.g., “race” inheres to the body of the nonwhite person and causes other social phenomena) or racial identities (e.g., race is represented through minority cultural production, racism is produced through individual prejudice). There are perhaps good institutional reasons for this framing, owing to disciplinary training and the like, beyond the colorblind political ethic of much contemporary liberalism. But it has left us without digital stories of race (although there are certainly exceptions, particularly in the work of writers like Lisa Nakamura and her collaborators), perceived to be a niche concern, on par with our digital stories of capitalism—much less digital stories of racial capitalism.

    Browne provides a path forward for a study of race and technology more attuned to institutions and structures, to the long shadows old violence casts on our daily, digital lives. This slim, rich book is ultimately a reflection on method, on learning new ways to see. “Technology is made of people!” is where so many of our critiques end, discovering, once again, the values we build into machines. This is where Dark Matters begins. And it proceeds through slave ships, databases, branding irons, iris scanners, airports, and fingerprints to map the built project of racism and the work it takes to pass unnoticed in those halls or steal the map and draw something else entirely.

    _____

    Daniel Greene holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research, studying the future of work and the future of unemployment. He lives online at dmgreene.net.

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  • Travis Alexander – Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS”

    Travis Alexander – Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS”

    a review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)

    by Travis Alexander

    ~

    Not long after someone dies in Ethiopia, the edir—friend, relative, or neighbor—takes to the streets to blow a horn and call out the deceased’s name. Thus begins the process of mourning. After this announcement, the edir pitches a tent in front of the bereaved’s home. Over the next three days, mourners congregate in the tent and grieve. By the seventh day, public grieving has largely subsided. More urgency still has passed by the fortieth and eightieth days, by the seventh year. Dagmawi Woubshet opens The Calendar of Loss with a lyrical description of this practice, according to which the temporality of the living attunes itself to the claim of the dead. It’s a fitting introduction, as The Calendar casts Woubshet himself as no less edir than scholar. His particular charge is the AIDS dead from the “early years” of the epidemic—1981 to 1996, when highly active antiretroviral treatment became widely available. It was in 1996 that AIDS, according to certain political constituencies, was rendered nonlethal; according to others, it was even cured.

    The ambition of The Calendar, though, exceeds mourning the AIDS dead in either the form of a memoir or uncritical memorialization. To be sure, there exists a prolific tradition of just this kind of memoirish text, epitomized by writers like Sarah Schulman. Woubshet looks instead to efforts made by AIDS mourners to simultaneously grieve their dead, process the historical contingency of these deaths, and reckon with the probability that their own deaths were on the horizon. As such, these works are “steeped in a ‘poetics of compounding loss’” (3). This idiosyncratic form of mourning not only registers a novel structure of feeling, but, in “confound[ing] and travers[ing] the limits of mourning” renders extant literary and cultural elegaic genres inadequate (3). Evincing his interdisciplinary sensibility, Woubshet trains his analysis on genres running to obituaries, funerals, graffiti art, photography, film, epistolaries, choreography, installations, and of course, the poetic elegy itself. The resulting critical work is a dialogue at the intersection of trauma studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and African Diaspora studies.

    Woubshet organizes the book’s chapters according to the various ways that queer loss was reinserted into a public discourse that had attempted first to conceal it, and then to efface its embodied specificities. To take only one of his most powerful examples, Woubshet addresses how in its traditional form the obituary had functioned as a disciplinary genre of (hetero-) reproductive futurism. In its foregrounding of birth-family kinship networks, the obituary not only omitted mention of gay partners, but reified the futurism (those, especially, children, who live on) that sublimates and mediates such reproductivism. Moreover, these pieces never mentioned AIDS, coyly alluding instead to a “long disease” the deceased had suffered, thereby interring the dead in one last closet. In response to the mainstream news outlets running these posthumously disciplinary remembrances, gay newspapers “arrogated to themselves the authority of the obituary,” emphasizing the cause of death and the queer networks left in the wake of the decedent’s passing, thus both constituting queer counterpublics and protecting the “rights of the queer dead from the normative rites of the living” (59, 61, 67, 84). Woubshet’s ability to demonstrate how works of mourning exhumed the queer body interdicted from the scene of public grief is equally salient in his poetic analysis, centering on figures like Melvin Dixon and Paul Monette and informed by poetry and elegy scholars ranging from Peter Sacks to Max Cavitch to Jonathan Culler. He hastens to remind us that the explicitly fatal homophobia of the 1980s and ’90s has simply been sanitized into the gay liberalism of the present. In its triumphalist projection of gay normalcy and citizenship, gay liberalism (akin to what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism) demands the erasure of AIDS, of the embodied queer past. “[B]y looking for the dead now, therefore,” The Calendar of Loss “challenge[s] gay liberalism’s present undertaking” (23).

    As such, the reformulation of central mourning genres such as the obituary , Woubshet notes, wasn’t demanded simply by the novel epidemiological and biocultural poetics of AIDS itself. It also responded to the unique forms of silence and erasure under which queer loss was placed in the 1980s and 90s by civil and governmental institutions alike. It is this “regulation of the ‘sphere of appearances’” (to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase) that the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) addressed in its motto “Silence = Death” (16). Woubshet argues that the protocols of silence in this era “disprized” mourners of queer loss, “shroud[ing]” their grief “in silence, shame, and disgrace” (4). The texts and performances collected in Calendar refuse this status, and collectively insist that “mourning = survival.”

    In its recuperation of a form of grief that is indeterminate and inconsolable, The Calendar of Loss is also a referendum on the approach to loss and trauma offered by Freudian psychoanalysis, which sets forth a pat binary between normative grief (mourning) and pathological grief (melancholia). Where the mourner eventually replaces his lost object, the melancholic cannot, and languishes. Amid the exigencies of AIDS, however, this binary falls short insofar as it fails to apprehend the fact that for these mourners, death is not a “singular” event, but part of an ever-expanding series of deaths, including—most likely—the mourner’s own (5). The melancholic grief of queer communities constituted by AIDS are certainly not “normal” according to Freud, but neither are they pathological, inasmuch as they “achieve cathexis in mourning itself and in its art and activism. However, […] as newly cathected objects, [these] cannot displace loss; on the contrary, they place loss center stage” (18). In worrying the normal/pathological binary, Woubshet delivers a theoretical instrument to those employing psychoanalysis, and a bracing intervention to a queer theory whose conceptualizations of trauma have unproblematically embraced this conspicuously unqueer binarism for too long.

    Drawing on work by Howard Thurman, Woubshet observes that this non-pathological melancholy finds clear historical expression in the genre of slave songs and black spirituals. In the spirituals as well as in black life generally, “[d]eath and dying are not just ‘unusual, untoward events’ or ‘inevitably end-of-lifespan events,’ but instead punctuate [it] routinely and proleptically” (19). This constant anticipation of loss is central to the conceptions of social death elaborated by scholars such as Orlando Patterson. Thus, the paradigm of black mourning (as in the slave songs) and black life generally, “accommodates” and illuminates early AIDS mourning, particularly in its “insistence that death is ever present, that death is somehow always impending, and that survivors can confront all this death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also often imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice” (5). This comparative work confirms The Calendar Of Loss as the first monograph in the humanities at the intersection of queer theory and African Diaspora studies and allows it to spark a true theoretical commerce between those fields (26).

    Already in this book, in fact, interdisciplinarity has sensitized Woubshet to a liability of queer theory over and above its internalization of Freud’s pathologization of melancholy. I’m speaking here of queer theory’s characterization of the child derived heavily from Lee Edelman’s pathbreaking No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). In this latter account, the figure of the child is not only opposed to the queer subject, but is deployed—insofar as it represents the claims of futurity—to discipline and defer queer pleasure, which represents by contrast not only the present at the expense of the future, but also the very foreclosure of the future itself. In his final chapter, Woubshet details the Sudden Flowers collective, which provides the resources for Ethiopian orphans whose parents were lost to AIDS to create works of art and performances that help mediate their grief. Many of these orphans choose to write letters to their deceased parents in which they chronicle the stages and practices of their mourning, and the sensation of the absence, the lost object(s), they have not (yet) filled or replaced. These children “rely not on idealized figures of innocence and purity to characterize their own experiences, but instead on queer figures of abjection, disparagement, and fearlessness,” thereby “thwart[ing] the naturalized figure of the child as the very embodiment of futurity” (140). The experiences of these children, then, are a living rebuke to the cleanliness of queer theory’s characterization of the child. But Woubshet doesn’t simply gesture to the children of Sudden Flowers to append an asterisk to the queer theory’s anti-natalism, to correctively bolster its critical acumen (though he certainly does accomplish this). While joining Edelman in the latter’s critique of hegemonic natalism, he breaks away in aiming to indicate what we might well call the white privilege of queer theory—the complacency of the latter’s archive, its evident disinterest in the particularities of life in the submerged global south in favor of an aestheticized lumping-together of African people with AIDS under the signifier of unalterable tragedy.

    But more witheringly still, The Calendar of Loss reveals the extent to which queer theory becomes a vested defender, an unwitting academic strategist, in the process of universalizing whiteness. Drawing on Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence, Woubshet recounts how, unlike the image of the white child that gelled (under the auspices of nineteenth-century Romanticism) to figure innocence, purity, and futurity, the black child discursively produced simultaneously (most canonically in the pickaninny) evoked repulsion, abjection, and social death (142). “Emptied of innocence and futurity,” he speculates, “the black child […] cannot be a marker against which queerness can be negatively defined” (142). Hidden behind the tact of Woubshet’s account is the indictment that positions like Edelman’s not only prefer the white child for its compatibility with a given theoretical imperative, but perpetuate a universalization according to which the white child, unburdened by racial marking, becomes the child as such, which iterates in turn the social death (in its rhetorical concealment) of the black child. This revelation represents just one of the fruits of Woubshet’s inflection of queer theory by the itinerary of African Diaspora studies.

    While we might fairly critique Woubshet’s failure to address the role of NGOs (like those that care for Ethiopian Orphans) as the “mendicant orders” (cf. Hardt and Negri) of the very same biopolitical governmentality that allowed AIDS to become a pandemic in the first place, this oversight seems the exception rather than the rule. The Calendar’s more concerning oversight is instead its unintentional reification of vitalist, optimistic, and citizenship-oriented rubrics of affect in its moments of “recuperation.” Consider for example Woubshet’s description of the children in the Sudden Flowers art collective who become “political figure[s], publicly taking on one of the most urgent issues of our time, [while simultaneously] departing from the norm” (144). These children are revealed in turn as “powerful agents, as subjects capable of reflection on and articulation of their experiences” (140). Here these children become deserving of praise insofar as they embrace an active, vigorous relationship with their circumstances. Elsewhere Woubshet will attribute the same valorizing characteristics to the gay American subject of his book too. AIDS mourners “across the Atlantic […] embodied AIDS openly and fearlessly” (5). Here “openly and fearlessly” carries the same sense of vigor and interactivity he attributed to the “powerful,” “agent[ial]” children of Ethiopia.

    Not only do these forms of affect coincide neatly with the behavioral strictures demanded by a late liberalism that exercises itself in intellectual and emotional economies, but they also threaten to undo the depathologization of melancholy executed above. That is to say, where Woubshet had previously claimed to find melancholy non-pathological insofar as it generates a new cathexis (attention to compounding loss), here he seems to smuggle in—through “articulation of […] experiences”—the kind of object-replacement or work-completion characteristic of normative mourning. Indeed, he says so himself in expressing his desire to show that nonnormative mourning “can be ‘productive rather than pathological, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary’” (22). Here Woubshet no longer desires simply a neutral opposition to the pathological (that is, the nonnormative), but—in the term “productive”—casts his lot in with a term derived from the cathectic economy of capital. In turn “social” evokes liberal citizenship and pluralism, while “militant” continues in the valorization of vigorous and positive affect suggested earlier by “powerful,” “agent[ial],” “open,” and “fearless.” Inasmuch as “militancy,” “articulation,” “social[ity],” and “productiv[ity]” address themselves to futurity, they reiterate the natalism that Woubshet in agreement with Edelman deemed unsalvageable.

    Indeed, Edelman himself is perhaps most helpful in diagnosing the forms of complicity I’ve attributed to Woubshet. In a 2006 piece, he cautions us against the trap of “affirm[ing] an angry, uncivil ‘politics of negativity’” (“The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” 821). Insofar as such negativity is “affirmed,” it becomes “little more than Oedipal kitsch,” performing the sentimental and “fundamentalist […] attachment to ‘sense, mastery, and meaning,’” and thereby striking “the pose of negativity while evacuating its force” (822). True negativity, meanwhile, refuses what Adorno calls the “all subjugating identity principle” (Negative Dialectics 320). In his attempt to depathologize queer melancholy, Woubshet pays homage to negativity, spurning the identification between melancholy and pathology. But in framing that melancholy as “militant,” “productive,” “social,” “articulate,” “open,” “fearless,” and certainly “agent[ial],” his negativity is outed as an identity principle in drag. This complicity also lends support to Jasbir Puar’s recent critique of affect theory (“Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity”). For her the latter, in attempting to conceptualize a register of energies and forces uncapturable by a form of governmentality dependent on the capitalization of intellectual and emotional labor, unwittingly finds itself attributing to affect a set of optimistic, buoyant characteristics that are themselves of a piece with the imperatives of productivity and ablement central to late capital in the first place (“Prognosis Time”). While Woubshet’s methodology has no stake in affect, the optimism inherent in his characterizations of melancholic grief and its creative expression—even his exclusionary attention to only those who have taken it upon themselves to create—instantiates the ideological double-bind of Puar’s affect theorists.

    Of course, a productivity that is cyclical and endlessly iterative would be recuperable where one that is teleological would not. And his investment in the trope of the calendar, which evokes a form of articulation that repeats—despite its “militan[cy]”—in stasis, suggests that this is version of productivity Woubshet has in mind. So his flirtation with productivity is potentially aesthetic rather than ideological. Whatever the case may be, The Calendar of Loss remains a rich and urgently needed contribution. When the legacy of AIDS is being submerged, not only by the rhetoric of gay liberalism, but by a generation of queer theorists who have turned their attentions elsewhere, efforts like Woubshet’s to “speak again” its history and “reanimate lives that demand remembering” cannot go unnoticed (xi).


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    Travis Alexander is a Mellon Graduate Fellow at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Though broadly interested in Post-45 literature and visual art, his specific interests cluster around portrayals of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in film, literature, television, and cultural theory between the 1980s and 1990s. Website: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/travis-alexander.

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    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1994.
    • Edelman, Lee with Robert L. Caserio, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean. “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 819 – 828.
    • Puar, Jasbir. “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19.2 (2009): 161 – 172.
    • Woubshet, Dagmawi. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.