Mama's baby, papa's maybe

From Driscollwiki

Stillers, H. (2003) "8. Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An american grammar book." Black, white, and in color: essays on American literature and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Reflecting on the names a black woman may be called in public:

• "Brown sugar", "sapphire", "granny", "aunty", etc.
• "overdetermined nominative properties" (203)
• "markers so loaded with mythical prepossession" the marked can't "come clean" (203)

Contents 1 Bastard status 2 Ethnicity and the Moynihan report 3 Gender effects of enslavement 4 "Body" and "flesh" 5 American grammar 6 Narratives of African people 7 European explorers 8 Middle passage 9 Property + kinlessness 10 Slavery and law 11 Uniqueness of the African-American male

Bastard status

In a society where inheritance is according to the male/father,

• No possibility (need?) for a female bastard concept

Referring to Moynihan's 60s report on the American family

• Assertion that the AfAm family lacks a father and thus is decentered
  • Yet somehow blames this on mother and daughter?
• Stiller: daughters and fathers manifest the same "rhetorical symptoms of absence and denial" (204)
  • In a system of domination, the gender holds no "symbolic integrity"
  • Worth working out these conflated roles because understanding them might return power to both male and female via
  • The opportunity, possibility for gender differentiation (not determined.) (204)
• Identifies "underachieving" black males among overachieving females. (205)
  • Suggests that this arrangement is incompatible with the patriarchical dominant (white?) culture

Ethnicity and the Moynihan report

• Ethnicity used as a category "out of time" (205)
  • "white family", "Negro family" are "wholly generated with neither past nor future [...] pure present and always tense" (205)
• Ethnicity achieves "memorial time", eternal (via Barthes and the dynamics of myth)

Gender effects of enslavement

Violent theft of the body (206)

• Loss of gender difference (among other subjective distinctions)
• Externally imposed meanings resulting in a dispersed "powerlessness" (not limited to physical power) (206)

"Body" and "flesh"

Flesh precedes the body

• "zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography" (206)
• Narratives grounded in the "flesh" of enslaved people concerns actual ripping, tearing, binding
• Human tissue "altered" and "ruptured", tortured (207)
• Can these flesh-bound marks and brands be carried forward in "symbolic substitution" to future generations? (207)

Female flesh "ungendered" by violence and attack (207)

• Not only the site of rape (in many forms) but forms of torture and violence typically gendered and thought of as "male"/"male"

Use of enslaved people in medicine

• "Diseased, damaged, disabled" people used for research, experimentation (208)
• "Total objectification" as bodies are categorized according to diseased parts (e.g., liver or kidney)

Captive flesh/body, though apparently liberated (208)

• Remains coded, named, subject to the metaphors and discourses of captivity
• Despite historiographic, theoretical, and forgetful energies opposed

American grammar

Symbolic order

• Beginning with violent, large-scale demographic changes in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of slavery
• Interrupting centuries of African culture
• "Every writing makes the the [startling] discovery [of pain] all over again" (209)

Narratives of African people

• Mutual shock in a meeting of European and African people
• Immediate "fall", "loss of communication", "loss of communicative force" (209)
• "Astonishing", alien customs, behaviors, sounds, appearances (210)
• Captors researve the right and ability to name, rename, and "name" the captive
  • Reflected in the continued unwelcome naming indicated at the start

European explorers

• "Discovery" of African people
• Blunt understanding of variation among the darker-skinned people
• Surprising imprecision given their savvy with navigation tools and techne (211)

"Males looking at other males" (212)

• Females apparently already estranged
• Appearance not dictate of the Church but emergent from explorer narratives
  • "Fair" opposed by "ugly", "hideous"
  • "Ugly" accompanied by "pagan"
• Indicators of "bestial" nature are ersatz, "specular"
  • Absence, unfamiliarity with "bread" or "wine" or "houses",
  • Despite the presence of sophisticated cuisine (213)

Middle passage

African people, isolated, separated from family

• Crammed into hulls
• An arrangement that "contravenes notions of the domestic" (214)
• "Suspended" in the ocean, "nowhere", with no knowledge of their location on the Earth (215)
• Becoming "culturally unmade" (215)

Male and female

• Differentiated only according to size, mass
• Fed the same, treated the same
• Gender differences quantified but not culture
• Records of female violation, insurrection, anger (in some cases presence!) not recorded in letters or other artifacts
  • Lacking in either evidence or counter-evidence
  • Yet anecdotes, reports of pre-slavery, suggest that in many African communities the female was strong and would not likely have submitted easily... ? (216)

Absence of female activity from these accounts

• Unrecognizable according to a patriarchical frame
• Purposefully left absent, obscured

Property + kinlessness

Economic situation that relies on a rupture of conventional kinship (217)

• Children neither "belong" to mother nor are "related" to "owners".
  • Automatically, by default, they are orphaned at birth
• Vestibular cultural formation whereby property relations can "invade" kinship at any moment (218)

Family structures emerging among enslaved people

• Tend away from vertical, blood-line structures familiar to the West
• Instead forming along horizontal relationships: language, discourse, blood, naming according to legal arrangements of slavery
• That captive people were able to form strong bonds amid the violence and instability of capitivity is "startling" to recall or consider (219)
• Though the very word "family" and the "nuclear family" is constructed of culture, history, law, and economics
  • Expecting patriarchical formation and patrimonial transference of wealth

How does kinship undermine the profitability of enslavement?

• If the parent is to believe she has a human right to the child, the sense of dehumanized property is undermined (220)

Loss of mother, loss of sibling bonds?

• Douglass' recollection of life among brothers and sisters, absent mother
• "Could we say, then, that the feeling of kinship is not inevitable?" (220)
• Destructive loss of mother and the attendent biological certainty of birth
  • Leads enslaved young to "social ambiguity" and "chaos"
  • But is this true of adopted children generally? Especially those estranged from birth parents?

Unidentified "master" father and identified "slave" mother

• "Fatherhood, at best a supreme cultural courtesy" (221)
• "One has been 'made' and 'bought' by disparate currencies, linking back to a common origin of exchange and domination"
• Inquiry into identity of father is met with reminder of ownership and property-status

"Pleasure" amid enslavement?

• All customary aspects of sexuality: "reproduction, motherhood, pleasure, desire" all "thrown into crisis" (221)
• Dubious among all couplings: between owner/owned as well as among the captive

Relationships among women, free and enslaved

• Neither fully owning claim to her body
• Jealousy of the free wife toward the young captive women
• Also a desire to occupy the younger body

Slavery and law

Slave owner is positively compelled to treat the enslaved as property

• Rather than restricted from treating them as human

Law in 1705

• Removes "blacks from the family of man" (222)
• As well lists them along a variety of possessible entities, living and inanimate
• How and why is this discursively possible?
• What can and could be done to disrupt it?

Uniqueness of the African-American male

Matriarchy among Af Am families is misunderstood

• The mother was denied even the right to motherhood
• As well as any legal right to guide inheritance, naming

Enslavement removed from the male

• The conventional partner responsibilities of naming, inheritance

The male may regain power and personhood through the only available path:

• Of female, of mother? (228)

Amid enslavement:

• Motherhood, "as female bloodrite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment" (228)
• Fatherhood, "dual fatherhood is set in motion, comprised of the African father's banished name and body and the captor father's mocking presence."
• Only the female stands in the flesh (228)
  • But she is outside the "traditional symbolics of female gender", a "different social subject" (228)

By claiming this "different" status ("with the potential to "name""), might the African-American female rewrite a "radically different text for female empowerment?" (229)