Black crisis shuffle: fiction, race, and simulation.

Over the past two decades, a sense of impending calamity has held sway in African American literary and cultural studies. Cornel West frames this period as one of "postmodern crisis" and laments the "decline in [black] popular mobilization and the decline of political participation and the decomposition more and more of the institutions of old civil society ..." (91). Voicing a related concern, Hortense Spillers observes that the locus of black communal life, the segregated enclave, has itself been so radically changed by deindustrialization, desegregation, and the plight of the black underclass that intellectuals must reconsider their understanding of community as an "object of knowledge" (102). These remarks distill the widespread anxieties generated by rapid changes in black life during the post-segregation era. And while few question the warrants for such disquiet, recent work by Madhu Dubey and Kenneth Warren demonstrates that the same heralding of crisis underwrites nostalgic calls for a return to the traditional cultural practices that defined black life during segregation. Dubey and Warren therefore take issue with those intellectuals who venerate black expressive culture--signifying, sermons, blues, jazz, etc.--on the grounds that this tack proves an inadequate response to the social and political ills of the present. (1) Despite the acuity of these critiques, however, they have not addressed contemporary writing that stages the undoing of communal belonging as a potentially generative occasion. In other words, how do we interpret black literature that neither pines ambivalently for the nationalist past nor positions art as a proxy for a communal wholeness that is nationalism in another guise?

Two novels of the late twentieth century, Darius James's Negrophobia: An Urban Parable (1993) and Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), usefully trouble existing strategies for reading contemporary culture. Indeed, these texts suggest that the critical discourse of crisis itself might well be outpaced by a disruptive phenomenon that has not been adequately considered. They reveal a blackness that because of its interdependence with commodification is not the authentic ground for communion, but rather a product of mass-culture industries such as cinema, television, and recorded music. The usurpation of racial authenticity by its simulation might have animated nostalgic longing for the substance of group distinction, but instead the texts exploit the possibilities in late capitalist commodity forms. They trade in the surprising aesthetic and political potential made available by racial identifies that are more malleable and recombinant precisely because they have been so thoroughly abstracted from any social context but that of the commodity. What one witnesses in this abstraction is an aesthetic that asks readers to derive pleasure from the disintegration of racial difference as it has been constituted in both popular culture and in such conventional mass political modes as nationalism and pan-Africanism. In this regard, Negrophobia and The White Boy Shuffle depart from a point of no return where blackness as we have known it is at once in its death throes and laden with postmortem potential.

Put another way, Beatty and James write a black postmodernity that insists upon greater attentiveness to the relationship between an evolving political economy and the most fundamental assumptions of the African American literary and critical tradition. It can be argued provisionally that the modern economy that preceded our own, one characterized by increasingly efficient modes of production and consumption as well as the proliferation of what Horkheimer and Adorno term culture industries, also coincided with a literary donnee that privileged the production of black difference. (2) Whether in the preoccupation with folk materials that animates African American texts from Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) or the privileging of mass-produced music in aesthetic statements like Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), the inducement to produce black particularity was a constant in twentieth-century cultural politics) Alternatively, the work of James and Beatty operates within and against a political economy wherein the productive forces that ushered in American modernity have been substantively restructured. David Harvey persuasively theorizes this moment as a transition from an early twentieth-century "Fordism" most fully realized in the rational management of mass production and consumption, to "flexible accumulation," a capitalist phase that displaces western production into undeveloped territories and retools the economies of western cities for the new service economies. The latter change has been facilitated by, among other things, the West's weakening of labor as a substantive opposition to capital and a reconstitution of finance bureaucracy and technology to enable more efficient flows of capital globally (Harvey 141-97). For Harvey and others these material shifts overlap with alterations in the very metanarratives of progress, rationality, and efficiency that undergirded Fordism. Of particular relevance here is Jean Baudrillard's claim that "the great humanist criteria of value, the whole civilisation of moral, aesthetic and practical judgment are effaced in our system of images and signs.... This is the generalised brothel of capital, a brothel not for prostitution, but for substitution and commutation" (Symbolic 9). Accordingly, the gradual waning of Fordist modernity ushered in a late capitalism increasingly defined by the primacy of the signifier. Baudrillard thus writes late capitalism as an economic mode that renders obsolete the traditional Marxist oppositions between economics and culture, between base and superstructure. For nothing "produced or exchanged today (objects, services, bodies, sex, culture, knowledge, etc.) can be decoded exclusively as a sign, nor solely measured as a commodity; that everything appears in the context of a general political economy in which the determining instance is ... indissolubly both ..." (For a Critique 147-48). This mutuality of production and signification inaugurates "the era of simulation," a "liquidation of all referentials," along "with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs ..." (Simulacra 2). If a chief problematic of late capitalism is the interplay between a waning referentiality and an economy that thrives on the generation of signs, James and Beatty ask us to consider more fully how race itself must also be reconsidered as part of these simulative tendencies.

Even as James and Beatty exploit the possibilities of late capitalism, however, they foreground the violence that attends the processes of simulation. James positions Negrophobia squarely within the minstrel tradition, and his work revels in the malleability that these mass-produced racial signifiers offer to the novelist. At the same time, the novel foregrounds the debilitating effects that attend these forms. Similarly, Beatty sets The White Boy Shuffle in the early 1980s at the moment when hip-hop culture generates malleable, simulative conceptions of black identity through technologies such as sampling and video; but these same technologies also subject the black underclass to the corrosive scopophilia of the dominant culture. Both texts, then, are situated precariously between the heady experimentation that the commodity form enables and a labor to sustain a critical vision about how the culture of simulation reproduces the subjection of black Americans. Beatty and James work not only to write the pleasures of worlds in which race is subject to simulation but to finger the limits of the late capitalist modes that their novels utilize. At first glance this core contradiction seems to confirm the insights of earlier theories of cultural production within late capitalism. For instance, Linda Hutcheon has argued that while "postmodern art does indeed acknowledge the commodification of art in capitalist culture, it does so in order to enable a critique of it through its very exploitation of its power" (207). Her argument that postmodern art works simultaneously within and against late capitalism usefully countered influential arguments by Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton that positioned postmodern culture as largely a formal and ideological extension of late capitalism. (4) Yet despite the foundational status of these debates, neither Hutcheon's formulation nor the arguments of Jameson and Eagleton attend sufficiently to the ways that race and racial ideology inflect the historical relationship between literature and the logics of late capitalism. Even as these theorists profess a commitment to historical materialism, they write postmodernism as a universal logic in ways that consequentially neglect the particular history of African American literary production and minority writing in general. Therefore, while there is a familial relationship between my argument and Hutcheon's, her broad claim about the contradictions of postmodernity offers little specific purchase on the ideological and aesthetic effects of late capitalism on the traditional protocols of African American letters.

In probing the contradictory overlays between late capital and black fiction, my argument will also be in tension with interpretive frames that position the political and aesthetic effects of these works as entirely consistent with the protocols of the African American literary tradition. For instance, James asks us to read Negrophobia as a political counter to America's long history of racist representation. His interpretation had its origins in the controversy that orbited about the dust jacket for the novel's first edition. The cover art parodies 1930s pulp cartoons by depicting a blonde white woman who gazes backward at a large minstrel mask that trails her as if it were her shadow. This imagery became the stuff of public debate when Florence Washington, a black administrative assistant with the Carol Publishing Group, saw the cover and "was enraged" because "African-Americans have fought so many years to get rid of images like this" and "to bring it back in any context" is "derogatory" (Fein 16). In the eyes of Washington and others, circulating minstrel imagery threatens to reassert the racial abjection embedded in these representations. James rebuffed these concerns, for in his view the "whole point is that I believe black people should start taking back these images from our iconography that have been stolen and corrupted through the years by racists" (Fein 16). This resignification is akin to "hip-hop artists wearing those tiny little braids just like those stereotypical pickaninny pictures. But it's a statement of power instead of self-loathing.... It is subverting the perversion" (Fein 16). And furthermore, James not only sees his appropriation as an exemplary strategy for liberating black consciousness but for helping "to subvert how one thinks about racist imagery. Every time a person has a racist thought they become physically ill. That's my intent" (James, interview with Haye 12). James even goes so far as linking these agendas to his own personal investment in Voodoo (James, interview with Hardin). That is, the motivating force of the novel's humor in his mind is the Voodoo god Gede, an entity associated at once with death, fertility, and satirical iteration (James, interview with Hardin). (5) In such formulations, James locates the novel in seamless continuity with communal aesthetic and political interests, the very ends-oriented agenda that has been a hallmark of black modernity. But provocative as is his interpretation of the novel, it articulates uneasily with what actually takes place in the text. The narrative seems bent instead on troubling the recovery of just such facile political readings. It repeatedly stages the failure of key characters to reconfigure racist iconography in the guise of liberation. And it is this disintegrative dimension of the novel's aesthetic that can be most adequately interpreted with reference to late capitalist culture.

A related longing for the totalities of modernity has shaped the reception of Beatty's White Boy Shuffle. It is no accident that one of the persistent complaints about his novel has been the difficulty of defining its political and aesthetic stakes along a single axis. Jennifer Jordan argues revealingly that the novel reflects a mode of satire that has an "indeterminant [sic] meaning and lacks heroes," and indeed is "devoid of ideological loyalties" (28). Jordan is anxious about an African American literature that is "less political" than earlier satires by figures like George Schuyler and Ishmael Reed. For both James and Beatty, then, commentators employ the critical language defined by the collusion between text and racial politics, yet it is this very nexus that these narratives labor to interrogate and undo. The task in assessing such work, therefore, should not be to mourn waning instantiations of modernity but to analyze with greater vigor the flotation of signifiers conjuring newly spectral forms of blackness.

Racial Identity and Its Simulation

Arguing that these novels are bound up with a phase in late capitalism is to say neither that the relationship between political economy and aesthetics is deterministic nor that the divisions between historical modalities of capital are absolute. These works do not merely reproduce the cultural logics of late capitalism with respect to race. Rather, the novels are dialogic, at times conceding to dominant currents and in other instances strongly refuting them. There also can he no doubt that the modalities that I am claiming are constitutive of a moment in late capitalism had predecessors during the heyday of Fordism. Nonetheless, these modalities--to borrow Raymond Williams's familiar coinage--were "emergent" dimensions of black modernist texts rather than "dominant" ones. (6) What distinguishes Beatty and James from such modern precursors is the suspension of black collectivism as a form of cultural authenticity or shared racial consciousness. The novels initiate engagements with race primarily through mass-produced signifiers of difference. It is this insistence on privileging the influence of mass culture signifiers in reproducing race that gives this work a sensibility distinct from black writing earlier in the twentieth century. Critics like Houston Baker have written powerfully about how the black expressive tradition has been inescapably bound up with commodified forms of blackness like the minstrel mask and the blues. But Baker nonetheless recovers the prospect of a racial authenticity underlying these commodified forms. As he writes in his now famous exposition on the blues performer, "Afro-Americans, in their guise as entertainers, season the possum of black expressive culture to the taste of their Anglo-American audience, maintaining in the process, their integrity as performers" (194). In his insistence that a fundamental integrity lies behind the racial mask, Baker demonstrates his belief in a cultural essence and a cohesive selfhood that ultimately triumphs over the commodity form.

One can reasonably argue that Baker's recourse to cultural integrity and subjective cohesion articulates an animating logic of black modernism. Novels like James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) give credence to the ways that mass culture reifies racial identity by reducing it to a set of depthless signifiers and tropes. But the impulse in these novels as well is to recover the authenticity of culture or the cohesion of the black subject as a counter to commodification. When Bigger Thomas accidentally kills Mary Dalton, his white employer's daughter, the newspapers reify him by claiming that he possesses "abnormal physical strength." He is "exceedingly black. His lower jaw protrudes obnoxiously, reminding one of a jungle beast" (279). Bigger recognizes such representations as part of the way that whites have "sport with him" before they "kill him" (282); but he also embraces this popular representation as one that can provide him with an emancipatory subjectivity. His accidental suffocation of Mary and his deliberate murder of his black girlfriend Bessie come to define his autonomy: "He had done this. He had brought all of this about. In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and deeply no matter what others might think ..." (239). Even though in one sense the novel construes this agency as a bankrupt extension of the dominant order, the text also performs a sleight of hand in which it announces a subjective cohesion and agency through the reified conception of the black man as beast.

In Darius James's Negrophobia, an abandonment of such authenticity begins at the movies. The novel presents itself as a screenplay where narration takes the guise of detailed scene descriptions. Throughout this cinematic text, the characters that appear are never presented as if they were actual subjects. The scenes are instead populated by figures drawn from the archive of preexisting mass productions: the white temptress, the Sambo, the Mammy, the Pickaninny, and so forth. Since subjects as such cannot be said to exist in the novel, the emotional registers of sympathy, identifcation, and cathexis that obtain in reading a realist narrative are rendered obsolete. What makes this strategy possible is the choice to write race primarily through icons that in their "original" manifestations were already consumer products. There is no reality to race in Negrophobia outside the mass production of racial signifiers. The fragmented clips that follow from that premise focus on Bubbles Brazil, a white "TEEN SEX-BOMB BLONDE" who encounters in her episodic travels a dazzling bricolage of racial iconography. Her journey takes her from mass-produced chocolates bearing the likeness of Louis Farrakhan to obscene images of Louis Armstrong gleefully mooning the nation. The novel seems to promise a transformation of white consciousness itself by exposing Bubbles Brazil to an onslaught of a racist detritus that is both of her making and radically estranged from her. But as I will show, the promise of transforming white consciousness is finally a red herring; Bubbles' more revealing purpose in the text is to perform new modes of racial domination.

Negrophobia draws the relations between commodification and race with particular acuity in its complicated treatment of black nationalism. In the opening scene Bubbles encounters nationalist ideology as a form of confection. She enters a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side where she discovers a "crescent-shaped box" with a label that reads, "Min. Louis Farrakhan's 'Ambrosia of Islam' / Do-for-Self Designer Chocolates / 'Allah eats 'em! And you will too!' " (3). The chocolate lid presents the Nation of Islam's brand of self-help and racial uplift as a discourse that has been so eviscerated within capitalism that the group's preachments signify only in relation to other goods. The novel equates this commodified state with death when it describes the candies inside as a "profusion of fluted paper coffins, spilling over the sides of the box." The candies are molded into the shape of "fez capped, frog faced fudge figurines" bearing "the likeness of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad" (3). Nationalism enters the text as a confectionary likeness of Elijah Muhammad and a platitudinous invocation of nationalist belonging all packaged for the pleasures of consumption. The scene captures the logic of simulation by demonstrating how the Nation of Islam itself is replaced by consumer goods that only signify within the logic of the marketplace. James writes a simulated world where the radical abstraction of things and ideas into the signifiers of exchange usurps all other realities.

This pervasive simulation enables the novel's ongoing attack on nationalism as a viable political mode. In one of the most scathing renderings of Black Power nationalism, Bubbles visits a multiplex theater where "MALCOM X'S CADAVER strolls onstage" to perform for a "muppetlike" black audience. Maggots "squirm in his jellied eyeholes" as he dances a soft-shoe, and sings,

   Ideas are getting old.
   So listen closely--
   We haven't got very much longer
   Fictions have taken hold
   You think--
   "Consciousness rising!"
   But I say--
   "Worms are writhing!"
   Eating your very soul. (89)

The resurgence of popular interest in Malcolm X and other nationalist leaders that permeated the culture of the late 1980s figures here as the mass consumption of a figure who is not only dead but a morbid reflection of the commodity form itself. (7) By having Malcolm perform his song in the style of the minstrel, the text equates the rhetorical methods that nationalists employed to interpellate the black public with the mass-produced blackness that was the minstrel tradition. In this sense, the narrative suggests that nationalist techniques for raising consciousness suffer from the same acute morbidity as the commodified blackness that preceded it historically. Through the radical abstraction of simulation, the text equates death, political obsolescence, and racist representation; this arithmetic enables the delegitimation of minstrelsy and nationalism.

Especially remarkable about the scene is how indebted the novel's strategies are to the very abstraction, recombination, and morbidity that the simulative commodity makes available. Malcolm X can be mobilized as a means to indict the black public because he and his nationalism are viewed as dead. He announces as much when he sings,

   I speak to you
   From another dimension
   Addressing
   your afrocentric intentions.
   Well-secluded
   I see all." (90-91)

The omniscience of the fallen nationalist mirrors the omniscient text, and both achieve their knowingness through death. Malcolm's location in "another dimension," that of the dead, underscores the fact that only by dwelling in the moroseness that is simulation does the novel telescope disparate cultural discourses (minstrelsy and black nationalism) or historical developments (the Black Power movement and Afrocentricity). Moreover, the passage takes genuine pleasure in the effects achieved by lingering amidst Malcolm's decay. After the nationalist hoofer leaves the stage, he bows, and "his arm peels from its socket, dropping to the floor. Malcolm X walks backstage, followed by his crawling arm." The excess of the text's gallows humor is identical to the pleasures produced with reference to the commodity's disintegrative effects. Negrophobia avoids mourning the decay of the nationalist corpse, or corpus, precisely because its end produces the occasion for humor and aesthetic invention--that is, pleasure in death. The narrative exploits the instability of late capital by mobilizing its tendency toward radical abstraction both to delegitimate competing political modes and to revel in the disintegrative possibilities made available by the commodity form.

By employing terms such as "pleasure" and "excess" to characterize James's aesthetic, I necessarily foreground my indebtedness to Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text (1976). In Barthes's work the sensual gratification of textuality stems from a "bliss" produced by the "cohabitation of languages working side by side," and thus through the sensation of being "gorged with language like children who are never refused anything" (4, 8). The sensual allure of Barthes's pleasure stems from the lack of any instrumental or strategic agendas in the deployment of language. Seduced by language's polysemy, Barthes views any interpretive focus on "critique" or "tactical aims" as necessarily antithetical to what he describes as the "perversity" of textual pleasure (12). But to embrace fully Barthes's inclination to celebrate the inscrutability of signification would be to elide the historical and political foundations of James's aesthetic. While his text trades in a kind of pleasure, the play of the signifier in his text is neither boundless nor without strategic intent. In this regard, James's work intersects with a tendency within poststructuralism without fully acceding to the desire for a literary and critical practice that has no instrumental agenda as such. James writes a pleasure that often pointedly tracks its relationships to historical modes of racial and political representation; his work thus pushes back strongly against a strain in poststructuralism that routinely celebrates the opacity of polysemy.

James's novel further traffics in the historicity and materiality of representation when Bubbles Brazil stumbles upon a rally hosted by a nationalist spokesperson named Uncle H. Rap Remus. After being doused with colored paints that conceal her white skin, Bubbles manages to infiltrate a meeting between Remus and his followers the Leopard Men. The group builds its nationalism by recoding the signifiers of white American nationalism to serve their own purposes. Described as "restless throngs of RASTAFARIANS," they wear "black leopard-head-hooded animal-hair hides, with withered white penile organs woven into the ends of their tangled dreads" (73). Through their sartorial style, the Leopard Men invert the phallic domination of white men and recode the primitivist signifiers of the jungle as expressions of their own political agency. Paradoxically, the plasticity of the nationalist identities that they fashion to achieve a communal plenitude and resist white dominance is also only conceivable because capital has produced blackness as a set of portable signifiers. It is thus by staging the necessary interdependence of white capital and black nationalism that the novel upsets the pretense of radical alterity claimed by nationalists. Binding nationalism and the commodity more fully, the text presents two of the Leopard Men as if they were living licorice candies. When one convert recognizes his status as candy, he fashions his sweetness as the very sustenance of revolutionary politics: "I ain't nobody's nigga baby no mo'! From now on, my politically correct self-definition is Congolese Confection--the revolutionary sweet designed to kill whytey! Eat me baby an' you one dead hunkie" (81). This strategy soon begins to dissolve when Uncle H. Rap Remus mimics the inversion in the public ritual of the Leopard Men. By baptizing Bubbles Brazil in front of his followers, Remus aims to "wash dis wayward chile! We gwine slap d'whyte man's stains from a her soul!" (81). The emancipatory recoding of the Aminites dissipates as Bubbles Brazil enters the baptismal water and carnivorous worms begin to burst out of her body. The worms then give chase to the Leopard Men and their confectionary insurgents. Upon capturing Remus, the creatures "chew holes through his pupils and leap from his eye sockets" (85). The worms that emerge out of Bubbles Brazil's body are a perfect simulation of the Aminites' own efforts to garner authority by donning the phalli of white men. That is, Bubbles generates the simulacra of the phallus that predicts and effectively contains the resistance that the Leopard Men adopt. Bubbles demonstrates that the nationalist strategies of inversion are themselves already inside the reproductive apparatus of late capital and therefore can be summarily anticipated, simulated, and overcome. In a cycle of recursion, the nationalism of Remus and the Leopard Men can only reiterate the death that capital invented.

This disintegrative aesthetic in the novel should make readers skeptical of arguments that position the narrative as a labor to reclaim the ends of nationalism. Even the quasi-nationalist cultural politics that James himself routes through Voodoo cannot preserve its integrity once the text accepts a wager with simulated blackness. It would not be unreasonable to interpret the character "Maid" as a representation of James's investment in the oppositional character of Voodoo. One might read her as a figure deployed to subvert the power of the minstrel type by foregrounding the vulgar qualities of this representational economy. When we initially encounter her, the narrator describes her as a "monstrous, mammy-sized cookie jar of a woman with doughy animal features and crazed incandescent eyes" (8). Certainly, this defamiliarizing tactic foregrounds the &formative nature of the type as it has been produced historically. Maid further atomizes the maternal aura of the Mammy when she drops a "live white mouse" into a steaming pot of "Sal's Hominy Grits" (9). Initially, these playful inversions seem consistent with the mode of satire that James associates with Gede. The challenge that Voodoo potentially holds for racist representation, however, has less clearly subversive effects when Maid invokes this power to serve her affirmative agenda. She puts a curse on Bubbles, but that curse is only issued once she realizes that her white nemesis has secretly read her entire collection of "sacred books" that are "not fo d'eyes o' white folks!" (14). As it turns out, then, Bubbles, the spectral disembodiment of whiteness, has already consumed the texts of Voodoo. And so the evocation of this religious practice to serve a liberating political agenda is compromised from the outset.

The troubles besetting Maid's efforts to put a curse on Bubbles multiply as she enacts her Voodoo ritual. With mortar and pestle in hand she grinds a concoction of "K-Y jelly," "berries from the belladonna branch, crumbles of henbane," and "a compressed square of marijuana buds" (50). Aided by this amalgam and the Voodoo Gods, she plans to drive Bubbles insane. For "If papa doc kin bring 'bout d'sassination ob d'res'dent ob d'Nited States wif hisjuju, ah kin cer'inly drive a young whyte gal crazy wif mine!" (48). She compares her curse on Bubbles to the historical incident in which Haitian president Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier infamously claimed that his Voodoo curse on John F. Kennedy brought about the president's 1963 assassination. (8) While Duvalier's curse might be construed as a nationalist challenge to white imperial power, his authority and his invocation of Voodoo are more often associated with the dictatorship that he sustained through violent policing of Haitian citizens and the murder of dissidents. (9) To link Voodoo to Papa Doc Duvalier is not to embrace the power of diasporic culture; rather, it is to position Maid within a nationalist enterprise that produced death and subjection for Haitian citizens. And the fatal inadequacy of Voodoo as politics plays itself out in Maid's case when Bubbles reverses her curse. While the Maid waits for "dat bellydonna" to take effect on Bubbles, the latter sets in motion a Voodoo simulation of her own making. In it, actress Marlene Dietrich begins to sing "Hot Voodoo," a song from her 1932 film of the same tide. The Maid listens in shock as she hears "dat blond Venus Nazi ho bitch singin' dat phony hoodoo song ... in a gorilla suit 'mongst all dem big-lipped Niggas. Ain't dis 'bout a blip! Dat chile try'n drape me in m'own shit!" (54). Maid recognizes at this moment that Bubbles has defeated her challenge to white supremacy through a masterful simulation of the counter itself. The insurgent potential of Voodoo turns inevitably towards death when Maid issues an "unearthly wail of anguish" and screams, "M'hands! Deys meltin'! N' m'feet! Deys meltin' too!" (55, 54). Thus, James's casting of the novel as a Voodoo subversion is upset by the text's presentation of the religion as an inadequate challenge to a culture that reinstates white hegemony through simulation. The sinister implications of the scene are confirmed when Bubbles scoffs, the "Belladonna bucked and kicked like a mule. But I hadn't been a Deadhead for nothing. I know those thorny, vine entangled wilds of psychedelia as well as I knew the mystical significance of the lines on nay own hand" (55). As with the nationalism of the Leopard Men, simulation anticipates the mystical powers of Voodoo fully. In the efforts of James and others to recover what critic Ronald Judy refers to as the "subversive act" of Negrophobia, they may well have imposed outmoded critical assumptions on a text that has its sights set elsewhere (178). The novel cannot seem to generate any form of black belonging that can maintain its integrity in the face of the new culture of simulations, and part of the lesson that the novel has to teach its readers may well lie in its capacity to map and navigate the spectral landscapes of our time.

Furthermore, through the moribund resistance of Maid and the Leopard Men, James formalizes the historical belatedness of his novel's place in the discourse on postmodernity. For earlier theorists of late capitalist culture--most notably poststructuralists like Baudrillard, Barthes, and Foster--the ideal form of cultural politics within this economy entailed precisely the kind of recoding that James himself explicitly articulates. Despite the capacity of capital to incorporate opposition into its own simulative strategies, Foster embraces subcultural practices because they reinvest "signs and commodities with a symbolic ambivalence that threatens the principle of equivalence on which our social and economic exchange is based" (171). Borrowing explicitly from Baudrillard, Foster holds onto the prospect of recoding capitalist simulations as a means to disrupt and resist their totality. Similarly, Barthes saw in contemporary society's constant production of social mythologies a pernicious means of inducing the public's unconscious assent to dominant discourses. In his view "the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?" (Mythologies 135; original italics). James announces his departure from such modes of recoding by writing the inadequacy of the sign as a political foil to the simulative. With equal potency, then, the disintegrative logics of late capitalism surface both as a mechanism for countering the hegemony of simulation itself and as a technology for anatomizing the resistant strategies that are the philosophical legacies of black nationalism and post-structuralism.

Macabre Shuffle

The tense interplay between simulation and communal identity that drives Negrophobia propels Paul Beatty's White Boy Shuffle with equal vigor. This bildungsroman focuses on the life of Gunnar Kaufman, an African American youth whose life takes him from the tranquility of white American suburbia to the ghettoes of Los Angeles and onward to academia on the East Coast. Born in the early 1970s, Gunnar grows up largely unaffected by the deprivations and exclusions of the Jim Crow era. Reared in the white suburbs of Santa Monica, California, he seems a walking exemplar of Spillers's argument that "the black upwardly mobile ... subject has not only 'fled' the old neighborhood ... but, just as importantly, has been dispersed ... to unwonted sites of work and calling" (72; original italics). To begin understanding Gunnar's post-segregation world, one must attend to the dislocation of black subjects in relation to the segregated communal enclave. Gunnar's troubles begin when he is thirteen years old and his mother decides to move him from his blissful exile in the white suburbs back to the locus of communal experience, a poor black and Latino neighborhood in West Los Angeles called Hillside. His mother's rationale for relocating Gunnar and his two sisters to Hillside has nationalist overtones in that she sees the neighborhood as the seat of "traditional black experience" (46). The fantasy of homecoming that Ms. Kaufman endorses, then, aims to reverse the alienation that is a consequence of desegregation by reintegrating into the site of an organic blackness.

Troubling Ms. Kaufman's fantasy of homecoming from the outset are the disturbing ways that capital has affected that community. In one critical scene a production crew from a company called "Moribund Videoworks" invades Hillside to film their "newest rap phenoms, the Stoic Undertakers" (76). The macabre vocabulary that the text uses to describe the film company references the culture of spectacular death that surrounded "hard-core" rappers during the 1980s and 1990s. But this rhetoric also tracks out the commodification that blackness undergoes within the corporate culture that is hip-hop. At the core of the film crew's sensibility is a primitivist hunger for a blackness that reflects the antithesis of Western modernity. The crew's director, Edgar Barley Burrows, true to his namesake, imagines himself "on Safari through the L.A jungle. A caravan of film trucks and RVs lurched through the streets like sheet-metal elephants swaggering through the ghetto Serengeti. Local strong-armed youth bore the director over the crowds in a canopied sedan chair ..." (76). Burrows subscribes to the bygone primitivist fantasy of Tarzan and enacts its assumptions with all the abandon of blank parody. And so powerful is the colonial simulation that Burrows brings to Hillside that it usurps riving reality. As Gunnar puts it, "[m]y street was a soundstage and its machinations of poverty and neglect were Congo cinema verite" (76). In the sense that Burrows and the crew reproduce a fantasy of interracial relations that is itself a mass-culture product--a reproduction of a reproduction--they represent the contemporary economy of simulations.

The insinuation of the simulative commodity form into the daily life of the community upsets the Kaufman family's return to the real in other respects as well. When Gunnar first arrives in Hillside, he struggles to overcome his alienation from a social environment in which he is perceived as "the whitest Negro in captivity" (52). He inadvertently challenges this perception and subsequently garners credibility in the neighborhood through his skills on the basketball court. His redemption takes place when, upon first playing basketball, he discovers an unconscious capacity to perform "high-flying kung fu triple-feature you-killed-my-teacher-you-dirty-bastard" dunks (75). In one sense, evoking Gunnar's unconscious ability to dunk a basketball seems to confirm one of the most egregious assumptions of biological essentialism. The black man must be born to dunk. Nonetheless, the scene of Gunnar's communal acceptance also steeps racial belonging in the impurities of a commodity culture that militates against any notion of racial essence as such. The fact that Gunnar's homecoming can only be imagined by his peers through a bricolage of 1970's kung fu cinema and hip-hop vernacular recasts the essential as the simulated. The very language of communal acceptance registers how thoroughly communion has been overcome by the simulacra of cinema. Moreover, Gunnar himself is dimly aware that accession to this simulated belonging is tantamount to a pact with death. As he dunks, "legs kicking in midair as if I were suspended from an invisible noose," he wonders, "What the fuck was I doing with a basketball in my hands?" (74). While Gunnar achieves good standing by allowing himself to be refashioned as a spectacular object for collective consumption, acceding to that exchange forces him to surrender the prospect of agency and enter the lyncher's noose.

For this novel too, however, the penetration of communal belonging by the commodity form is not only a negative experience but also an occasion for more generative possibilities. The very fatality of Gunnar's evolving status as a commodity allows him to achieve a critical purchase on his own condition. Because of their skills on the basketball court, Gunnar and his best friend Nick Scoby become icons of black communal belonging and authenticity. They eventually earn scholarships to attend Boston University. An even more remarkable player than Gunnar, Scoby shoots the basketball so brilliantly that he never misses. Eventually Scoby becomes so distressed by the culture's scopophilic fascination with him that he commits suicide. But for Gunnar the attention that they receive produces a new reflexivity about their condition.

   We have no place to hide, no Superman Fortress of Solitude, no
   reclusive New England hermitages for xenophobic geniuses like Bobby
   Fischer and J. D. Salinger. Successful niggers can't go back home
   and blithely disappear into the local populace. American society
   reels you back to the fold. "Tote that barge, shoot that
   basketball, lift that bale, nigger ain't you ever heard of Dred
   Scott?" (118-19)

Gunnar becomes increasingly aware that contemporary modes of commodification actually reinforce the subjection that has pervaded black life since the nineteenth century. With the inevitability of the dialectic, his standing within simulated blackness seems also to generate the critical consciousness that allows Gunnar to develop an oppositional stance toward capital.

It makes perfect sense to understand Gunnar's broader repudiation of simulated belonging as an extension of the critical perspective that he develops in becoming a spectacular commodity. In addition to his simulative status as an athlete Gunnar achieves national notoriety as a poet. Initially, his poetic skills provide another avenue for overcoming his alienation from his community in Hillside. He ascends "to poete maudit for" a local gang called "the Gun Totin' Hooligans and by extension the neighborhood" (105). While he enjoys a momentary satisfaction from "movie money" earned through his reading of "sappy epithalamiums at weddings and dour elegies at funerals," this role as the voice of the Hillside community is ultimately revealed to be inseparable from the commodity culture (105). Once he leaves Hillside to attend Boston Univeristy, he discovers that the poems granting him access to an authentic blackness have also made him into a cult celebrity in white poetry circles. Upon attending his first poetry writing class, he learns that one of his peers owns a coffee-table book that features pictures of his poems. "Ghetotopia: An Anthropological Rending of the Ghetto through the Street Poems of an Unknown Street Poet Named Gunnar Kaufman" confirms that even Gunnar's faith in urban poetry as a definitive communal aesthetic is not outside the reach of commodity culture. He finds himself suffering the contradictions of a late capitalism that, as Foster argues, routinely "transforms" ethnic others "into serial consumers" of "simulacra of their own expressions" (168). Upon realizing the inescapable character of late capital, Gunnar strips his clothes and walks through the Boston University campus nude. His white peers follow him home where they suggest that he publish a volume of his poetry because the "people, your people, need to see your work" (180). As they make this suggestion, Gunnar curls himself into a ball while his Japanese wife Yoshiko "cleaved the crack of my ass like a hacksaw" and "plucked a hair from my anus" (180, 181). Gunnar's nude escapade and Yoshiko's anal sadism stage the effective dismantling of the productive relationship between the black community and literary production. Even though he ultimately agrees to publish his poems in a volume with the tide Watermelanin, he does so in a condition of the most abject exposure. His status as poetic spokesperson is a vulgar violation, a submission to a benevolent sadism. The moment of achieving poetic voice in Beatty's novel is therefore also the disappearance of the poet's voice and the community within the commodity form. But strikingly, the passage does not so much lament this fact as inhabit the excesses of that abjection. Beatty transforms the demolition of the relation between artist and community into a painfully inventive burlesque, an occasion for the novel to dwell in the black writer's abjection as the locus of generation.

From one vantage point, this laying bare of the artist's compromised relationship to communal interest also grounds the pleasures of the novel's aesthetic, which is to argue that the novel writes the masochistic exposure of this scene as the foundation for its political and aesthetic protocols elsewhere in the novel For example, when Gunnar introduces himself to readers in the first chapter, he does so in a language of playful self-negation: "Unlike the typical bluesy earthy folksy denim-overalls noble-in-the-face-of-cracker-racism aw shucks Pulitzer-Prize-winning protagonist mojo magic black man, I am not the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son.

I wish I were, but fate shorted me by six brothers and three uncles ..." (5). Rather his lineage is one "[p]reordained by a set of weak-kneed DNA to shuffle in the footsteps of a long cowardly queue of coons, Uncle Toms, and faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers" (5). The narrative employs a striking rhetorical effusiveness in describing what might otherwise be the tragic dissipation of the racial spokesperson. The humor of inversion, rhetorical invention, and comic excess of Gunnar's inability to achieve credibility as bearer of cultural authenticity reveal a narrative working to induce a kind of bliss from within disintegration. If black political reality as Gunnar imagines it has been atomized, his language pursues the possibilities of things falling apart.

The union of disintegration and potentiality comes to the foreground in even more potent ways when Gunnar further elaborates his roots in failed communal belonging. As he recounts the Kaufman genealogy, Gunnar evokes his progenitor, Swen Kaufman, the only free black ever to "run away into slavery" (12). In narrating this tale Gunnar inverts the classic trajectory of the slave narrative, for Swen leaves his home in Boston in order to pursue his love of formal interpretive dance by moving south into bondage. Frustrated by those in the north who want him to perform in "coony-coony minstrel productions," Swen turns southward to the "Cotton Belt" in search of a place that appreciates his "Frenchified royal court body syncopations" (12). Upon his arrival at a plantation owned by the Tannenberry family, Swen seeks to aestheticize slavery rather than rail against it. Hearing the "urgency of the work songs" and watching the slaves labor, he develops his plan to create a "'groundbreaking' dance opera," a "renegade piece that intertwined the stoic movement of forced labor with the casual assuredness of the aristocratic lyric" (13). These aspirations lead him to understand himself as the "dancer-in-residence" on the plantation, and his lofty self-regard alienates him from fellow slaves who "hate him" (13). Swen's alienation from community eventually results in an aesthetic triumph of sorts. Outraged by his slave's high manners, Master Tom Tannenberry proceeds to whip Swen "Demi-plie--five lashes. Second position--ten lashes" (14). As Swen insists on the integrity of his art in the midst of repressive violence, the slaves begin to "admire" the choreographer's "persistence and to appreciate his art" (14). After the beating, he labors to sustain this art in ways that are more surreptitious yet more communal in nature. His wedding provides an occasion for the inclusion of fellow slaves in a carefully choreographed artistic event:

   On the wedding day they danced. To the accompaniment of body drums
   and fiddles, maids of honor, bridegroom, and guests swooped across
   the fields. They tightroped the tops of fences many had never even
   dared look at, much less touch. For most it was the first time
   they'd been within twenty yards of the fences. The audience
   consisted of the pregnant Missus Tannenberry and her four
   daughters, trailing the action as it traversed the grounds,
   applauding at the appropriate intervals. In the middle of the
   ceremony the Tannenberry women held the broom, cheering as the
   happy helot couple jumped over it, kissing in midair, landing in
   matrimony. In the last moment the adults passed unlit torches to
   the children, then lay in the slaves' graveyard next to the mounds
   of earth and rotted tombstones. The children peered into the
   windows of the bighouse, the still unlit torches resting on their
   bony shoulders. Then they too went to the graveyard and lay down
   next to their parents. Missus Tannenberry cried for a month
   afterward and on every anniversary of Clocinda and Swen's regal
   wedding visited the graveyard. (15)

Only through Swen's incongruous synthesis of slave and European high culture do the bondsmen ritualize a transgressive relationship to the dominant order. This would seem to confirm Dubey's suspicion that contemporary writers pine nostalgically for an identical relationship between collectivism and aesthetics. Yet to read the passage as a straightforward reunion between the aims of black elite artistry and mass interests is also to miss the novel's sly disruption of such an interpretation. It seems that the text cannot imagine this aesthetic and collective triumph without also placing the slaves in communion with the dead. Only as the slaves revere death and move toward the sublimation of the disintegrative do they initiate a resistant cultural practice. That community as such is thus haunted by a grave, a negation that threatens its pretense of cohesion. What the passage actually celebrates, therefore, is the potentiality of an aesthetic wedded to death, an artistry committed thoroughly to the incongruous aesthetic maneuvers made possible by the disintegrative effects of death in the commodity form. The very idea that this passage shows a cohesive slave community is troubled by the fact that Mrs. Tannenberry and her daughters are the primary audience for the event. That is, the transformative effects of the group aesthetic on white women displaces black communion as a primary end of the event. In its macabre celebration of disintegration and its dislocation of culture's production of racial belonging, the novel frustrates what initially seems a happy nexus of art and community.

This unsettling mixture of collectivism and death shapes the representation of Gunnar's own present as well. His poetry gains him acceptance among the Gun Totin' Hooligan gang, and they enlist him as a member. He endures a test of his commitment to the gang after a store robbery in which a falling malt liquor bottle kills one of their members. They vent their rage obliquely at a rival gang, the Ghost Town Black Shadows. In a dazzling set piece the text turns what could have been an expression of realist street vengeance into high camp. The Gun Totin' Hooligans proceed to disguise themselves as women in order to distract their enemies before bombarding them with primitive arrows and balloons filled with liquid drain cleaner. Particularly suggestive is the way that the novel employs the trappings of commodity culture to dismantle the fantasy of masculine bonding that the gang represents. Gunnar initially views the gang's greeting--"My nigger. What it be like, black?"--as the ultimate marker of insider status, yet this scene instead foregrounds the homoerotic nature of the gang's bond (57). Dressed in "stuffed halter tops with blue toilet paper, daintily knotted blue scarves about their necks, smoothed pleated blue skirts," they "fought over who would have the largest breasts and who would wear the expensive Wanton perfume" (106-07). Their recourse to commodities as a means to concealment and violence exposes the homoeroticism underpinning both their bond with one another and their violence against rival gangs. As they face their rivals, one Gun Totin' Hooligan "ran his tongue over his top lip, sending the Ghost Town gangsters into a frenzy. The courtship ritual began with the sugary sweet words of budding love" (109). After the Hooligans make their assault, Gunnar notes, "none of the boys bothered to remove their wigs or makeup" (111). Amidst a car stereo blaring music from Delibes's opera Lakme, wherein two lovers "declare their undying devotion, then they die," Gunnar "celebrated life by hitting the high notes with the rest of the fellows" (111). Only as the Hooligans inhabit the simulated version of their retribution and desire do they experience pleasure. In other words to occupy their death in the commodity, to dwell within the simulation of desire and retribution is the pleasure and possibility of the text.

Death As Possibility

Gunnar's growing engagement with mortality is indicative of the complex interplay between death and commodification in The White Boy Shuffle and Negrophobia. These works provide distinctive meditations on the problems that attend speculation about what Maurice Blanchot aptly terms "death as possibility." Blanchot coins this phrase in part to interrogate the commonplace notion that one's death can provide a mode of agency. He traces such assumptions in matters ranging from authors who assert their enduring legacy in death to the veneration of suicide as an affirmation of being. For any number of thinkers, the "decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death" (96). In this sense the recourse to death, having "death within reach, docile and reliable, makes life possible, for it is exactly what provides air, space, free and joyful movement: it is possibility" (97). Thus, Blanchot rewrites evocations of death as discursive operations that concretize the autonomy of the subject. He punctures this mystification by asking, "Do I myself die, or do I not rather die always other from myself, so that I would have to say that properly speaking, I do not die?" (98; original italics). He questions the assertion of the subject's autonomy in death precisely because mortality insures no agency for the subject but rather erases the "I." Or as he writes in relation to suicide, "Whoever wants to die does not die, he loses the will to die. He enters the nocturnal realm of fascination wherein he dies in a passion bereft of will" (105). For death is "never a relation to a determined moment any more than it bears any determined relation to myself" (104). It is therefore the endeavor to commute the unknowable into a concrete determination of the subject that Blanchot so powerfully demystifies.

The questions that Blanchot raises with respect to death's possibilities only multiply as one addresses works of literature that equate commodification with death. In Beatty's novel, the difficulties of that risky proposition are nowhere more apparent than in the novel's evocation of suicide as a national poetics. Frustrated simultaneously by the absence of viable political alternatives for black Americans and his own inability to slip the noose of commodification, Gunnar inadvertently posits black suicide as an option. This prospect comes about at Boston University where Gunnar serves double duty as poet and basketball celebrity. After being asked to give a speech at a divestment rally, Gunnar laments, "today's black leadership isn't worth shit." These "telegenic negroes not willing to die. Back in the old days, if someone spoke up against the white man, he or she was willing to die" (200). Retooling one of Martin Luther King's civil rights era maxims, Gunnar pronounces, "I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die" (200). In this articulation Gunnar acknowledges the impossibility of reviving the modes of bodily sacrifice that civil rights activists forged, and begins to articulate suicide as an alternative. Gunnar eventually proposes to consolidate human agency and autonomy by determining his own death. He articulates this logic in a conversation with his friend Psycho Loco who sees suicide as "taking the easy way out" (226). Viewing America's treatment of black men as inevitably lethal, Gunnar retorts, "Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction" (226). To take away the nation's capacity to issue death is thus to reclaim the autonomy of the subject by rendering morbidity a possession that can be reclaimed. It is this very instrumental notion of death that might lead readers to interpret the novel as one that holds a lingering nostalgia for the wholeness of civil rights activism or black nationalism. The text elaborates this interpretive prospect when blacks across the nation become utterly seduced by the idea of national suicide. Gunnar's speech inspires a black nationalist named Dexter Waverly to abandon his superficial rhetoric and kill himself in protest against Boston University's financial support of a corrupt African leader. The fact that this suicide actually forces the university to rescind its financial commitment to the African nation seems to confirm the instrumental use of death and makes Gunnar a national celebrity. Reports "of black people killing themselves indiscriminately across the United States" soon emerge in the national media (201). Additionally, at Gunnar's request, masses of people begin forwarding him their suicide poems. In a world in which all blackness has been thoroughly commodified Gunnar recommends a poetics and politics that seeks to reassert black national agency by rewriting death as a possibility. Or to frame this challenge to commodification somewhat differently, black suicide offers an intriguing twist on Baudrillard's vision of agency within capital. In his formulation, late capital achieves its hegemony through a symbolic substitution of labor for death. The "equivalence of wages and labour power presupposes the death of the worker," for a "man must die to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage" (Symbolic 39). In this sense, then, the wage labor system is always a curious commutation of an execution that capital itself has already performed. Capital's "gift" is the sleight of hand whereby it induces the worker's symbolic death by making him a wage earner and then allows that worker the "gift" of buying his own resurrection through labor. This is the unilateral nature of the gift that sustains capital's dominance. But if "domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity of the gift without countergift ... then the only solution is to turn the principle of its power back against the system itself: the impossibility of responding or retorting. To deft the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death" (Symbolic 36-37; original italics). Following a parallel logic, national suicide in Beatty's novel draws its power from its simulation of capital's own unilateral gift, the production of black death as that which refuses exchange.

Despite the allure of death's possibility, the novel ultimately negates this gambit. Gunnar consistently refuses his role as the messianic leader of the masses. His rise to eminence brings increased surveillance by the police and almost constant media scrutiny. After returning to Hillside, the scopophilia becomes so acute that Gunnar and his pregnant wife leave their apartment to take up residence at the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat. In his exile, he hopes that he can find a more authentic mode of expression. He subsequently founds the Bacchanalian MiseryFest, an open-mike poetry session that takes place under the "simple but effective" stage lighting provided by orbiting LAPD helicopters (219). While the events do allow for a communal experience of artistic expression--"neighborhood players read poetry, held car shows, sang, danced"--the political and aesthetic integrity of the events seem compromised by their very spectacular nature (219). One night, in commemoration of Nick Scoby's suicide, Gunnar reads a poem and stages an act of self-mutilation that underscores the limits of death as a paradigm of symbolic resistance. The poem articulates the model of suicide as resistance that asserts death as a unilateral gift. The piece submits that the most potent effects of slave rebellion lie not in the effects of infanticide on the "consciousness / of a murderous parent" but "in the slave owner's anguished cries / upon discovering / his property permanently damaged." After the master "calculates his losses / forecasts the impact on this year's crop," he "will notice the textual eyes of murder/ suicide / read 'caveat emptor' / let the buyer beware" (222). In one sense, this seems a perfect allegory for death as that which refuses exchange; the poem thus reads as a Baudrillardian offensive against capitalism. But Gunnar's subsequent mutilation of himself his cutting off of his own finger--complicates this politics considerably: "I reeled for a moment, then meticulously wrapped the speckled red-and-white handkerchief around the severed finger, exactly as I'd seen Robert Mitchum do in some American yakuza movie. Staring at the space where my finger used to be, I held my hand high above my head" (223). His audience of "distraught minions interpreted my masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy. The more I tried to deny my ascendency, the more beloved I became" (223). The spectacle of mutilation must be seen as the enactment of the masochism that underwrites the poem's strategy of resistance. Both depend on a vulgar display of black self-mutilation. Gunnar's cynical response also confirms the ultimate bankruptcy of these strategies. Prisoner of both the police and the media at the moment in which he is most resistant to the system, his rebellion is being recycled as part of the dominant order's simulative strategies. He cannot imagine a form of agency without deriving it from a Hollywood film. In this respect, the reclamation of death as a radical subversion of capital is itself vulnerable to the social order that the strategy seeks to challenge. In short-circuiting the utopian potential of revolt, the novel foregrounds the absoluteness of the system's dominance, the inescapability of its atomizing effects. The core contradiction of Beatty's novel, then, does not reside in a vexed nostalgia for coherent community, but in the fact that the text draws euphorically on the abstractions of commodification while foregrounding its insinuation into every sphere of contemporary African American life.

By refusing an equation between death and political agency the novel not only works contrary to Baudrillard's Marxism but also in contradistinction to a seminal current in black cultural theory. Influential works by Sharon Holland and Paul Gilroy imagine that dwelling among and even "resurrecting" the dead serves as both a means to confirm the agency of the individual subject and the racial community. Holland's reading of Morrison's Beloved construes the novel as a labor to resurrect "the 'ghost' of slavery in order to let the dead speak to the living, in order to allow silence to manifest itself in language" (40). By opening up the possibility of communion between the dead child and the living black subjects in the novel, Beloved brings "about the repair of the psychic damage of slavery and serves as an antidote to the beleaguered status of black women in contemporary America" (52). The dead thus make possible a series of reversals, from silence to speech, from damaged to recovered, and from beleaguered to unburdened. Along the same lines, Gilroy's account of transatlantic performances that commemorate the dead also serve to consolidate at once the subjectivity of the black performer and a racial community as such. As he phrases it, the "turn towards death" also "points to the ways in which black cultural forms have hosted and even cultivated a dynamic rapport with the presence of death and suffering" (198). Gilroy interprets musical forms like the blues and jazz as "mnemonic" devices that "preserve and cultivate ... the distinctive rapport with the presence of death which derives from slavery ..." (198, 203). Cultural practices thereby facilitate the reproduction of the death and negativity that attended the African's bondage in New World slavery. It is in this remembrance that Gilroy locates the grounds for a black "racial counterculture" and thus political agency (200). By contrast, in Beatty's work death provides no utopian opposition against late capitalism. Even as Beatry evokes the legacy of death in slavery, he insists that the fantasy of black agency must also be subject to the limits of late capitalist hegemony. The result of the strategy is that it insists on the primacy of the problematic that attends contemporary political economy. This approach contains an implicit charge that insisting on the utopian possibility of the slave's death is in some sense to evade the quandaries of contemporary political economy.

An ambivalence about the achievement of agency through death surfaces in James's Negrophobia in very different terms. A passage featuring a character named Talking Dreads develops a scenario that parallels James's evocation of Voodoo. Whereas Maid fails to use Voodoo effectively because she does not understand the power of simulation to reproduce every act of resistance as part of itself, Talking Dreads overcomes that liability. This being from another planet appears to Bubbles Brazil at times as a "disembodied, dreadlocked head" and at others as an "empty white linen suit" (123). He recounts the story of how he was used by a Scottish female author as the inspiration for a text with the title Lil' Black Zambo. Of course, the title and authorial biography point to Helen Bannerman's notoriously racist children's story Little Black Sambo. Therefore, when readers learn that Lil' Black Zambo is a text based on its author's inability to see Talking Dreads as anything but the racist caricatures in her imagination, the novel implicates Bannerman's text in the same process of misrecognition. Moreover, as the linguistic blend of "zombie" and "Sambo" in the title suggests, the text of Lil' Black Zambo can be read as a representation in which James's investment in Voodoo and the commodity converge. That is, the orthographic changes invoking Voodoo zombies also underscore the text's play with the dead signifiers of racial representation. The text recodes the commodified blackness in Bannerman's original text in order to produce a simulation that takes the original to task. The strategy is evident in the first lines of the simulated text.

      Lil' Black Zambo was a little nigger boy. Or Pickaninny. Or
   jigaboo. Or any number of names we have for little colored
   children--shine, smoke, snowball, dinge, dust, inky, eggplant, and
   chocolate moonpie. And since Lil' Black Zambo lived with his mammy
   in a oneroom hut made of mud and leaves near a croc-infested swamp
   in the Jungle, we can call him 'gator bait, too. (124-25)

The incongruity between the dulcet rhetoric of the children's tale and the crude abjection of Zambo in this stockpiling of racial epithets places the concealed violence of Bannerman's text at the forefront of its simulation. And in this way occupying the dead form of the commodity allows Negrophobia to make the kind of instrumental counter to racism that James imagines as "subverting the perversion." Still, despite James's claim regarding Voodoo, it is Bannerman's commodified representation that allows him to make such a maneuver. The invocation of Voodoo mystifies a set of social relations that have more to do with capital than Haitian religion as such. Moreover, the rebellion that Talking Dreads engages in is more accurately described as simulation than Voodoo. This becomes all the more apparent when he shows Bubbles a secret project to defeat white racism. It involves a simulated town called Garvey's Corner in which all of the citizens appear to be white Americans but are in fact blacks "trained to look, act and think white" (139). These simulated whites are reproduced to "undermine all the rights and freedoms American society has to offer the white race without the slightest detection" (139). In a sense then, the tactic here is to undermine white supremacy by becoming as adept in simulation as the dominant culture.

Ever consistent in its disintegrative aesthetic, however, the novel upsets the utopia that Talking Dreads endorses. In a parallel episode the narrative focuses on the Zombie Master, a self-styled "revolutionary" character. He aims to overthrow white supremacy by building an army of zombies out of the bodies of dead celebrities. JFK and Elvis are among the corpses that he reconstructs in his laboratory. The chief manifestation of the white supremacy that the Zombie Master aims to destroy is Walt Disney. In a brilliant parody of white supremacist ideology, Walt Disney uses all of his mass-culture resources to foment the rage of white Americans and thereby destroy the black race. Giving a speech modeled on the Gettysburg Address, he asks the white Nation to embrace his enduring nativist creed: "Hang the nigger and burn the Jew!" (99). The Zombie Master counters this nationalist plot when he sends hordes of his zombies in to destroy Walt Disney and his theme park, the Disney Magic Mail. As the assault on the park unfolds, the Zombie Master and his favorite Zombie, Elvis, discover Disney asleep in his subbasement casket. Zombie Master begins to drive "the stake into Walt's heart" when he realizes that Disney is literally a robot and therefore "a puppet in his own mad design!" (111). The scene anatomizes a chief problem with investing in the radical insurgency of the dead. A political battle between simulations could turn out to be just that, an empty symbolic endeavor with no consequential stakes. The culture of simulation may have the effect of rendering even symbolic gestures of resistance obsolete; it is this dystopian possibility that the radical visions of Talking Dreads and Baudrillard fail to address.

For both James and Beatty then, the tensions between the aesthetic possibilities of simulated blackness and the fraught prospects of political agency in a world inundated by simulation pose the problem of black postmodernity in terms that exceed the discourse of crisis. One cannot read these texts exclusively as indexes of a crisis in belonging, for they begin with the premise that whatever made older forms of communion possible now only exists as spectral reproduction. And if there is no returning to the past, then these are novels inordinately concerned with the cartography of the present. They probe the possibilities and limits of literature and politics within late capitalism. While they traffic in the recombination made available by simulated blackness, they are also shrewdly aware that these same mechanisms install new forms of racial domination. The timely genius of the novels is that they are neither seduced entirely by the prospect of a radically recoding simulation in the manner of poststructuralists like Baudrillard and Foster, nor held prisoner by Blanchot's suggestion that death makes available only a set of dubious performative operations. Employing the archive of dead signifiers that produce racial difference as mediating terms between death's erasure and possibility, these texts insist on our reconsideration of existing frameworks for reading contemporary black culture. Indeed, the refusal to invest in a politics of authenticity militates against the persistent critical desire to find racial affirmation in black art. It is this longing that shapes the ongoing controversies surrounding not only Darius James but also the visual art of Michael Ray Charles and Kara Walker. (10) Critics take issue with this work because in their minds it reproduces the denigrating minstrel representations of the past. What such commentaries have not addressed is how the art itself challenges the very foundations of this critique by undermining the concept of a utopian black expressive culture that transcends or inverts capital. As I have argued, a useful alternative to indicting the work for its complicity in racist representation is to interpret it as an aesthetic tendency that both grapples with the difficulties posed by late capitalist political economy and formalizes its own ideological implication in the contradictions produced by that system. To wish that this art were like that of another time is to evade a present not adequately examined and perhaps to refuse the potentially unreal future of race.

Works Cited

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Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. 1972. Trans. Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos P, 1981.

--. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

--. Symbolic Exchange and Death. 1976. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage, 1993.

Beatty, Paul. The White Boy Shuffle. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Bernstein, Richard. "Black Poet's First Novel Aims the Jokes Both Ways." Rev. of The White Boy Shuffle, by Paul Beatty. New York Times 31 May 1996, late ed.: C25.

Blanchot, Maurice. "Death as Possibility." The Space of Literature. 1955. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982. 87-107.

Desmangles, Leslie G. The Faces of the Gods: Voudou and Roman Catholics in Haiti. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.

Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

Favor, J. Martin. Authentic Blackness. The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Fein, Esther. "Book Cover Is Questioned." New York Times 17 June 1992, late ed.: C16.

Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Seattle: Bay P, 1985.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1990.

Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and Black Subjectivity. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 19.44 New York: Continuum, 1972.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Roufledge, 1988.

James, Darius. Negrophobia: An Urban Parable. New York: Citadel P, 1993.

--. Interview with Christian Haye. Bomb 40 (Spring 1992): 12-14.

--. Interview with Rob Hardin. 4 Feb. 1994. Rob Hardin personal web page. 20 Aug. 2007. <http:users.rcn.com/scrypt/Darius_James_Int.html>.

Jordan, Jennifer. "The New Literary Blackface." Black Issues Book Review 4.2 (March/April 2002): 26-28.

Judy, Ronald A. T. "Irony and the Asymptotes of the Hyperbola." boundary 2 25.1 (Spring 1998): 161-90.

Metraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. Trans. Hugo Charteris. New York: Oxford UP, 1959.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Warren, Kenneth W. So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

--. "The End(s) of African American Studies." American Literary History 12.3 (Fall 2000): 637-55.

West, Cornel. "The Postmodern Crisis of Black Intellectuals." Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times. Monroe, ME: Common Courage P, 1993.87-118.

Wideman, John Edgar. Sent for You Yesterday. New York: Vintage, 1983.

Notes

(1.) See Dubey 1-54; Warren, So Black 1-41.

(2.) See Horkheimer and Adorno 120-62.

(3.) This point is affirmed in a wide range of scholarship. See Favor, Huggins, Van Deburg; see also Warren, "The End(s) of African American Studies."

(4.) See Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92; and Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism," New Left Review 152 (1985): 60-73.

(5.) On Gede's place in the Haitian Voodoo pantheon see Desmangles 121; Metraux 112-16.

(6.) Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 121-27.

(7.) For the resurgence of popular interest in Malcolm X, see Adolph Reed, Jr.

(8.) On Duvalier's claim about the assassination, see Abbott 113.

(9.) On Duvalier's use of violence and murder as a means to maintain power, see Abbott 102-58.

(10.) On these controversies see Pamela Newkirk, "Pride or Prejudice?" ArtNews March 1999: 114-17; Pamela Newkirk, "Controversial Silhouette," ArtNews September 1999: 45; and Rhonda Stewart, "Still Here: Artist Kara Walker in Black and White," The Crisis January/February 2004: 49-51.