Black dada nihilismus: Phillis Wheatley, Malcolm X, and the traumatic politics Of conversion.

Abstract

Responding to what he sees as the "nihilist threat" to African-American culture, Cornel West has called for a "politics of conversion" (West, 1993: 18). Though subject to reproach from critics seeking particular forms of practical political intervention as response to the decay of black civil society, West's existential critique invites consideration of the historical function of violence and negativity in the historical formulation of African-American revolutionary vision. This essay proposes a model for such exploration by linking ante-bellum poet Phillis Wheatley and Black Consciousness activist Malcolm X as writers seeking to appropriate the personal and collective trauma of diasporic experience as sites for both resistance and regeneration. Through careful readings of Wheatley's "To the Earl of Dartmouth" and Malcolm's Autobiography, we can follow the specific figurative and narrative itineraries by which a discourse of insurgency and realization, at once self-effacing and self-constructive, has been forged from slavery to the modernity.

I. Black Avowal: The "Nihilismus Scream"

In the lead essay to Race Matters, referring to what he sees as "the despair and dread that now flood the streets of black America," Cornel West declares that the "most basic issue now facing black America is the nihilistic threat to its very existence" (West, 1993: p. 12). After noting that in previous generations black society created various cultural structures to "ward off the nihilistic threat," West proceeds to call for what he terms a "politics of conversion" as a way to cure this nihilistic affliction, to produce (he says) "a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle" (18).

West's argument has elicited a flurry of critical retorts, from Eric Lott's branding of West's evocation of nihilism as what Albert Murray calls the "fakelore of black pathology," to Stephen Steinberg's dismissal of West's proposed solution of a "politics of conversion" as a vapid sham, so much preacherly hand-wringing without any practical politics. To some extent, West courts suc h reproaches by the deliberate distancing of his discourse from both "philosophic doctrine" (14) and detailed political analysis, favoring instead an avowedly "existentialist" critique of such elusive phenomenological constructs as angst and care, agency and rage, pleasure and love, as they find embodiment in the "lived experience" of contemporary black America. Even so, West's critics fail to take seriously enough his identification of negativity as a nearly constitutive element of black cultural experience and reflection. Nor have they grasped the subtext of his thesis: that is, the need to recuperate and redirect--to re-memory, if you will--the problems of violence and death that were central to the black intellectual and cultural revolution of the 60s, and beyond that to the still-haunting experience of slavery.

I propose to take this still- unsettled argument about nihilism and the politics of conversion swirling around the name "Cornel West" as an occasion to begin rethinking the place of negativity in African-American literary and cultural discourse. Since, following West, I believe that two key historical moments--slavery and the era of the mid-60s to mid-70s known as the Black Arts or Black Consciousness Movement--remain for us the cardinal reference points in considering the evolution of black intellectual and expressive tradition, I've chosen Phillis Wheatley and Malcolm X as exemplary subjects for this exploration. Admittedly, from the perspective of most accounts of this tradition, Wheatley and Malcolm may be the most antithetical pairing imaginable: on one hand, the decorous 18th-century authoress of neoclasssical verse, mostly elegiac, patriotic, and pietistic, a slavegirl bought for a trifle in Boston, named after the schooner that transported her from her native (probably Islamic) Gambia, educated in English and classical letters and steeped in her master's Congregationalist faith, likely freed by virtue of the favorable impression made via her writing on the nobility of England as well as on influential members of the soon-tobe ruling class of America, who yet remained long- forgotten after her death from an infection contracted during childbirth (1); on the other hand, the fiery twentieth-century advocate of black nationalism and militant self-defense, son of a Garveyite Baptist preacher and ardent disciple of a homegrown Islamicism whose prison conversion to the Muslim faith followed years of hustling as pimp, drug-pusher, and burglar in the Harlem underworld, the commanding street orator, activist, and organizer, whose bitter split from Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam led eventually to his February, 1965 assassination in the Audubon Ballroom and, beyond that, to his almost immediate canonization as martyr of uncompromised African-American aspirations for freedom and self-determination. (2) Phillis Wheatley's and Malcolm X's attributes as embodiments of conversion and advocates of black liberation graph a chiasmal play of differences that seemingly defines the vast gap between the slave past and the continuing struggle for black self-realization in modernity.--But that's partly the point, since I fundamentally take to heart West's comprehensive gesture toward the African-American past as a rich and varied reservoir of heroic instruction; and since, more exactly, I want to pursue West's inchoate notion that it is in the legacy of a redeemed, or reimagined, negativity that the subversive similarities of the past and the present--of Wheatley and Malcolm's "crossing," if you will--can be revealed.

My title comes from Amiri Baraka's poem, "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS," which contains these lines:

  Black scream    and chant. [...]