An Avalanche of Cultural Rejections

As Emily Violet Maddox explains about the work of disability in the writings of Walter Benjamin, “Redemption in a Benjaminian sense means that objects are ruptured from their place in the order of things. Thus, things or, as I will argue, bodies which have been ordered through their use values or their commodity value, can be redeemed by being used otherwise.”1 In making this argument, Maddox takes up a formative approach that guides many contemporary disability studies methodologies developed as “cripistemologies” (a term theorized by Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer).2 Cripistemological approaches challenge the presumed desirability of the normal and reorient readers toward less beaten pathways. Such alternative vantage points and practices dislocate our expectations and foreground productive, more foundational interdependencies otherwise obscured by the myth of independence. The object, as Maddox explains, does not even have to be representative of a disabled person; genres, metaphors, and structures of feeling can all be cripped. For example, Maddox analyzes “the not-quite-human” figures that come into Benjamin’s works as crip imaginings.3 The not-quite-human are those who disrupt received meaning and throw history out of joint by breaking the ground of accreted cultural meanings.One can also see this shared methodology of dislocation in Sari Altschuler’s essay “Touching The Scarlet Letter: What Disability History Can Teach Us about Literature,” where Altschuler demonstrates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s growing fascination with blind cultures of “haptic reading” as a potential model for his alternative portrayal of Hester’s daughter, Pearl, who learns to read by touching the embroidered A on her mother’s dress.4 Likewise, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s essay “How We Got to CRISPR: The Dilemma of Being Human” explores the reverberations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century eugenics in contemporary gene coding and its criteria of antiselection (the “choice” not to have certain kinds of children).5 Each of these works locates readings of disability even in texts (cultural, literary, and otherwise) that are not evidently populated by disabled characters and plots.6 Collectively, they demonstrate how disability serves as a productive means by which to narrate and decipher literary, philosophical, and scientific modes of thought that don’t appear to be about disability at all. Further, all these essays connect because disability teaches readers how to read (literally as in adapted educational pedagogies) for alternative perspectives that don’t conform to practices dictated by narrow cultural norms.A central aspect of cripistemological approaches has been the productive traffic between critical race studies and cripqueer studies.7 The absence of racialized and sexual differences in the essays mentioned above exposes the struggles of disability studies to recognize a subject outside the consumptive contexts of the liberal and neoliberal humanist orders they critique. This catalog of ruptures would destabilize the productive dislocations offered by Maddox, Altschuler, and Garland-Thomson while exposing the texts they choose as embedded in the perspective of bourgeois subjectivities themselves. The critiques in these cripistemological interventions, for example, expose the technofetishism of liberal humanism but cannot break with their own unmarked assumptions of reproductive sexuality and Euro-American racialized universalisms. Thus I employ these comments as a jumping-off point for my own reading of Black, disabled, queer narrative methods on display in Randall Kenan’s 1989 novel, A Visitation of Spirits.Visitation follows two fourth-generation cousins, Jimmy Malachai Greene and Horace Thomas Cross, as they wrestle with the meaning of nonnormative desires taking shape in the heavily religious predominantly Black community of Tims Creek, North Carolina. After a failed alchemical transformation into a bird that will allow him an escape from what he believes to be his deviation from heteronormativity, Horace spends one night as a “demon” visiting community spaces—church, school, football field, theater, barn—that formed the crux of his communal scapegoating as a Black, psychiatrically disabled, gay teenager. This experience of social instability unmoors Horace and triggers an apparent psychiatric break (or what La Marr Jurelle Bruce refers to in the book How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity as “a snap”) that he navigates for the duration of the text.8 Following these visitations of communal institutions, he ultimately commits suicide by turning a gun on himself. Kenan’s novel combines all key aspects of cripistemological analysis: (1) direct and tangential representations of Black, disabled, queer subjects as “narrative prosthesis,” in which the inclusion of disabled bodyminds leaves the text discomforted;9 (2) “aesthetic nervousness,” when the “dominant protocols of the novel” are upset by disability in the aesthetic realm;10 and, finally, (3) at the level of “disabled textuality,” in which the nature of narration itself is significantly disrupted and becomes a cripqueer performative act.11 Kenan’s work represents a critical example of what Houston A. Baker Jr. has called the critical African American literary project: the “mastery of form, and the deformation of mastery.”12In this essay I want to explore the intersections of racialized cripqueer experience by arguing that Visitation requires a cripistemological reading to burrow into Horace’s mounting encounters with community, peer group, and personal impositions of shame.13 I refer to these multiplying encounters with abjection in the title as resulting in “an avalanche of cultural rejections” that denigrate the Black cripqueer teenager’s coming-out experiences. Horace’s suicide occurs among other prominent slaughters in the novel. Like the grueling accounts of hog slaughter and chicken killings undertaken to sustain communities and families through the sacrifice of nonhuman animals, Horace’s “sacrifice” helps purge the Black community around him from “debasements of the flesh.” To show how this descent into debasement is actually a deepening of cripqueer desire, I draw on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of the “seduction of shame” in her book Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (2007). This effort extends the bridge that is forming between critical race theory and queer studies as they cross the methodological and representational innovations in disability studies.Rather than situate the body as a passively imprinted surface on which culture performs its work, critical race and cripqueer theorists approach the contingencies of bodyminds as a “switchpoint” or “point of connection between two signs (or two rather separate connotative fields) where something from one flows toward (is diverted in the direction of) the other, lending its connotative spread and signifying force to the other.”14 I argue that Horace’s experience of psychiatric disability displays a form of neomaterialist strategizing that allows him to pursue gay desire while occupying a biblical world marked by the abjected stigmatization of nonnormative bodies.15 The series of cultural avalanches of rejection Horace undergoes expose the Black community’s fault lines of intolerance based on the internalization of religious beliefs and practices that are, in fact, the product of the African slave-based economy of colonialism. Thus, in Stockton’s terms, the novel becomes a switchpoint between pathologizing cultural sign systems that divert flows of force from one devalued identity to another. Ironically, in the process of this redirection the sign systems of race, disability, and sexuality become supercharged with value that can’t save Horace but advance a connotative spread that transforms all who traverse the novel’s colliding pathways as dislocated switchpoints of desire.A key switchpoint diverting energy from one devalued condition to another in the novel is Horace’s experience of his “psychiatric break.” Horace’s sections (even the magical realist-like fantasies that populate his “delusions”) are narrated from inside the psychic “warping” that he undergoes. Yet, while it is tempting to dismiss these “hallucinations” as the ravings of a mad Black gay man, Horace’s world making actually unveils the inequities of his experiences growing up on this rural palimpsestic site of African slave history. Nearly every structure in the novel surfaces with a nostalgic reference to the Old South that clings to racialized hierarchies of power. Thus, I argue, as in many encounters with psychiatric patients, their comprehension of the world often makes full sense within the logic of their effort to give voice to buried inequities that remain repressed at the level of the family, community, and/or the nation itself.If we approach Horace’s transfiguration in this manner, we understand that his nocturnal visit to the church, the school, the football field, his neighbor’s flowerbed, the green Oldsmobile that he steals, and the abandoned plantation house all come replete with memories of his experiences of cultural rejection and as sites of potential revenge taking.16 They are “delusions” only in the sense that they dredge up repressed cultural inequities that have toppled Horace from his status as a “bright, black student” to one who precipitously begins to fail his classes and fall away from the normative dictates of the predominantly black Tims Creek community. Thus this resurfacing methodology of Kenan’s novel makes the Tims Creek community “come out” and exist on the surface rather than in the repressed underbelly of Black communal and historical relations. Horace’s cripqueer revelations metamorphose from the individual ravings of a madman to the seductiveness of critical thinking that causes buried social violence to become newly visible and thus available for more radical interventions.There has been surprisingly little critical attention paid to A Visitation of Spirits. The most notable exception is Robert McRuer’s extended reading of the novel in The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. Central to McRuer’s arguments are his critiques of identitarian modes of discourse that tend to efface difference in the name of sameness even as they presumably splinter categories of majoritarian normalcy.17 Not only is one of the novel’s main characters, Horace, haunted by ghosts, but his cousin, Jimmy (a young minister at the First Baptist Church and the first Black principal of the elementary school in Tims Creek), is haunted by Horace’s death following his suicide. Jimmy’s “confessions” are not only a product of Christian guilt (although they are partly mobilized by this discourse) but assembled sometime after Horace’s self-obliteration. Thus, while Jimmy does not help Horace during his own confessional coming out, he is haunted by his memory. McRuer reads this haunting at length as the queer transformation of Horace into a version of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “signifying monkey”—a “queer trickster figure” who exposes the degree to which Horace’s queerness productively destabilizes family and community codes of heteronormative conduct.18 Thus, in McRuer’s reading, Horace is never fully erased in the novel. However, his suicide demonstrates Kenan’s “habit of killing off characters not long after they come to an awareness of the ways in which their community needs transforming.”19My goal here is fully in line with McRuer’s reading of the multiplicity of identities hiding beneath the surface of “sameness” that cripqueer bodyminds make surface. Yet I want to further pressure the crip in McRuer’s queercrip reading to encounter Horace’s differences at the level of “disability narrativity” itself.20 To crip Kenan’s representation of racialized gay subjectivity, the novel imports a third term, psychiatric disability, that further refracts the fluidity of identity and the “gender trouble” that Horace’s presence Horace’s transformation into a rather than a and his haunting of Jimmy’s of gay desires also on an in the normative of the novel form The encounter with “the of Tims Creek is through Horace’s experience of a psychiatric In fact, this break out to be not a break at as the pathologizing of would tend to have but Horace’s of a world that is not for Further, Kenan’s narrative break with the of in the Euro-American literary of force a of the into a where identitarian fall away and Horace his desires the and disability he is an out and Black, gay teenager. The has to the of Horace’s “psychiatric in of or not the he is out is in the world of Tims Creek or as inside his own For as Horace explains after his into a rather than a this his a to and as he of the gun in his to be a to what he to it he the in the of his he I have of a a Horace’s nonnormative psychic his psychiatric status as only a of his As he his own from a in the of an at a What can the cripqueer of being by about psychiatric disability in a racialized of African American How can we understand the of the novel as a of the racialized cripqueer and, even less in Stockton’s terms, a of the of Jimmy that Jimmy Horace’s alternative of and the world around him Jimmy has to the of as a to a more on taking of when Horace approaches him with his coming-out After Jimmy is to as a who other Jimmy by Horace that these because they are a of growing the to a more of Jimmy on a religious nonnormative sexuality is something to to be is the Jimmy can while to direct Horace’s energy toward more objects of The that Black and who pursue alternative of sexuality are surfaces the novel in the of and the Thus Horace to and his him without from the to he explains this his Horace’s for his own queerness as a form of internalization that his desires as and his of thinking about as psychiatrically This point of ways of being in Horace’s to as a radical to his from social and as a of his own nonnormative Horace’s of Jimmy and, the palimpsestic text of African slave history in the of Tims Creek, makes his cripqueer of thinking more for the of other that surface the her Shame: and in would to a newly at values for and to understand certain of are by and and also black in We are in this to the value of debasement as a central social even when debasement a Kenan’s novel readers to through the between psychiatric disability, race, and nonnormative sexuality while as social impositions rather than sites of toward Horace the of his nocturnal that has In through these pathologizing Stockton’s of the potential of gay and debasement the from A the into the of the of literary where to and for becomes the of late to its on and Kenan’s of a literary model Horace’s in of from the the and who and his desires for the of that and the As in of Benjamin’s of all things Horace’s his desire for bodies by a Benjaminian than their Horace their bodies as a site of sexual in the where he spends of his school Horace’s never surface with literary As he to the avalanche of cultural within he the that him and an but the key to the literary model and the Euro-American African American as as Jimmy’s to his as a of to and the Kenan’s of Horace’s to a nonnormative of to this of and In the point is that needs the to his as the of and him to that he his of his violence toward as in toward crip what will In Visitation it is not Horace but the community that needs that an with Horace’s alternative rather than The novel exposes the when Black, disabled, gay are to the violence of communal As McRuer the it is not Horace the individual but the and the place in which he that are in of in the novel we the further of in the form of an avalanche of that in a in to Horace’s point of Horace serves as a in an as the for a racialized history one that cannot be in his to but in a form that an of Black history in the from the to the This of history is Horace’s personal experience and as an to of in the of that book of In Kenan’s in the of a that cannot be and the is a of history that to from a by Euro-American The disabled of Visitation allows this of of perspective to As in Horace’s psychiatric allows him to into the of that Tims his psychic of transfiguration him to an otherwise historical this Visitation is the of of in the and a on every in the novel. The palimpsestic of the plantation the neoliberal of structures demonstrates that the slave history the surface of Horace’s “delusions” is shared by the novel Thus the narrative and the of Horace’s alternative psychiatric world another key switchpoint of racialized cripqueer energy in the novel. this racialized history and the family of the is a third of an avalanche of cultural Horace as a Black, disabled, gay in contemporary Tims This history is first by Horace’s for out with a of at his school who are the of the of Tims Thus Horace this as a potential to make his of with who of his own desire, site of and of alternative desires in the of Horace’s Horace his into the only as that of a their of and a black as their they show their inclusion with a form of in that the further exposes Horace’s racialized cripqueer being as with the of his this becomes one in his own series of from the of by of Horace’s rejection from Black at As one Black been with of I we for these What can I what I at the Horace, in other is at the of the his peer a and him Horace’s by and rejection by the Black community, he also experiences rejection by his own family when he to come with his (a body he with other of the of Horace his his that family Yet the is than he he that they would and the family that Horace’s sexual identity will their as and to the Tims Creek religious community, his is the of and they throw him out of the series of all in the avalanche of cultural that to Horace’s suicide. expose the of cultural communities and the resulting from his cripqueer rejection of Horace to the most of gay in the novel. As one family him in to see come to We come this for around to see The at this point is how to from the of to what refers to as the nature of “the to I argue, in line with that Kenan’s novel from narrative in A through the of by and Horace to the of psychiatric as an switchpoint for this mounting avalanche of cultural Horace’s of cripqueer desire resulting in a in the of these scapegoating Horace cannot his desire away from his in he to the community theater, where “the which haunted and an on Horace has with a in an abandoned house that a They not they they not they they not they of the of gay as what and sexual encounters without the goal of reproductive The that Horace on after sexual encounter as a narrative into an that with Stockton’s to the value of in the of example, Horace that the first he of a him and This of exposes as a force but not one that Horace from his nonnormative The two and the of rather than or Thus as an of gay sexual and the is to with Horace’s experience of the violence of the Horace’s desire to other bodies in as an to break Like his in who can their from most of the majoritarian world and when they are most Horace his sexuality as a that cannot and/or be this narrative to all the through the of abjected cripqueer Kenan’s avalanche of cultural form the cripistemological crux of a novel about a body that cannot be for cultural even when the subject experiences his desires as an This is the of Stockton’s of the debasement of of the essays by Maddox, Altschuler, and Garland-Thomson at the their shared arguments what McRuer “the of McRuer this with his on of as a to queer an object, and/or of In I would argue that this of productively the identitarian of disability, and all the above would with this Kenan’s use of psychiatric disability as a form of disabled with the of normative narration and the Euro-American that Horace little as he to his status as a Black, psychiatrically disabled, and gay one of the most aspects of Kenan’s novel is that he have to experiences to at the level of characters with and his novel with as breaking with form to and racialized narrative as Horace with his own to to in cripqueer world encounters are as my with the of the approach attention from more with which the differences disability, alternative psychiatric and For example, Altschuler’s essay on Pearl, as a toward Hawthorne’s the that his with while her Yet, in the essay disability experiences of in a tangential to a more neomaterialist experience of in of Hawthorne’s in at the for the a of a disability family that has the of the struggles with to for personal and educational to of as the to as as a that most of her as in and of of I voice a of on the of the of disability I also employ not that into more of critical not of The neoliberal of that it is a of the and that disability has been and we can about the violence at disabled Such a form of or the of inclusion as a sign of the nation on its to the of a

Chinese history and philosophy · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Japanese History and Culture

• Liberalism and Human Suffering

  Open Access•Asma Abbas•Liberalism and Human Suffering•2010

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• Reading Walter Benjamin with a Disability Lens

  Emily Violet Maddox•Journal of Literary & Cultural…•2021

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• Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame

  Heather Love•English Language Notes•2007

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• Crip Theory

  Robert Mcruer, Michael Bérubé•Crip Theory•2022

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• How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind

  La Marr Jurelle Bruce•How to Go Mad Without Losing Your…•2021

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• Introduction

  Sharon Snyder, D Mitchell•Journal of Literary & Cultural…•2010

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• Cripistemologies

  Merri Lisa Johnson, Robert Mcruer•Journal of Literary & Cultural…•2014

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• Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer

  Carrie Sandahl•GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay…•2003

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• TouchingThe Scarlet Letter

  Sari Altschuler•American Literature•2020

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