‘What Did I Do to be so Black and Blue?’: Afro-Absurdism in ‘Invisible Man,’ ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Sorry to Bother You’

15 Aug

Declaration

I hereby certify that this dissertation, which is approximately 15,000 words in length, has been composed by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. This project was conducted by me at the University of St Andrews from May 2023 to August 2023 towards fulfilment of the requirements of the University of St Andrews for the degree of MLitt in Postcolonial and World Literatures under the supervision of Dr Lorna Burns.

Date: 15 August 2023

Introduction

Black Consciousness and the Afro-Absurd

Oh God? […] Bewildered we are and passion tossed, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people […] what meaneth this?[1]

— W. E. B. Du Bois.

William R. Jones opens his book Is God a White Racist? with Du Bois’ plea. The indignancy, fury, and confusion it conveys characterise Black existence for Jones, and he feels theology cannot answer its central question: ‘What meaneath Black suffering?’[2] Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, expresses a similar sentiment:

I was hated […] by an entire race. I was up against something unreasoned… [and] for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic. [3]

For Fanon ‘the Black man wants to be white;’ he turns to the delusion of white supremacy to explain his unreasonable suffering, but this neurosis leaves him no less ‘miserable’ than before.[4] In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s unnamed Black narrator listens to Louis Armstrong’s ‘Black and Blue,’ suggesting he likes it because Armstrong ‘made poetry out of being invisible.’[5] Armstrong sings about his suicidal thoughts and professes, ‘I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case// ‘Cause I can’t hide what is in my face,’ showing that this invisibility is tied to a Fanonian neurosis. [6] Ellison’s narrator insists Armstrong is ‘unaware that he is invisible,’[7] and that his ‘own grasp of invisibility aids [him] to understand [Armstrong’s] music.’[8] This ‘grasp’ might be understood through Steve Biko’s notion of ‘Black consciousness.’[9] Biko writes: ‘finding himself on the receiving end of such deliberate (though unjust) cruelty,’ the Black man ‘[drowns] in his own misery;’ ‘this is the first truth […] that we have to acknowledge.’[10] Black consciousness, then, begins with a recognition of how irrational racism has rendered the Black man, who desires reason, hopelessly miserable.

In this way, Black consciousness might precipitate a confrontation with the ‘absurd’ as theorised by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.[11] For Camus, mankind’s ‘deepest desire’— which he calls ‘nostalgia for the absolute’— is to find meaning and reason in the world.[12] However, he insists ‘the world is ‘not reasonable.’[13] The absurd is ‘the confrontation of this irrational [world] and the wild longing for clarity […] in the human heart.’[14] Faced with this situation, Camus writes: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’[15] There are two forms of suicide in his theory: literal self-annihilation, and ‘hope’ or ‘philosophical suicide.’[16] The former is self-explanatory, while the latter is ‘the act of eluding’ the absurd through a ‘leap’ of faith in ‘some great idea that will transcend [life…] give it a meaning, and betray it.’[17] However, Camus insists suicide is not the rational response to the absurd because ‘if I judge that a thing is true, I must preserve it.’[18] Thus, if one has realised that ‘absurdity determines [their] relationship with life… [they] must adapt [their] behaviour to [it] and pursue [it] in all [its] consequences.’[19] One must keep ‘the absurd alive’ by pursuing meaning, whilst simultaneously recognising the impossibility of this task.[20] He calls this ‘absurd revolt,’ and likens it to Sisyphus’ eternal punishment.[21]

Echoes of Camus’ thinking resonate through the work of many Black theorists. Fanon asserts that he ‘came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning,’ but in the face of racism, he is ‘doomed to watch the dissolution of truths […] one after another.’[22] Likewise, Jones recalls that he found his ‘earliest answers to the enigma of black suffering’ in Christianity and bell hooks insists that ‘black folks turn away from reality because the pain of awareness is so great,’ both evoking philosophical suicide.[23] Furthermore, affinities between the Black experience and the Camusian man have led Esther Merle Jackson to suggest that ‘the image of the Negro […] has served as a prototype of […] ‘the absurd.”[24] Indeed, Jean Paul Sartre writes that ‘the black man […] lives the absurdity of suffering in its pure form’ and quotes Paul Niger’s assertion that on “judgment day, Armstrong’s trumpet will be the interpreter of man’s sufferings.” [25] Thus, we can see how Black consciousness of unreasonable racialised suffering might lead one to recognise the absurd human condition. I call this phenomenon Afro-absurdism.

Afro-Absurdist Literature

In this dissertation, I will explore Afro-absurdism in Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016-2022) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018). Jackson has read Ellison’s novel, along with Richard Wright’s Native Son as ‘studies in phases of the absurd sensibility,’[26] while Terri Francis, director of the Black Film Centre at the University of Indiana, has suggested contemporary Black creatives are increasingly concerned with “representing the absurdity of black life.”[27] Moreover, Kevito Clark cites The Eric Andre Show and Atlanta as evidence that ‘Black absurdist comics […] are changing the game,’[28] and Robin Kelly examines the implications of Riley’s description of his film as “an absurdist, dark comedy.”[29]

Beyond this, explicit critical engagement with absurdism in Black literature is sparse, which I attribute to the tendency of critics to follow D. Scott Miller’s ‘Afro-Surreal Manifesto’ in lumping all ‘freaky black art’ under this category.[31] Some (including Miller) even use the terms surrealism and absurdism interchangeably.[32] This is not to say ‘freaky black art’ is not surreal— in fact, I argue surrealism is often central to absurdist literature— but rather that the focus on surrealism has overshadowed the absurdist implications of Black art that addresses the ‘freakiness’ of reality.

Consequently, I examine my texts in terms of literary absurdism. Martin Esslin is credited with establishing the genre in his book The Theatre of the Absurd, which reads the plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and their contemporaries through a Camusian lens. Esslin argues that the Second World War had shattered the ‘childish illusions’ of ‘religious faith,’ ‘progress’ and ‘nationalism,’ and that the genre depicted a world ‘deprived of a generally accepted integrating principle.’[33] In 1945 Aimé Césaire asserted: “when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead” and when one considers the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, it is no surprise that Afro-absurdist literature is thriving. [34] Esslin argues that absurd theatre satirises ‘inauthentic’ societies populated by ‘mechanical’ human beings leading ‘half unconscious lives’ in service to an illusory rationality, but its ‘second, more positive aspect’ expresses how we might ‘face’ the ‘stark reality’ of life in the absence of ‘complete, closed systems of value.’[35]

This dissertation considers how Invisible Man, Atlanta and Sorry to Bother You, as examples of Afro-absurd literature, show that the irrational suffering caused by white supremacy and racialised capitalism can lead to a Black consciousness of the illusory nature of ideologies that provide white people with a fantasy of meaning. Having exposed the absurd reality, the texts ask— in Camus’s terms— ‘if it is possible’ for Black people, and by extension all people, ‘to live without appeal’ to such delusions.[36] Chapter One employs Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to examine the motivations behind and effects of white supremacist ideology in Ellison’s novel. Chapter Two explores white supremacy through the absurd motif of whiteface and blackface in Atlanta, but primarily in the context of what Ellis Cashmore calls ‘the Black Culture Industry,’ and its commodification of Blackness.[37] Chapter Three addresses racialised capitalism as portrayed in Sorry to Bother You, discussing the exponential exploitation of racialised bodies. Finally, having explored their representations of the absurdity of Black American life, my conclusion considers Ellison, Glover, and Riley’s metatextual examination of themselves as Afro-absurd creators, which provides a vision of absurd revolt. I argue that Afro-absurd creation is not only politically expedient in the struggle against racism, but a means to Sisyphean happiness in a meaningless world.

Invisible Man

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.[38]

Ellison’s unnamed protagonist begins his account with a prologue that takes place at the chronological end of the narrative. His invisibility, he realises, has made him ‘ache with the need to convince [himself] that [he] exist[s],’ which has driven his actions thus far. [39] Ellison once proclaimed the search for identity ‘the American theme’ (my emphasis), and I argue that his aching need is for the existential lifebuoy of identity.[40] The narrator’s Camusian nostalgia is manifest in this search, which— in Thorpe Butler’s terms— sees him accept ‘identities packaged in illusions also containing ordered social worlds and roles for him to play in those worlds.’[41] In the prologue, the narrator describes a racist white man as being ‘lost in a dream world,’ calling to mind Žižek’s description of ideology as an ‘(unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality.’[42] Žižek suggests this fantasy is centred on the unfulfillable desire for the ‘sublime object;’ ideology offers an ‘objet petit a, the chimerical object of fantasy’ for its subjects to pursue which ‘materializes the void of our desire’ for the Real.[43] The narrator admits: ‘all my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.’[44] Thus, I argue that ideology can be understood as a ‘screen [to] hide the absurd,’ offering the narrator identities and ‘illusions’ to satisfy his nostalgia for a meaning that is always already elsewhere.[45] In the novel, the fantasy is a social world ordered by 1930s American white supremacy. The unreasonable suffering that the narrator faces as a result of white supremacy leads him to recognise the illusory nature of this ideology and the identities it offers, precipitating a confrontation with the absurdity of a world that denies him his sole desire.

Ideology

Tracy Wyman-Marchand calls the novel ‘the account of a black man who bears witness to the ideological machine […] that drives a separate and unequal philosophy’ and, following this, I read Ellison’s mechanistic imagery as a metaphor for white supremacist ideology.[46] He employs the metaphor in the first chapter, in which the narrator identifies himself ‘as a potential Booker T. Washington,’ an educated Black political leader criticised for accommodating white supremacy.[47] Working towards this identity, he gives a speech before his town’s influential white men, hoping to receive a scholarship to a Black college. However, he is first forced to fight in a battle royale with a several other Black boys to entertain the men. The narrator notes that ‘the harder we fought, the more threatening the men became,’ ‘and yet [… he] wanted to deliver [his] speech more than anything else in the world, because [he] felt that only these men could truly judge [his] abilities.’[48] The sadism of the men ought to challenge his faith in their intellectual superiority, but instead strengthens it, as his self-worth hinges entirely on their approval. The reason for this seemingly irrational faith becomes apparent upon the battle’s completion, as the contestants are made to collect their prize in the form of coins scattered on an electrified carpet. The narrator tries ‘to remove [his] hand, but [he cannot] let go,’ and the ‘hot, violent’ current makes the boys ‘dance,’ as one spectator calls: “That’s right, Sambo.”[49] Pertinently, the narrator says: ‘ignoring the shock by laughing, I discovered that I could contain the electricity— a contradiction, but it works.’[50] The key here is ‘contradiction,’ as Žižek argues ‘every ideological Universal […] necessarily includes a specific case which […] lays open its unity.’[51] For Ellison, this was the “myth of race,” which contradicted American “ideals,” such as the self-evident equality of men.[52] Žižek explains this through Lacan’s notion of jouissance, a transgressive ‘surplus-enjoyment’ that splits the subject, making them aware of how they are— in Freud’s terms— “lived’ by unknown and uncontrollable forces’ (i.e. the unconscious).[53] The “irrational,’ contradictory character’ of ideology is a ‘positive condition’ of its function; ideology is ‘an injunction which is experienced as traumatic, ‘senseless,” and which brings enjoyment when obeyed.[54] Here, the carpet represents the ideological machine and electricity, white supremacist ideology. The electricity is experienced as a ‘hot, violent’ injunction to ‘respond as a puppet’ (Lee) to the white spectators (‘dance’), and, while the suffering it causes the narrator ought to clarify the irrationality of his belief, this ‘contradiction’ instead causes him to internalise (‘contain’) it even more.[55] The juxtaposition between the ‘shocks’ and his ‘laughing’ speaks to the painful enjoyment that senseless obedience brings him. In these terms, we can understand the narrator’s vehement desire (‘more than anything else in the world’) for white approval of his intellectual abilities in the face of their brutality. In Žižek’s terms: ‘an ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.’[56]

The effects of his irrational faith become apparent once his desire is transferred to a new objet petit a: the identity of an urban worker employed by a white businessman. He finds work at a factory famous for producing paint “so white you can paint a chunka coal,” whose slogan reads: “It’s the Right White.”[57] Biko suggests Black people raised in white societies feel ‘there is something incomplete in [their] humanity, and that completeness goes with whiteness,’ which soon leads to ‘self-negation.’[58] This self-negation is metaphorised by the factory, as its machinery— the “white is right” ideology gestured to in the slogan— provides America, which desires racial purity, a means to render invisible the Blackness symbolized by coal.[59] That this negation is carried out by Black people themselves is clear when a Black engineer announces: “we the machines inside the machine.”[60] Ellison emphasises this when, after an accident, the narrator is taken to the ‘factory hospital’ (an extension of the ideological machinery), and placed inside a ‘machine’ for a procedure reminiscent of electro-shock therapy.[61] Brian K. Reed notes the near ubiquitous critical understanding of the machine as a ‘symbol of external forces working to modify his behaviour’ and, for me, the force is ideology.[62] The metaphor of electricity returns and he is made to ‘[dance] between the nodes,’ which Wyman-Marchand notes is ‘metronomic of the shock dance in the battle royal’ (sic).[63] After receiving multiple shocks, the narrator realises he cannot remember his own name, nor the name of his mother, and Butler argues this indicates how he rejects ‘his racial identity’ by ‘suppressing [… his] past experience.’[64] The doctors speak to the narrator, but he admits: ‘their meanings were lost in the vast whiteness in which I myself was lost.’[65] For Fanon, the ‘colonized […] becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness,’ and the effect of the machine signifies the narrator’s engagement in such renunciation.[66] Moreover, the narrator admits that if ‘all the contradictory voices shouting inside [his] head would […] sing a song in unison, whatever it was [he] wouldn’t care,’ and the doctor suggests this is exactly what the ‘machine’ offers: “the patient will […] experience no major conflict of motives.”[67] As established, ‘contradictory voices’ are essential to ideological enjoyment, but Žižek argues that for ideology to function, ‘this traumatic fact […] must be repressed into the unconscious, through the ideological, imaginary experience of meaning.’[68] The subject of ideology cannot become conscious of the irrationality of their behaviour, and so the machine offers the ‘vast whiteness’ of white supremacy as such an imaginary meaning, capable of resolving his logical conflicts.

Having left the factory-hospital-machine, the narrator adopts a new ideology: the communist Brotherhood. Brother Jack, a high-ranking member, gives him a new name (‘this is your new identity’) and, if not exactly white, this identity is apparently deracialised because the organisation’s ‘claims’ are ‘broader than race.’[69] It becomes apparent that this identity is another ideological illusion when a Brother tells the narrator ‘we judge through cultivating scientific objectivity,’ causing him to feel as though ‘locked in’ to the ‘hospital machine’ again.[70] Nonetheless, the organisation gives him a ‘vital role’ and ‘the world a new shape,’ satisfying his nostalgia for ‘certainty.’[71] Consequently, the narrator’s neurosis persists, as he admits that he feels “more human” when faced with the ‘possibility of being more than a member of a race,’ and wonders if he meant ‘that [he] had become less of what [he] was, less a Negro,’ recalling Fanon’s assertion that the ‘whiter’ the ‘Negro’ feels, the closer ‘he will come […] to being a real human.’[72] At the height of his indoctrination, the narrator concludes: ‘life was all […] discipline,’ and the significance of his words is revealed later, when Jack tells him that “discipline” is “sacrifice.”[73] Žižek views Fascism’s imperative: ‘Obey, because you must!’ as the purest form of the ideological command to ‘sacrifice yourself and do not ask the meaning of it,’ a ‘renunciation’ of rationality that ‘produces a certain surplus-enjoyment.’[74] The Brotherhood, then, is simply another means of irrational, enjoyable elusion for the narrator.

Surrealism and Interpretation

Ellison makes the operation and effects of ideology apparent to the reader, but for the narrator it is consistently obscure. The fantasy of white supremacy induces a repression of his Black consciousness— which is an awareness of this fantasy— into his unconscious. Esslin notes the ‘absurdists,’ were influenced by surrealism’s concern with the unconscious mind, attempting to ‘stage an internal psychological reality.’[75] This is clear in Ellison, who employs surrealist techniques to depict the return of the narrator’s repressed Black consciousness in fleeting moments of clarity that— in Suzanne Césaire’s terms— ‘liberate [his] mind from the shackles of absurd logic.’[76]

In his manifesto of surrealism, André Breton emphasises the significance of dreams, and so we can analyse the narrator’s dreams as a return of his repressed Black consciousness.[77] The night of the battle royale, he describes a dream whose ‘meaning’ he ‘had no insight into’ at the time.’[78] In the dream, he attends a circus with his grandfather, who ‘[refuses] to laugh at the clowns no matter what they [do].’[79] Next, his grandfather tells him to open the briefcase containing the scholarship awarded to him that evening, within which he finds an envelope containing another envelope and ‘another, endlessly,’ until he finally reaches the last one, which contains a document reading: “To Whom It May Concern […] Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.”[80] Robert Lee suggests ‘the circus is clearly a potent image of the Negro situation; the clowns are […] Sambo-figures, sad ‘happy’ niggers […] controlled by white ring-masters,’ and indeed, having been forced to dance in the hospital machine — already metronomic of the battle royal’s “Sambo” dance— the narrator admits he ‘felt like a clown.’[81] Moreover, Lee highlights how, throughout the text, letters have been ‘documents of supposed identities’— the scholarship, letters of recommendation for work in New York, his new Brotherhood name— the ‘something’ that the narrator has been looking for ‘all [his] life.’[82] René Ménil contends that ‘works of the imagination […] signify […] (being sustained by desire) what we lack,’ aligning with Ellison’s dream imagery, which recalls the Lacanian structure of desire, in which one pursues so many object-displacements (‘another and another’) of a fundamental lack.[83] The nature of these displacements becomes clear once we consider the dream’s final element, running, and its prevalence in Biko and Fanon. The former sees in Black consciousness the realisation that ‘by seeking […] to emulate the white man,’ Black people are ‘running away from their colour,’ while the latter notes the Black man’s ‘constant effort to run away from his […] own presence.’[84] The narrator is running after the white identity represented by his letters, but the unsatisfying conclusion of his pursuit points to the illusory nature of his object.

Dreams are not the only instances of surreal insight, however. Ménil sees jazz as the epitome of what Breton calls ‘psychic automatism.’[85] Ellison described the ‘steady flow of memory [and] desire […] swept like a great river from its old, deep bed’ by jazz music and, as such, Timothy Spaulding suggests the narrator’s ‘improvisational voice’ is modelled on the ‘bebop virtuoso.’[86] This is evident in his speech following the battle royal, as, although not improvised, Phillis Klotman notes that it includes a ‘Freudian slip of the tongue which changes social ‘responsibility’ into social ‘equality.”[87] When accosted by the crowd, he apologises for his ‘mistake,’ saying: “I was swallowing blood.”[88] Describing Aimé Césaire’s surrealist poetry, Sartre writes that it is ‘bloody,’ ‘full of phlegm,’ as ‘he ejects the black soul from himself […] when others are trying to interiorize it.’[89] His repressed desire for equality flows ‘like a great river’ upon his arrival in New York after he looks over the possessions of an old Black couple being evicted from their home. These include ‘FREE PAPERS’ (i.e. from slavery) and an ‘Ethiopian flag,’ but also ‘a straightening comb [and] switches of false hair’ and “knocking bones’ […] used in blackface minstrelsy.’[90] Sun-Joo Lee notes the ‘symbolic’ value of these ‘iconic artifacts,’ which evidently represent a dichotomous pride in their heritage and compulsion to whiten themselves, represented by their engagement with the self-negating practise of minstrelsy and the woman’s desire to straighten her hair.[91] For the narrator, the objects ‘[throb…] with more meaning than they should,’ and he is overcome by memories of his ‘mother’ (repressed by the machine), and by ‘far-away-and-long-ago […] remembered words.’[92] ‘Nauseated,’ the narrator throws up ‘a bitter spurt of gall’ over the possessions, which Lee, recalling Sartre, calls a release of ‘the bile of so much injustice and racial self-hatred.’[93] The remembered words flow from him in an improvised speech beginning with him insisting Black people are ‘slow-to-anger’ in an effort to quell the forming crowd, but transforms into a derision of ideological contradiction.[94] His initial description of Black people becomes an ironic refrain juxtaposed with the violent dispossession facing the couple, highlighting the absurdity of Black tolerance in the face of white intolerance.[95] This culminates in an exhortation which reveals striking self-awareness:

[C]lear the street of debris […] Hide it, hide their shame! Hide our shame![96]

The declaration is akin to what Žižek calls the first stage of ‘psychoanalytic process: the ‘interpretation of symptoms,” in order to confront the ‘fantasy.’[97] The narrator interprets the symptomatic significance of the objects as distilled embodiments of the function (‘their shame’) and effect (‘our shame’) of white supremacy. His ironic demand to “hide it” demonstrates how Black consciousness of the irrationality of this fantasy is repressed, like covering coal with white paint.

The narrator gives a final ‘speech’— an internal monologue— after Jack’s words on discipline, which, significantly, come as a retort to the narrator’s criticism of the Brotherhood’s decision to decrease their presence in Black-dominated Harlem. The narrator thinks:

Discipline is sacrifice […] and blindness; he doesn’t see me […] And me sitting here whilst he tries to intimidate me […] I looked at him again as for the first time […] with the feeling that I was just awakening from a dream.[98]

Biko describes Black consciousness as a recognition that ‘the black man […] rejects himself […] because he […] equates good with white,’ and here, in drawing attention to Jack and the Brotherhood’s blindness to Black people, the narrator holds up a mirror to his own behaviour— the rejection Biko describes— and confronts the fantasy once more. The combination of indifference and wonder recalls Camus’ assertion that ‘one day’ ‘the stage sets’ of our daily routine ‘collapse’ under the weight of the “why,” which leaves us feeling ‘weariness tinged with amazement’ and ‘awakens consciousness.’[99] However, the narrator’s newfound Black consciousness, his confrontation with the absurd fantasy, is only the first step towards the absurd life. As Camus says: ‘the feeling of the absurd is not […] the notion of the absurd,’ it only ‘lays the foundations for it;’ ‘what follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening,’ ‘suicide or recovery.’[100]

Suicide

There are two forms of suicide for Camus: physical and philosophical. Both are represented as responses to Black consciousness in the text. The former is the response of Todd Clifton, a young, Black member of the Brotherhood that inexplicably disappears, only for the narrator to find him selling dancing Sambo dolls on a street corner.[101] The narrator cannot understand Clifton’s decision, thinking: ‘he knew that only in the Brotherhood […] could we avoid being empty Sambo dolls,’ but of course Clifton’s actions betray a consciousness, which yet escapes the narrator, that the Brotherhood’s ideology renders Black people as invisible as any other. Reed suggests that ‘no longer having anything to believe in is an emptiness which [Clifton] cannot overcome,’ and this is evident moments later as Clifton engages in a ‘suicidal attack on [a] policeman.’[102] In Fanon’s terms, Clifton realises ‘the Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands, so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes.’[103]

Clifton’s death precipitates the narrator’s recognition of Jack’s blindness, but it is on the night of this awakening that he discovers his own means of suicide. Leaving his meeting with the Brotherhood, the narrator is accosted by Ras, a Black nationalist who blames the Brotherhood’s inaction for Clifton’s death. Fleeing Ras, the narrator buys dark sunglasses and a hat to disguise himself, but soon finds himself repeatedly mistaken for a man named Rinehart.[104] The narrator discovers Rinehart has been living multiple lives in Harlem, but that he ‘looked past him’ all the while.[105] This realisation has existential implications: ‘If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?’[106] Identity can only ever be a fabrication in a ‘world of fluidity’ in which meaning is always already elsewhere.[107] As a Reverend, Rinehart preaches Afro-absurdism, telling his congregation to “Behold the Invisible;” his experience as an invisible man stripped of identity reveals the wider impossibility of identity in an absurd world.[108] With this knowledge, he is ‘at home’ in the world’s ‘fluidity,’ adopting whatever illusory identity proves most beneficial.[109]

Ellison describes the narrator’s ‘despair’ upon leaving Rinehart’s church, echoing Camus’ description of absurdism as ‘a despair that remains lucid.’[110] However, the narrator rejects lucidity, admitting he wants ‘the props put back beneath the world,’ and consulting Hambro, the expert on Brotherhood ideology.[111] The narrator confronts him regarding the withdrawal from Harlem and Hambro admits that Harlem’s “members will have to be sacrificed,” evoking Jack’s words.[112] The narrator points out that the Harlem members “don’t know why they’re being sacrificed,” showing his awareness of the Brotherhood’s demand for obedient renunciation of reason in favour of an idea (here, a “new society”).[113] In Žižek’s terms, he ‘subjects the ideological text to a ‘symptomatic reading,’ confronting it ‘with what it must repress’ (i.e. Black consciousness) ‘to organize itself.’[114] In his diagnosis: the college, factory and Brotherhood ‘merge into one single white figure,’ their world-views all symptoms of a wider white supremacist fantasy.[115] The narrator determines to replace the Brotherhood in Harlem with his own organisation, although he sees ‘no possibility’ of this without resources or allies.[116] Nonetheless, he decides to ‘do a Rinehart,’ performing loyalty to the Brotherhood to dismantle it from within and resolving to ‘agree with Jack without agreeing.’[117]

The narrator calls this approach ‘Rinehartism— cynicism,’ and it is in these terms that we can comprehend his philosophical suicide.[118] Žižek understands the ‘cynical distance’ the narrator exhibits as ‘just one way […] to blind [oneself] to the […] ideological fantasy.’[119] In this suggestion, Žižek follows the ‘basic Lacanian proposition’ that ‘belief is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.’[120] His desire to ‘organise a splinter movement’ (contradicted by its impossibility) is the ‘rational [reason] to believe’ in working for white supremacists that reveals itself to him because, practically, he already does.[121] Žižek describes this as a ‘perverted ‘negation of the negation’ of the official ideology’ (note Camus’s description of philosophical suicide as ‘the movement by which a thought negates itself’) in which one recognises ‘the particular interest behind the ideological universality,’ but negates this knowledge by finding ‘reasons to retain the mask.’[122] Even if the narrator ‘does not take things seriously’ he is ‘still doing them,’ leaving ‘untouched’ the ‘(unconscious) fantasy structuring [his] social reality.’[123] In Camus’ terms, he ‘returns into the chain;’ his ‘gestures’ remain ‘mechanical’ though he believes them voluntary.[124] The results of his cynicism prove catastrophic, as a riot breaks out in Harlem in the absence of the Brotherhood’s organisation. Stood in the midst of the riot, the narrator realises that the Brotherhood had intentionally ‘surrendered [their] influence to Ras,’ to stimulate a ‘race riot’ in which the population of Harlem would be martyred to the anti-government cause.[125] Worse, he realises that, in his cynical obedience to the Brotherhood, he ‘had helped,’ ‘by pretending to agree [he] had indeed agreed.’[126]

Fantasy

To truly break with white supremacy, the narrator must complete the second stage of the ‘psychoanalytic process:’ ‘going through the fantasy,’ which involves ‘experiencing how the fantasy-formation just masks, fills out a certain void.’[127] In other words, he must turn his Black consciousness into an Afro-absurd awareness that the white supremacy that has controlled his life is a screen for the world’s irrationality. Žižek explains that ‘the only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream.’[128] For this reason, Breton’s belief in the power of literature to resolve the ‘two states of dream and reality […] into a […] surreality,’ is crucial to understand how the Real of desire is represented in the text.[129] In his surrealist dream scenes, Ellison allows the narrator to perceive the desire that announces itself in the ideological fantasy structuring his reality. Hence, in the earlier dream the narrator wakes up at the sight of the final document: its implication— that white identity materialises the void of desire (‘running’ itself)— is unbearable, and so he awakens into conscious delusion to avoid this ‘insight.’[130]

Fleeing Ras during the riot, the narrator falls down a manhole, collapsing into a ‘state’ ‘somewhere in between’ ‘dreaming’ and ‘waking;’ a surreality.[131] His dream begins as follows:

I lay the prisoner of a group […] all of whom had run me […] and they were demanding that I return to them [...] ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m through with all your illusions and lies, I’m through running.’[132]

The narrator’s passive tone in the opening sentence (‘all of whom had run me’) indicates a Freudian awareness of how he has been ‘lived’ by the unconscious fantasy represented by the ‘group,’ which includes the head of his college, the man who gave him his factory job and Jack. In his dialogue, however, the narrator takes on an active role (‘I’m through’), reflecting how, in Jackson’s terms, he ‘comes to reject the vision of himself as a victim, [… assuming] responsibility for his own destiny’; if he has been run, it is because, in search of identity, he has allowed himself to be.[133] This reflects a development in his Black consciousness, as Biko notes the importance of reminding ‘the black man […] of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused.’[134] Camus insists ‘one recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it,’ and here these paths—represented by the members of the group— are laid out for the narrator, revealing that his ‘course’ lies in ‘unfailing alertness’ to, and rejection of, illusion.[135] Ellison makes the difficulty of this path apparent, as the group castrate the narrator asking: “HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION?” To which he responds: “Painful and empty.”[136] Freedom from illusion is a castration because it entails a loss of the narrator’s object petit a of white identity, making the transference of desire impossible and destroying the libidinal economy of the symbolic order. As Žižek explains, the symptom (here, the illusion of white identity) is ‘an element which causes […] trouble, but its absence would mean […] total catastrophe.’[137] In Camus’ terms, standing in the ‘waterless [desert]’ of the absurd (evoked by ‘empty’), the narrator chooses ‘a despair that remains lucid.’[138] This lucidity allows him to traverse the fantasy, as he tells the group: “at a price I now see that which I couldn’t see.”[139] Pointing to his genitals, he says:

There hang not only my generations […] but your sun […] your moon […] all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make.[140]

The narrator recognises that white supremacist symbolic order (‘history’) rests entirely on a simple dichotomy— expressed through the opposition of ‘sun’ and ‘moon’— between white and Black people (the latter embodied by his ‘generations’). In an essay published after the novel, Ellison explains this sentiment, writing:

White Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to […] use [Black Americans] as a […] metaphor for the ‘outsider.’[141]

Eric Lott uses this quote to propose a theory he calls the ‘Black mirror,’ which employs Lacan to understand the phenomenon Ellison identifies. For Lott, ‘race and racial difference […] are structured by fantasy,’ as white America constructs a negative image of Blackness that acts as a ‘mirror’ in which ‘imaginary […] fullness emerges.’[142] In this way, the narrator is right to ‘wonder whether [he is not…] simply a phantom in other people’s minds.’[143] However, as the narrator recognises, this phantom is incredibly valuable to the white symbolic order, allowing white people to elude confrontation with the “primordial Discord” “at the heart of the organism.”[144] Lott calls this value— along with the material value accrued from capitalising on this phantom— ‘surplus symbolic value.’[145] This recalls Fanon’s insistence that ‘the Negro is in demand,’ ‘one cannot get along without him […] but only if he is made palatable in a certain way.’[146] This involves negation and objectification:

The object is denied in terms of individuality and liberty. The object is an instrument [… that enables] me to realize my subjective security. I consider myself fulfilled (the wish for plenitude) and I recognize no division.[147]

Following Fanon, we can understand why, when asked by a group of white men what he has in his briefcase— which contains ‘Clifton’s doll’— the narrator responds: “You […] what do you think of that?”[148] In typically absurdist fashion, Ellison employs what appears to be verbal nonsense (insisting a man is in his briefcase) to express the narrator’s knowledge that white ‘subjective security’ rests on the ideological construction of Blackness in his briefcase.

Ellison writes that, after the dream, the narrator ‘awoke in the Blackness,’ ‘[f]ully awake now,’ and this encapsulates how his declaration: ‘I am an invisible man,’ expresses not only Black consciousness of how white supremacy negates Black existence, but also an Afro-absurd awareness of why it does so.[149] Invisibility thus brings with it a Camusian ‘absurd freedom,’ his ‘thought and action’ are no longer shackled by fantasy.[150] Timothy Brenan suggests that, in the text, the ‘quest for ‘freedom’ no longer suggests a struggle for social equality, but a search for existential self-discovery,’ but in my interpretation his self-discovery is a means to both freedom and social equality.[151] As Biko says: ‘merely by describing yourself as black, you have […] commited yourself to fight against’ racial hierarchy.[152]

Action

By the epilogue, the narrator has traversed the fantasy and confronted the Real of desire that announces itself in white supremacy, coming to the Afro-absurd realisation that the world is devoid of positive meaning; the pursuit of identity that has ‘kept [him] running’ is a ‘crude joke.’[153] This discovery places him in a state of ‘death alive’ that recalls the ‘psychic suicide’ (i.e. an absence of libidinal desire) Žižek suggests is the ‘only alternative to the symptom.’[154] However, the narrator hears a voice tell him ‘don’t kill yourself;’ he has no interest in psychic suicide and so insists: ‘I am an invisible man.’[155] This represents the ‘end’ of the Lacanian ‘psychoanalytic process’: ‘identification with the symptom.’[156] Žižek explains that the ‘patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom,’ the ‘only positive support’ to their ‘being-in-the-world.’[157] The narrator’s invisibility is a symptom of the white supremacist fantasy, but this symptom itself conceals a wider, universal invisibility. In this way, the narrator identifies with the fundamental impossibility of identity encapsulated by society’s refusal to see him. This identification is consistent with absurdism, as Camus insists one of the only objective, positive truths available to us is the impossibility of such a truth.[158]

However, the narrator asserts that his ‘belated appreciation’ of the ‘joke that kept [him] running’ is ‘not enough,’ because ‘without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labelled ‘file and forget.”[159] The narrator recognises that without the action of revolt, one ‘forgets’ the absurd by ignoring their own nostalgia. The impossibility of identity is only absurd to one who desires identity. This begs a question: ‘what is the next phase?’[160] The narrator’s desire for identity continues to motivate him, as he admits that ‘the old fascination with playing a role’ is ‘[drawing him] upward again’ to the surface world of action.[161] In order to ‘[keep] the absurd alive,’ the narrator elects to undertake a ‘confrontation between man and his own obscurity,’ ‘an insistence upon an impossible transparency,’ by renewing his search for identity, even while recognising its futility.[162] Thus, the narrator’s description of himself as an invisible man is an identification not only with the impossibility of identity, but also with his revolt against this impossibility. As Camus writes: ‘his rock is his thing.’[163] I will discuss how the narrator renews this search in my conclusion, but for now, it is enough to note his heroic declaration: ‘humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.’[164]

Atlanta

It was all a dream…

—‘Juicy,’ The Notorious B.I.G.[165]

In the first episode of Atlanta, Earn, the show’s protagonist, is forcefully offered a Nutella sandwich whilst taking his daughter home on the bus. Earn refuses and turns away, but on turning back the man has disappeared.

Camus writes that, after recognising the absurd, ‘the stage scenery marked by habit becomes again what it is:’ strange.[167] Accordingly, Esslin notes that absurdists confront ‘their audience with a […] distorted picture of a world that has gone mad.’[168] In Atlanta, like in Invisible Man, the madness of the world becomes apparent in the irrationality of white supremacist ideology. Scenes stranger than the above abound in the show, compounding to create a picture of the eponymous city so surreal that the title of the final episode, ‘It was all a dream,’ could be taken literally. Atlanta is distinctly Kafkaesque, and Žižek writes that “Kafka’s universe’ is not a ‘fantasy-image of social reality’ but […] the mise-en-scene of the fantasy which is at work in the midst of social reality itself,’ here, the fantasy of white supremacy.[169] In an interview, Glover, the lead actor (Earn), creator, lead writer and frequent director, professes: “it’s all bullshit […] colour doesn’t mean anything in a vacuum.”[170] However, he continues, “we don’t live in a vacuum;” in Bill Yousman’s words: ‘these unreal designations are treated as real and thus have real effects.’[171] Atlanta makes manifest the real effects of these unreal designations.

The show examines white supremacy through the lens of hip-hop, focusing on Earn’s management of his cousin Alfred, a.k.a. up-and-coming rapper Paper Boi. Hooks suggests hip-hop is a means for Black people suffering from the ‘psychic pain’ of being rendered invisible by white supremacy to demand an audience.[172] Nyambura Njee explains that despite the genre’s ‘hyper-visibility within pop-culture,’ it continues to be ‘regarded as invisible.’[173] This is because, in Cashmore’s terms, ‘black culture has been converted into a commodity,’ and so ‘blacks have been permitted to excel in entertainment only on the condition that they conform to whites’ images of [them].’[174] Accordingly, this chapter examines how Atlanta depicts the effects of the absurd condition of invisibility/ hypervisibility imposed on contemporary Black Americans by the ideological fantasy of white supremacy.

Black Skin, White Masks

The problem of invisibility is expressed through the motif of whiteface. Like Ellison’s protagonist, many of the show’s Black characters suffer from a Fanonian neurosis, coveting white identity due to their societal negation. Glover depicts the origins of this neurosis through an instance of literal whiteface. Vanessa, a teacher at a majority Black high school, walks into her classroom and is met with this sight:

Earlier, the school principal tells Vanessa: “the system isn’t made for these kids to succeed,” hinting at the significance of the scene that closes the episode.[176] Fanon insists the Black schoolboy in the Antilles develops ‘a way of thinking and seeing that are essentially white.’[177] Likewise, the Black child in an American school system that has recently begun teaching that ‘some Black people benefitted from slavery because it taught them useful skills,’ becomes ‘subjectively, intellectually’ white.[178] Glover portrays the effects of internalised white supremacy in the form of Antoine Smalls, a Black highschooler with ‘transracial’ identity who insists: “I’m a 35 year-old white man.”[179]

This is not Antoine’s natural hair colour.[180]

Antoine’s declaration literalises Fanon’s figurative assertion, ‘I am a white man […] for I unconsciously distrust what is black in me.’[181] This distrust is apparent, as Antoine tells a police officer conversing with a Black man: “excuse me, this is definitely the guy,” while the irrational, phobic nature of this distrust is clear in the man’s response: “I called them.”[182]

However, Atlanta is primarily concerned with how the Fanonian complex presents itself in the Black music industry. Despite its focus on hip-hop, the most memorable engagement with this industry comes in an episode titled ‘Teddy Perkins.’ In this episode, Earn’s friend Darius visits an old plantation house to pick up a piano belonging to a Black pianist named Benny Hope. Handling the exchange is his apparently white brother, the eponymous Teddy.[183] Roger Luckhurst sees the episode as an example of the Southern Gothic, and, indeed, its ‘plantation imagery’ signals a striking change in tone from the show’s usual comedy, hinting at the story of material wealth accrued through Black suffering which follows.[184] Thomas Bjerre explains, ‘Southern Gothic texts mark a Freudian return of the repressed,’ as ‘the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts.’[185] Teddy and Benny are examples of such uncanny ghosts, embodying the terrible cost of Black artistic success, and of voracious white consumption of Black culture. Darius, yet to see the brother, tells Alfred: “I don’t even think Teddy exists, I feel like Benny created Teddy to make up for the fact that he made himself look like a ghoul.”[186] As such, Teddy— played by Glover in heavy white prosthetics— becomes a Michael Jackson figure, whose neurotic racial self-hatred caused him to whiten his skin.

The connection is emphasised by a reference to Benny having a skin condition preventing him from going “in sunlight,” which recalls Jackson’s vitiligo, the ostensible reason for his changing skin tone.[188] Cashmore compares Michael Jackson to the black child depicted in the ‘labour in vain’ posters (pictured below) popular in Europe and North America, since ‘Jackson’s efforts to transmogrify himself were as futile as those of the white couple of yore,’ reflecting the Sisyphean absurdity of his suffering.[189]

Teddy, as a Jackson-like ‘ghoul,’ represents a repressed knowledge that, in hooks’ terms, the industry has historically seduced ‘black folks with the promise of mainstream success if only we are willing to negate the value of blackness.’[191] Indeed, Teddy admits he finds rap ‘insufficient as an art form.’[192] Later in the episode, Darius discovers Benny in the basement, problematising his previous theory.[193] However, due to the surreal nature of the show, the actual relationship between the pair is somewhat inconsequential compared to their allegorical significance. Benny is Teddy’s doppelganger (an image whose extraordinary uncanniness Freud notes), and the pair represent the split-psyche of the Black artist. [194] Benny, covered in bandages and kept in the basement (the unconscious, in the imaginative geography of the house) to prevent his skin being seen (coming to light), personifies the artist’s Black consciousness, which he must repress in order to attain the material wealth and pseudo-whiteness represented by Teddy. The episode ends with Benny emerging from the basement, before shooting Teddy and himself; like Todd Clifton a confrontation with the absurd reality of Black life proves too much to bear.

White Skin, Black Masks

Having examined how Atlanta uses the motif of whiteface to depict the persistent feelings of invisibility in Black Americans, I will now address Glover’s use of blackface to express the hypervisibility that exacerbates this. Hooks suggests the mass media circulates images of Black people that ‘reinforce and reinscribe’ white supremacy,[195] which I understand using Lott’s theory. He describes the ‘black mirror’ as a

black mask for my white face, all the beautiful (or demonic) attractions of ‘blackness,’ generated out of a thousand media sources and ideological state apparatuses, the […] precondition for the reproduction of national white selfhood.[196]

Pervasive, stereotyped depictions of Blackness create a mirror against which to oppose ‘white selfhood,’ generating ‘surplus symbolic value.’ This value is both ontological and material (capital itself being symbolic), in that their ontological value (among other reasons that I will explore) ensures a vast market demand for these representations. Their material value has led to what hooks terms the ‘commodification of Otherness.’[197]

The most obvious instance of blackface in Atlanta comes as Alfred plays in a charity basketball game with other celebrities including Justin Bieber, played by a Black man.[198]

The characters express no surprise at this race-swap, leaving the audience perplexed. Bieber is a white man, but he has repeatedly been accused of cultural appropriation, the act of taking “things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.”[200] Bieber admitted:

My style, how I sing, dance, perform and my fashion have all been influenced by Black culture.[201]

Nonetheless, he has been filmed making racist jokes and saying slurs on multiple occasions, demonstrating the lack of respect that typifies appropriation.[202] The problem, Gregory Ochiaga explains, is that when artists such as Bieber imitate Black people, they perpetuate ‘an essentialist image of what a Black American is.’[203] Atlanta’s surreal literalisation of his race swap makes clear that, according to the white supremacist fantasy, Blackness can be reduced to so many sterotyped signs. Thus, when the show’s Bieber adopts AAVE to exclaim: “Imma dunk on a nigga,” and engages in a fist fight with Alfred, his embodiment of such stereotypes means that he quite literally is Black.[204]

Hooks explains that sterotyped representations are often constructed by ‘black people who may see the world through the lens of white supremacy,’ and Atlanta shows this through the figure of up-and-coming rapper, Clark County, described as an “industry plant.” [205] The term describes an artist whose career is heavily funded, but also dictated, by a music label. County’s manager is white, and he is signed to a record label dominated by white employees.[206] In the episode, director Hiro Murai expresses the oppressive nature of this environment through a shot in which a room full of white employees pause, stand in silence, and stare at Earn until he notices, at which point sound and movement resume.[207]

The ominous silence and their fascinated fixation on him, captured by the camera’s focus, conveys the colossal weight of pressure placed on Black artists to conform to expectation. The effects of this pressure are manifest soon after, as we see a Black artist dancing for white label executives, echoing Invisible Man’s ‘Sambo dancing’ motif.[209] County later appears in an advertisement for chocolate milk, rapping about sex, money and drugs, to which Darius responds: “This Clark County dude, he making money.”[210] This might be defensible as genuine self-expression, but in a later episode Alfred offers him weed and Hennessy cognac, which he refuses, before moments later rapping: “Hennessy plus the Herb.”[211] Evidently, County is willing to repress his Black consciousness for the sake of profit, demonstrating a cynical knowledge that, in hooks’ terms, Black artists ‘find greater support in the culture’ ‘to the degree that [they] embody […] familiar racist stereotypes.’[212] Indeed, a white reporter flippantly calls Alfred a “gangster,” reducing him to a two-dimensional imago, before advising him to “play” this “part” by being an “asshole.”[213] The reporter’s words recall Fanon’s assertion that ‘the black man is supposed to be a good nigger;’ his ‘goodness’ being synonymous with his performance of stereotypes.[214] Alfred consciously attempts to avoid engaging in the minstrelsy typified by County, rejecting an offer to advertise his own flavour of “rap snacks” called “Cocaine White Sugar,” but faces the problematic fact that his life necessarily conforms to many harmful stereotypes.[215] Without the backing of a record label, Alfred has to sell drugs to fund his rap career, which is itself a necessity, as he admits: “I scare people at ATMs, I have to rap.”[216] As such, Alfred is faced with a maddeningly absurd situation, in which white supremacist ideology has rendered it impossible to earn a living as anything other than a gangster-rapper, a role that perpetuates the very stereotypes that have necessitated his career.

Atlanta demonstrates that constructions of Blackness by the media serve a more complex purpose than the simple ‘reproduction of national white selfhood.’[217] Such a view would imply Blackness is constructed solely to offer an illusion of stable identity/ meaning by opposition; a commodified Camusian ‘leap’ of faith.[218] Instead, Atlanta’s depiction of commodified Blackness recalls Yousman’s notions of Blackophobia and Blackophilia.[219] The former describes the Black mirror phenomenon, while the latter refers to the ‘excitements’ and ‘sexual pleasures’ achieved by white “transgression’ into a strange […] world.’[220] Blackophilia recalls Žižek’s description of surplus-enjoyment, giving us a lens to understand the white demand for images of Black violence evident in Atlanta.[221] When Bieber greets Alfred by saying: “you that nigga that blew that other nigga’s brains out… cool,” he is speaking to the surplus-enjoyment (“cool”) white American’s feel when engaging with “those unpleasant aspects of […] consciousness” (the death drive) that Ellison suggests “the Negro has become identified with.”[222] Ellison calls minstrelsy a “ritual of exorcism,” recalling Fanon’s assertion that the ‘white man retains an irrational longing’ for ‘unusual eras of sexual license,’ and projects these ‘desires onto the Negro.’[223] Unsurprisingly, we see such projection in Invisible Man when, during sex, a white woman tells the narrator: “Look at me […] like you want to tear me apart […] I love for you to look at me like that!”[224] The woman’s enjoyment is derived from the act of transference itself: she ‘loves’ to believe that the destructive impulse originates with the Black man. In these terms, white consumption of a song such as Paper Boi’s “Mucking” (“that’s massaging and fucking”), reflects an enjoyment of illicit white desires exorcised through projection onto the image of the Black rapper.[225]

Moreover, Žižek insists that ‘enjoyment […] emerges only in […] surplus, because it is constitutively an excess’— it is a desire that can never be satisfied— and Atlanta demonstrates how the Black rapper is constructed in these excessive terms.[226] In his advertisement, County raps:

I just got a check like (Yoo-hoo) […]

Saw your baby mama like (Yoo-hoo) […]

Bars and the Xans like ‘Good night,’

And we drinking Yoo-hoo like it’s dirty Sprite.’[227]

The refrain ‘Yoo-hoo’ gives a flippant, casual quality to County’s accumulation of wealth (‘check’), women (‘baby mama’) and drugs (‘bars,’ ‘Xans’ and ‘dirty Sprite’), advertising an image of Blackness as endless consumption. Here, we begin to see how surplus enjoyment has become intertwined with surplus symbolic value. Žižek notes Lacan’s theory of surplus enjoyment was ‘modelled’ on ‘Marxian […] surplus value,’ and consequently argues that the logic of accumulation (the drive for ever-increasing profits) functions by appeal to enjoyment, with capital becoming the objet petit a.[228] In Alfred’s breakout song, he raps:

Paper Boi, Paper Boi, always gettin’ paper, boy
If you ain’t makin’ money then you ain’t a money maker, boy.[229]

As in County’s advertisement, repetition connotes excess, but also hyper-fixation on accumulating ‘paper,’ the irrationality of which is clear in the circular logic of the second line. The Black rapper comes to represent the enjoyable capitalist demand for irrational, excessive accumulation and consumption, and the homology between surplus-value, surplus-enjoyment and surplus symbolic value is unmistakable.

Enjoyment, Žižek writes, ‘in its stupidity, is possible only on the basis of a certain non-knowledge, ignorance,’ it must hide behind the ‘misrecognition’ of the objet petit a.[230] For example, Ellison’s narrator enjoys his pursuit of white identity only inasmuch as he remains ignorant that it simply materialises the act of running. Symptoms of white supremacist ideology can only be enjoyed if experienced as “irrational,” ‘traumatic’ injunctions. [231] Thus, I argue the greater the irrationality, the greater the enjoyment. We see this in Atlanta when Alfred, Earn and Darius are invited to a frat house, only to be seated in front of a confederate flag:

One of the frat boys tells Alfred he is one of his “favourite rappers” and the juxtaposition of Blackophilia and white supremacy suggests that white racists enjoy Black cultural products precisely because it makes their fantasy beliefs even more irrational. [233] This principle, I argue, can be applied on an existential level: in confrontations with the absurd, the larger the ‘leap’ of faith, the greater the enjoyment. Lott argues that ‘in the process’ of fostering an illusion of white identity, the ‘black mirror […] threatens white annihilation,’ because its oppositional structure ‘betrays’ ‘white dependence on’ Blackness.[234] I understand hooks’ assertion that ‘eating the Other’ (interracial sex) is ‘a movement out into a world of difference’ providing a ‘more intense pleasure than any that exists [within…] one’s familiar racial group’ in these terms.[235] When white racists such as Atlanta’s frat boy consume Black culture, their nostalgia for meaning through a positive, white identity means that they must constantly misrecognise the absurd ontological negativity implied by racial difference, a renunciation of rationality that produces immense surplus-enjoyment.

The irrationality of enjoyment leads Žižek to insist it is ‘incompatible’ with ‘truth’ and this might explain hook’s observation that ‘white people do not feel that’ the ‘pleasure’ (enjoyment) derived from Black culture ‘should be linked to unlearning racism.’[236] Hence, Atlanta’s Bieber episode concludes with him apologising for his performance of Blackness. Bieber declares: “I’ve been trying to be so cool lately that I became something I’m not,” and the echo of his earlier description of Alfred’s violence (“cool”) reiterates how white people project their destructive desires onto an image of Blackness so that they can be simultaneously enjoyed and exorcised (“I became something I’m not”).[237] Bieber then turns his baseball cap forwards and announces that the “real Justin” is not a “bad guy,” he “actually love[s] Christ.”[238] The cap-turning and allusion to religion signify a return to the comforting delusion of whiteness (backwards caps being a staple of hip-hop fashion), while the implication that people behaving as he has are “bad” guys demonstrates a white supremacy unaffected by his performance. Yousman summarises this problem: ‘the white fan of gangsta rap has the option of dropping the affectations of ‘Black’ style’ when convenient, while Black people ‘must experience both the pleasure and the pain’ of “Blackness.”[239] As such, if at any point the truth of racial inequality implied by hip-hop begins to spoil the white consumer’s enjoyment, they can stop consuming and maintain their ignorance. Likewise, if confrontations with racial difference too obviously ‘threaten white annihilation’ by pointing to the impossibility of positive identity and its absurd implications, the white consumer can return to the homeostatic pleasure of their ‘familiar racial group.’[240] In Fanon’s terms:

If the other seeks to make me uneasy with his wish to have value (his fiction), I simply banish him without a trial. He ceases to exist. I don’t want to hear about that fellow.[241]

Sorry to Bother You

First of all, you talk white.

Second off, you talk like you haven’t given up yet…

—Childish Gambino, ‘Bonfire.’[242]

Riley calls Sorry to Bother You an “absurdist dark comedy,” and within the first five minutes, his protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green, delivers a conventionally absurdist ramble about death, the inevitable explosion of the sun and the fear that nothing matters.[243] This, however, is merely a tone indicator, as the film is overwhelmingly concerned with the irrationality of racialised capitalism, demonstrating a specifically Afro-absurd sentiment. The film tells the story of Cash’s career as telemarketer at RegalView call centre, depicting his rise to the coveted and well-paid position of “power-caller” by learning to use a “white voice.”[244] As a power-caller, Cash sells the labour of people living in factories operated by “Worryfree” a corporation offering unpaid “lifetime-labour” contracts in exchange for bed and board.[245] Cash discovers that Worryfree has developed a means of turning his employees into hyper-productive horse-human hybrids called “Equisapiens,” which leads him to recognise the absurdity of the system that he has profited from.[246] Like Atlanta, Sorry to Bother You depicts a hyperbolised, surreal image of a ‘world that has gone mad’ to criticise the exploitative irrationality of contemporary American racial capitalism.[247]

Racial Capitalism

Where Atlanta’s central absurd motif was the visual swapping of races, Thomas Austin (using Stoever’s terms) observes that Sorry to Bother You engages with the often “unacknowledged, but ever present” role that sound plays “in the construction of race.”[248] Riley uses the ‘white voice’ to examine what Yehudi Webster calls ‘racialization:’ the ‘systemic accentuation of certain physical attributes to allocate persons to races that are projected as real and thereby become the basis for analysing all social relations.’[249] Of course, racialisation is central to the Black mirror phenomenon defining much of my analysis, but I choose to invoke the term here specifically in relation to racialised capitalism. I argue that the film depicts the relationship between race and capital in terms reminiscent of Alys Weinbaum’s suggestion that ‘labor processes create observable racial formations and not the other way round.’[250]

In the film, the labour Cash performs constructs whiteness as a state of economic security. Fanon insists ‘to speak means […] to assume a culture,’ and this perspective is evident in the film.[251] The colleague that advises Cash to talk white explains:

It’s like, sounding like you don’t have a care. Got your bills paid […] like ‘I don’t really need this money’ […] It’s not really a white voice. It’s what they wish they sounded like.[252]

In Robin Kelly’s terms, whiteness is ‘a sense of being genuinely worry free.’[253] Judith Butler writes that ‘neoliberal rationality demands self-sufficiency as a moral ideal,’ and we can understand Cash’s co-worker’s words accordingly; to talk white means to ‘assume the culture’ of neoliberalism by embodying its ideal of financial independence.[254] The first time Cash uses his white voice, he toasts ‘to be becoming a power-caller, and here, ‘power-caller’ is synonymous with white identity as the objet petit a of neoliberal racialised capitalism; it is what ideology makes people ‘wish’ for.[255] Upon becoming a power-caller, Cash rides an elevator to the top of the RegalView building, as a computerised voice tells him:

Today is your day to dominate the world […] you are […] the top of the reproductive pile.[256]

This passage signals how the financial ‘self-sufficiency’ of the power-caller— a role which consists primarily of selling slave labour— necessitates the domination or exploitation of others. The Darwinian tone of “top of the reproductive pile” suggests ‘white’ means that race of people whose willingness and ability to exploit others are traits that make them fit to survive in a hostile neoliberal market.[257] Weinbaum argues ‘a laborer […] may, as a consequence of [their…] place in the division of labor, be identified as ‘white,” and, indeed, Cash’s exploitative labour racializes him.[258] This is not to say that Riley’s focus on material divisions causes him to overlook ontological exploitation. Cash attends a party at Worryfree CEO Steve Lift’s mansion, in which Lift invites him into a room of white people and asks him to tell them about “gangster shit,” saying: “you’re different […] make an impression.”[259] The crowd demands he raps and, unable to think of lyrics, Cash repeats “Nigga shit,” over and over, delighting the guests.[260]

The framing of the first shot recalls the shot of Earn at the white-owned label, conveying the same intense pressure to conform to stereotypes, evident in the anxiety on Cash’s face (second image). Lift’s assumption that Cash has been involved with gangs echoes the reporter’s reduction of Alfred. Clearly, Blackness still holds non-material surplus symbolic value as a comforting image of difference and means to transgressive enjoyment. Cash notes that power-callers make “Benz” (i.e. Mercedes) “type money,” but he is still objectified by white America.[263] Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Alfred meets a Black basketballer who spends lucratively and owns an “invisible car.”[264] Of course, for Ellison, invisibility connotes the existential negation of Black people, and so it seems that Atlanta’s invisible car makes the same point as Riley’s rap scene. In the words of Kanye West:

And for that paper look how low we’ll stoop,

Even if you in a Benz you still a nigga in a coupe.[265]

Evidently, Riley is not suggesting money buys whiteness.

Instead, the film suggests that under contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the state of endemic material exploitation that has (in America) historically been attached to Black people is becoming the generalised state of the growing proletariat. In other words, more and more people are being racialised as ‘Black’ through their ‘place in the division of labour.’[266] Butler writes that, in neoliberalism, ‘diverse populations are increasingly subject to […] ‘precaritization,” a process that ‘acclimatizes populations’ to uncertainty of ‘employment, shelter, health care, and food,’ along with spreading ‘unpayable debt.’[267] This precaritization is clear from the film’s opening, as Cassius begs RegalView for a job so that he can pay rent to his uncle, who also admits he “owes too much” in mortgage payments.[268] Riley punctuates the film with shots of homeless settlements, and has Squeeze, a union organiser, demand “enough money to pay rent” and “not have to eat cup-a-noodles every night,” reflecting the insecurity that Butler describes.[269]

In Butler’s terms, the film confronts us with ‘a maddening contradiction’ in racialised capitalism (c.f. Žižek), in which this ideology ‘demands self-sufficiency as a moral ideal at the same time that neoliberal forms of power work to destroy that very possibility’ through ‘precaritization.’[271] Of course, the pseudo-white ‘self-sufficiency’ that Cash attains is ironically dependent on selling the labour of others, and so, I argue that, in the film, to be Black is to be unwilling or incapable of exploiting others in order to survive in the Darwinian neoliberal labour market.

The film demonstrates that racializing ideology is necessary to facilitate further capitalist exploitation. In Jodi Melamed’s words, ‘capitalism is racial capitalism,’ because ‘racism enshrines […] the unequal differentiation of human value,’ and the inequality between ‘capitalists with the means of production’ and ‘workers without the means of subsistence’ that ‘capitalism requires.’[272] Indeed, in an interview, Riley argues “racist black tropes” explaining why Black people are “poor” serve a “system that necessitates poverty.”[273] In the film, Black people are those rendered precarious by their inability to exploit others, and this precarity makes them willing to be exploited by Worryfree’s life-time labour contracts. Cash’s uncle professes that, in the face of his debt, “Worryfree […] don’t sound that bad.”[274] This is compounded by the psychological effects of ideology. Riley explains that his film depicts “the ideas we’re being sold,” and we see this in the multiple advertisements for Worryfree displaying slogans such as: “Show the world you are a responsible babydaddy.”[275] Clearly these advertisements are ‘selling’ the neoliberal belief that financial insecurity makes people irresponsible and racially inferior (‘babydaddy’ being an AAVE term), which Lift’s company capitalises on, offering people the possibility of conforming to the white ideal (‘being genuinely worry free’) on the condition that they allow themselves to be exploited.[276] Even the name speaks to the Žižekian contradiction of racial capitalist ideology— ‘Worryfree’ means financially secure, but the means of attaining financial security are entirely different for ‘white’ and ‘Black’ people, and the former relies on the precaritization and exploitation of the latter. As Squeeze says: “We make the profits, and they don’t share.”[277] Furthermore, having forced people to subject themselves to exploitative labour conditions, ideology racializes these people to justify their exploitation. As Fanon notes (through the words of Bernard Wolfe): “ever since slavery began, his […] guilt as a slave-owner has led the southerner to describe the Negro as an animal.”[278] We see this when a show called “NTV Cribs” offers a look into the Worryfree factories, during which the white worker presenting the show uses AAVE, saying: “after a day of hearty-ass work, you feel me? We ready to eat.”[279] There is a maddening circularity: he is a Worryfree worker because he is ‘Black,’ and he is ‘Black’ because he is a Worryfree worker.

Biocapitalism

Having explored how and why racialisation functions in the film, I will examine the how Worryfree’s labour centres maximise the surplus value— the ‘chief end and aim of capitalist production’ for Karl Marx— produced by the labour of their racialised workers.[280] Like Sarah Lauro and Caroline Hovanec, I see ‘biopower’ at work in the system of value maximisation (valorisation) that Riley depicts.[281] Michel Foucault describes biopower as the ‘power over life’ itself, echoed in Lift’s assertion that Worryfree is “transforming life itself.”[282] He suggests this power evolved in two forms. The first was ‘an anatomopolitics of the human body,’ involving the ‘integration’ of individual bodies into ‘systems of efficient and economic controls,’ including ‘the machinery of production.’[283] The second, a ‘biopolitics of the population’ focused on the ‘species body,’ controlling ‘births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy’ et cetera.[284] Both forms of biopower were ‘indispensible […] in the development of capitalism.’[285] The anatomopolitical dimensions of Worryfree’s labour system are clear, as workers “live in space efficient dwellings in the same facilities where production occurs,” speaking to how, in Leshu Torchin’s terms, ‘Capital refigures space’ throughout the film to erode the gap between ‘work and leisure.’[286] Additionally, a protestor tells a reporter that the workers are “fed cheap slop and worked to the bone 14 hours a day,” and this is significant in the light of Marx’s analysis of capitalism.[287] He explains that, because only ‘labour power’ can both ‘[reproduce] its own value,’ and ‘[produce] value over and above it,’ labour is essential to the production of surplus value.[288] He terms the time a labourer spends reproducing labour costs ‘necessary labour-time’ and the time spent producing surplus value ‘surplus labour-time.’[289] In order to maximise surplus labour-time, the capitalist tries to ‘make the working-day as long as possible,’ explaining Worryfree’s 14-hour work-days.[290] Moreover, the reason that they are “fed cheap slop” and “live in space efficient dwellings,” is to reduce the cost of labour and thus necessary labour time, allowing further surplus labour. Worryfree’s anatomopolitical exploitation figures as the conclusion of the logic of accumulation, capital’s drive for ever-increasing surplus value.

By nature, the logic of accumulation cannot have a conclusion as, in Melamed’s terms: ‘Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating.’[291] However, the working day can only be extended so long, and the quality of sustenance made so low because, as Marx explains, the labourer ‘must be able on the morrow to work with the same amount of force, health and freshness as to-day.’[292] This leads Lift to recognise that “human labour has its limitations.”[293] He presents his solution to this problem to Cash in a claymation video:

Worryfree’s scientists have “discovered a way […] to make humans stronger […] more durable and therefore more efficient and profitable,” by transforming workers into horse-human hybrids called ‘equisapiens.’[295] Lift’s solution is a form of what has been termed ‘biocapitalism.’[296] Foucault describes the second form of biopower, biopolitics, as ‘the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.’[297] The equisapien project appears to be a form of biopolitics, as it aims to maximise the life and health of the population by eradicating the ways illness and infirmity ‘[sap] the population’s strength [… and shorten] the working week,’ causing a ‘fall in production.’[298] Biopolitics operates a Darwinist ‘selection that eliminates the less fit,’ its basic logic being: “The more inferior [individuals] die out […] the more I— as species rather than individual— can live.”[299] Unsurprisingly, then, the video suggests that the project is “carrying forward this lineage of natural development,” or rather evolution.[300] However, where biopolitics traditionally sought to evolve the population by killing off the ‘inferior’ sections— a logic that Foucault calls ‘modern racism’— Lift’s project seeks to make the weak stronger.[301] This change is due to capitalist influence. Marx insists capital views ‘man himself […] as the impersonation of labour power,’ and thus human life the only means to surplus value.[302] The affinity between the biopolitical maximisation of life and capitalism’s drive for surplus value is clear, and in biocapitalism human life becomes synonymous with surplus value, evident in Lift’s parapraxis: “We’re saving the economy […] I mean we’re saving lives.”[303] Under biocapitalism, the logic of modern racism (killing those racially unfit) becomes illogical because, in neoliberal racial capitalism, those deemed racially unfit are the ones producing surplus value. Accordingly, Braun writes that this mode of power is ‘directed at shaping, enhancing, optimizing and maximising the productive life forces of the human’ (my emphasis), or more specifically, the ‘Black’ proletarian.[304] Therefore, the film follows the other texts in making the Black body the site of surplus symbolic value and surplus enjoyment, as ideology constructs an image of ‘Black’ people in order to facilitate a system that is irrational because, in Katherine Braun’s terms, it is an ‘unlimited process of maximizing’ Black life-as-surplus value that materialises desire itself.[305] Having his plan, Lift insists “this isn’t irrational,” and, like Kelly, I argue that this indicates how the ‘equisapiens represent neoliberalism’s project in its extreme form.’[306] This is encapsulated by the painting— John Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare— hanging behind Lift as he explains his plot:

Fuseli’s The Nightmare (second image) hangs behind Lift.[308]

The painting is loaded with signficance. The title might refer here to the ideological nightmare of racialised biocapitalism, represented by the vampire-like creature sat atop the woman. Marx writes: ‘vampire-like’ capital ‘only lives by sucking living labour’ and thus the creature embodies the vampiric effects of the unconscious ideological fantasy, while the horse embodies the biocapitalist technologies employed in this vampirism.[309]

The Gothic painting foreshadows a Teddy Perkins-like shift in tone at this point in the film, as just before Lift reveals his plan, Cash enters a bathroom in which Lift is keeping his equisapiens prisoner. Dim lighting and silence create an anxious atmosphere, which builds until Cash opens a stall, revealing a monstrous body, screaming, and writhing in pain as uncomfortable, high-pitched music blares.[310]

The equisapien is the Southern Gothic monster par-excellence; Riley invokes the tradition Bjerre calls the ‘Southern Grotesque,’ presenting a deformed body that ‘expose[s] a harsh, confusing reality of contradictions [and] violence.’[312] With his dark skin, iron chains and large penis (Fanon: ‘the Negro […] is viewed as a penis symbol’), the equisapien is the grotesque of a Black chattel slave.[313] I argue that the form itself is immensely significant, as its capacity to stage the ‘clashing’ of ‘time periods’ (Bowen) is central to what Torchin calls ‘the transhistorical intersections of race, slavery, and capitalism’ in the film.[314] In tying his symbol of biocapitalism to slavery, Riley points to the similarities between the two systems. Though it is not made explicit, the intersection of racialisation, surplus value and life in Riley’s Gothic monsters echoes the Spillers’ recognition that, through the phenomenon of slave breeding— the process in which the white master raped his female slaves to produce slaves to sell as commodities— ‘the female captive body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange.’[315] In this way, Riley follows Weinbaum in showing that ‘four hundred years of slavery ought to be recognized as biocapitalist,’ and contemporary biocapitalism ‘ought to be recognized as ‘subtended by’ slavery, even if contemporary ‘processes of racialization […] do not skew black or white in the same way’ (i.e. are not premised on skin colour).[316] This fact, along with the aforementioned fact that Worryfree’s “new form of slavery” figures as a rational progression of the logic of accumulation, must be repressed in the ideology of neoliberal racial capitalism. Lift calls “the comparisons with slavery” “ludicrous and offensive,” while the claymation video portrays the equisapiens with noticeably lighter skin.[317] Thus, the equisapiens embody racial capitalism’s repressed contradiction, namely the fact that its objet petit a— a white, economically ‘self-sufficient’ identity— is entirely dependent on the limitless extraction of surplus-value from racialised bodies. Their reveal constitutes a scene typical of the Southern Gothic, in which “the return of the past […] subverts and corrodes the present” (Lloyd-Smith) and the “metonymic national ‘self’ is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness” (Martin and Savoy).[318] When we consider that the Gothic shares surrealism’s interest in repressed, unconscious thoughts, we can understand why Miller’s Afro-surreal manifesto asserts that Afro-futurism is unnecessary because ‘the future has been around so long it is now the past;’[319] in Kelly’s terms, Sorry to Bother You’s surrealist Gothicism ‘is not a vision of a dystopian future, it is a commentary on five hundred years of human history.’[320]

Realisation and Revolt

Unlike Ellison’s narrator, Cash begins the narrative an absurdist. However, he is not an Afro-absurdist; his philosophy is not tied to Black consciousness and this accounts for much of the film’s action. His belief that life is meaningless is a consequence of his lack of vocation, as he tells his girlfriend Detroit, who is an artist: “you got your art,” it “means something, right? But I’m just out here surviving, spinning around in an endless circle,” recalling Camus’ Sisyphus metaphor. [321] Therefore, we can understand his power-caller work as a form of philosophical suicide, as he admits: “I finally feel like I’m good at something, I’m feeling myself.”[322] Just as Ellison’s narrator sought meaning in identity, Cassius achieves an illusion of identity (feeling ‘himself’) in his conformity with the exploitative ideal of neoliberal racial capitalism. I have argued that ideological belief is a means to elude knowledge of the world’s irrationality, and this might explain Riley’s assertion that Cash’s “performance of whiteness,” which typifies the embodied ideological belief that Žižek describes, involves him “aligning with [his…] oppressors” rather than his “own oppression.” [323] Ideology blinds him to the unreasonable oppression of both Black people and ‘Black’ (i.e. racialised) labourers, along with its Afro-absurd implications. However, Riley insists that the film “is about having a revelatory experience […] that change[s] your view of the world,” and I argue that, for Cash, this is an Afro-absurd realisation following two crucial moments: the rap scene and his encounter with the equisapiens.[324] In the former, he confronts Lott’s Black mirror, realising that the ideal white identity he has been performing is dependent on its opposition to an objectified and stereotyped image of people like himself. In the latter he faces the knowledge, repressed by his ideological belief, that white economic security has always necessarily existed on the back of unimaginable Black suffering which will continue as long as the racial capitalist system that demands it. In these scenes, Cash confronts the ideological contradiction that has facilitated his enjoyable pursuit of whiteness, which is Blackness-as-surplus, as the surplus symbolic value necessitated for white supremacy and the surplus life/ value necessitated by racial biocapitalism. In Camus’ terms, he ‘stands face to face with the irrational’ embodied by the equisapien. Like Ellison’s narrator, he gains a ‘belated appreciation of the crude joke’ that ‘kept [him] running,’ awaking the next day ‘in the Blackness’ of Black consciousness and recognising American ideology’s blindness to Black existence:[325]

I know […] Worryfree and RegalView […] view me as another one of their fucking creatures to control and manipulate.[326]

Žižek insists an ignorance of irrationality is required for ideological enjoyment, and so the philosophical suicide of power-calling becomes impossible, leaving him once again in the desert of the absurd, though this time, his Black consciousness renders him unable to leave. After spending the second act of the film being ‘run’ by ideology— earning a lucrative wage, living in an expensive apartment, and alienating his friends— Riley signals Cash’s return to his initial position of absurdism by having the film conclude in the same way that it began, with Cash and Detroit musing about the sun exploding in his old apartment.

Cash has decorated the walls with Detroit’s anti racial capitalist art. Cash admits: “I couldn’t come back to the exact same thing after all that,” reflecting how his revelatory experience has caused a transition from absurdism to Afro-absurdism.[329]

Like Ellison’s narrator, however, his belated appreciation is ‘not enough,’ and he must keep his Afro-absurdism ‘alive’ through revolt. [330] Squeeze explains the challenge of the Afro-absurdist under racial capitalism: “if you get shown a problem, but have no idea how to control it, you get used to the problem,” echoing Camus’ insistence that ‘to abolish absurd revolt is to elude the problem.’[331] The ‘problem’ is irrational racial capitalist exploitation, and so “getting used to it” would be accepting exploitation, a cynicism equivalent to belief. To revolt, Cash must maintain an ‘unfailing alertness’ (Camus) of the absurdity of neoliberal racial capitalism by demonstrating his Black/ class consciousness as a racialised proletarian through trade union resistance. As such, he returns to his original job and joins the “new and glorious telemarketers union” in order to “start fighting.”[332] He even gives up his expensive car, demonstrating an awareness of Kanye’s aforementioned musings on coupes. Classical Marxism insists the dictatorship of the proletariat is inevitable, and Cash professes that if the union succeeds in picketing RegalView, they “win”, which seems incompatible with Camus’ rejection of ‘hope’ in ‘some great idea.’[333] However, Riley again uses narrative structure to reflect Cash’s absurdist beliefs. The picket succeeds, suggesting the possibility of triumph over an absurd system. In the next scene, though, it is revealed that Cash inadvertently ingested Lift’s “binding agent” and will transform into an equisapien, implying that biocapitalism’s valorisation of racialised life is inevitable:

The credits roll, ending the film on a note of grotesque pessimism, but seconds later, Riley includes a final scene in which the equisapien Cash breaks into Lift’s house, presumably to murder him.[335] This structure of progress, setback, progress, speaks to the Sisyphean nature of the revolt Cash has committed himself to, which becomes, in Camus’ (pertinently Marxist-Trotskyist) terms, a ‘permanent revolution.’ [336] Transformed into the embodiment of Afro-absurdity, he is forced to recognise the ‘certainty of a crushing fate,’ but rejects ‘the resignation that ought to accompany it,’ making him, like Ellison’s narrator, a Camusian hero.[337]

Conclusion: Afro-Absurd Creation

I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.[338]

Ellison, Glover, and Riley, like Camus, give significant weight to creation in an absurd world. Each inserts a Black creative into their narratives as a meta-textual commentary on the import, or lack thereof, of their work. Through the invisible man, Detroit and Alfred, the creatives question whether their works might lead to the spread of Afro-absurdism and, accordingly, societal change. However, in typically, absurdist fashion, having concluded that such hope would be a delusion, the creatives each pose a distinct method of creative revolt in the face of this hopelessness.

Esslin writes that by bringing them ‘face-to-face’ with ‘the schizophrenic universe,’ the absurdist hopes to help their audience/ reader take ‘the first step in coming to terms with’ the ‘ultimate reality of [their] condition,’ and this perspective resonates throughout the texts and the words of the creators.[339] Ellison concludes his text thus:

Being invisible […] what else could I do […] but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

This implies the narrator’s compulsion to spread awareness of the existential negation facing Black Americans and fear that the implications of this negation might reveal the wider absurd human condition. But this revaltion freed the narrator from white supremacist ideology, so it seems that ‘for Ellison, a thorough diagnosis of the sickness of blindness and invisibility is an indispensable preliminary to any authentic attempt at a cure’ (Butler).[340] Detroit represents a similar position, insisting her art, depicting the absurdity of “a life shaped by exploitation,” serves to “expose the bullshit” of racial capitalist ideology.[341] Likewise, in Atlanta, Glover sought to make white people “really experience racism, to really feel what it’s like to be black in America,” evidently seeking to spread Black consciousness to those with the power to alleviate Black suffering.[342]

However, all three creatives betray an awareness of their endeavour’s futility. Glover begrudgingly admits that even if Atlanta “makes people aware,” “it’s not going to do the transformative work,” while Ellison’s narrator admits that he ‘was never more hated that when [he] tried to be honest,’ and never ‘more loved and appreciated’ than when he allowed people to pretend that ‘the world was nailed down.’[343] Evidently, both assume people will elude the Afro-absurd for the homeostatic comfort of delusion.[344] This is encapsulated perfectly by the metatextual title of Riley’s film, which speaks to how “telling someone something that is different from how they view […] the world,’ such as his criticism of racial capitalism, “feels like an annoyance” and tends to be ignored.[345] Moreover, Riley inserts multiple overt criticisms of creative activism into his film, including having a defaced Worryfree billboard displayed ineffectually in Lift’s mansion and having Cash tell Detroit, “You ain’t gonna do shit neither by selling fucking art to rich people.”[346]

Following Milo Sweedler, I argue that ‘the movie’s […] criticisms of Detroit’ are criticisms that ‘the filmmaker directs at himself,’ demonstrating a quality that Camus sees as fundamental in the absurd creator. [348] He explains that one’s art ‘cannot be the end, the meaning […] of life,’ otherwise one would elude the absurd that they seek to depict, so they must recognise that ‘creating or not creating changes nothing.’[349] Riley ‘repudiate[s]’ his work in the very process of working, making it a Sisyphean struggle.[350]

Conversely, Ellison suggests that creation is a means to an absurd form of self-fashioning, as the narrator enacts his Sisyphean pursuit of identity through writing the novel. The narrator realises: ‘I was my experiences,’ experiences defined by his absurd condition of invisibility.[351] The narrator’s ‘compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white’ is thus a manifestation of his nostalgia for identity; in Camus’ terms, ‘the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work.’[352] This creation is doubly absurd, as it simultaneously bears witness to two frustrating impossibilities. The first, as we have seen, is the impossibility of positive identity in a meaningless world, and the second is that of recreating experience-as-self through art. ‘Incapable of refining the real,’ Camus explains, ‘thought pauses to mimic it,’ but this mimicry is doomed to fall short of the original, so the absurd creator’s works are ‘a collection of his failures.’[353] The narrator admits that experiencing the ‘outrageously absurd’ riot might ‘move’ Harlem’s population ‘one fraction of a bloody step closer to a definition of who they were,’ but that ‘the definition would be too narrow.’[354] When we understand the novel as an attempt at self-fashioning through an account of his own experience of absurdity, Ellison seems to be saying, in Camus’ terms: ‘if I try to seize this self […] it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers […] I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume […] but aspects cannot be added up […] forever I shall be a stranger to myself.’[355]

Finally, I have yet to address any means of revolt in Atlanta, and this is because creation is its central narrative point. However, Atlanta’s vision of absurd creation differs quite drastically from the other texts in that, while Glover professes some desire to affect change through his work, Alfred’s position as a drug-dealer and rapper problematises such a desire. We have seen that Alfred makes a conscious effort to avoid minstrel performance, but in order to bear authentic witness to the absurdity of his life, he must necessarily depict the crime and violence. In this way, Alfred finds himself in a position reminiscent of Sartre’s description of Jewish people, who “live in fear that their acts will correspond to” stereotypes, consequently allowing stereotypes to control their lives.[356] Alfred is keenly aware of the absurdity of ideology, but it still dictates his behaviour, robbing him of the ‘freedom’ that Camus sees in absurdism.[357] Atlanta’s response to this situation comes in the final episode, in which a Black woman tells Darius: “I think I was trained for a long time to look at this world like a battle […] but I’m part of this world too […] and I’m allowed to dance in it how I want to.”[358] The battle, of course, is the struggle against racism, and Alfred’s situation indicates how seeing the world this way can deprive the creative of the joy inherent in their art, metaphorised by “dance.” By concluding the show with this message, Glover seems to be suggesting that finding joy in documenting the absurdity of life is as much of a revolutionary, liberating act as criticising this absurdity.

To conclude, Camus writes, ‘for the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining or solving, but of experiencing and describing:’ ‘everything begins with lucid indifference.’[359] This sentiment resonates throughout Afro-absurd writing, as Fanon asserts ‘there is no Negro mission,’ while Riley seems indifferent to his lucid analysis of racial capitalism and Ellison’s narrator insists ‘irresponsibility is part of [his] invisibility.’[360] The creators, then, seek to depict the ‘beautiful absurdity of […] American identity’ (Ellison),[361] but recognise the futility of their creation, because, in the words of Darius:

Everything’s made up nigga, stay woke.[362]

Endnotes

[1] W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Litany at Atlanta,’ quoted in Jones, xvii.

[2] Jones, xix.

[3] Fanon, 118.

[4] Fanon, 10-11.

[5] Ellison, Invisible, 8.

[6] Armstrong, ‘Black and Blue.’

[7] Ellison, Invisible, 8.

[8] Ellison, Invisible, 8.

[9] Biko, 30.

[10] Biko, 62, 28-29.

[11] Camus, 1.

[12] Camus, 15-16, 36.

[13] Camus, 19.

[14] Camus, 19-20.

[15] Camus, 1.

[16] Camus, 7, 39.

[17] Camus, 7, 36

[18] Camus, 29.

[19] Camus, 20.

[20] Camus, 52.

[21] Camus, 52.

[22] Fanon, 109, 10.

[23] Jones, xx and hooks, 6.

[24] Jackson, ‘Absurd,’ 359.

[25] Sartre, 42, 46.

[26] Jackson, ‘Absurd,’ 360.

[27] Quoted in Bakare, ‘The new age of Afro-surrealism.’

[28] Clark, ‘The Future of Comedy.’

[29] Kelly, ‘Sorry, Not Sorry.’

[30] The Eric Andre Show, ‘Series 2, Episode 9.’

[31] Miller, ‘Afro-Surreal.’ Note this tendency in Murphy and McCoy, ‘Afro-Surrealism;’ ‘The Afro-Surrealist Film Movement,’ Surrealism Today; Taw, ‘Introspection & Afro-Surrealist Cinema.’

[32] See Clark, ‘The Future of Comedy’ and D. Scott Miller as quoted in Phillips ‘New Black Surrealism.’

[33] Esslin, 4, 6, 337.

[34] Aimé Césaire quoted from memory in Fanon, 90.

[35] Esslin, 338-339.

[36] Camus, 51.

[37] Cashmore.

[38] Ellison, Invisible, 3.

[39] Ellison, Invisible, 4.

[40] Ellison, ‘The Art of Fiction.’

[41] Butler, ‘What is to Be Done?,’ 319.

[42] Ellison, Invisible, 14 and Žižek, 30.

[43] Žižek, 69.

[44] Ellison, Invisible, 15.

[45] Camus, 88.

[46] Wyman-Marchand, 175.

[47] Ellison, Invisible, 18.

[48] Ellison, Invisible, 24-25.

[49] Ellison, Invisible, 26-27.

[50] Ellison, 27.

[51] Žižek, 16-17.

[52] Ralph Ellison, ‘Bearden & the Destruction of the Accepted Word,’ quoted in Rosemont and Kelly ed., 217.

[53] Žižek, 43, 51, and Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id,’ 23.

[54] Žižek, 35-36.

[55] Lee, ‘Knucklebones,’ 466.

[56] Žižek, 49-50.

[57] Ellison, Invisible, 217.

[58] Biko, 100-101.

[59] Lee, ‘Sight,’ 26.

[60] Ellison, Invisible, 217.

[61] Ellison, Invisible, 243, 236.

[62] Reed, 261. See Tony Tanner, ‘The Music of Invisibility;’ Thomas A. Vogler, ‘Invisible Man: Somebody’s Protest Novel;’ George E. Kent, ‘Ralph Ellison and the Afro-American Tradition,’ for Reed’s examples of this reading.

[63] Ellison, Invisible, 237 and Wyman-Marchand, 175.

[64] Ellison, 239-240 and Butler, ‘What is to be Done?,’ 318.

[65] Ellison, Invisible, 238.

[66] Fanon, 18.

[67] Ellison, Invisible, 259.

[68] Žižek, 36.

[69] Ellison, Invisible, 309, 353.

[70] Ellison, Invisible, 505.

[71] Ellison, Invisible, 381.

[72] Ellison, Invisible, 346, 352, 354 and Fanon, 18.

[73] Ellison, Invisible, 381, 475.

[74] Žižek, 89.

[75] Esslin, 317, 364.

[76] Césaire, 124.

[77] Breton, 12.

[78] Ellison, Invisible, 33.

[79] Ellison, Invisible, 33.

[80] Ellison, Invisible, 33.

[81] Lee, ‘Sight,’ 23-24 and Ellison, 242.

[82] Lee, ‘Sight,’ 23-24 and Ellison, Invisible, 32, 145, 309, 15.

[83] Ménil, 94.

[84] Biko, 49, 66 and Fanon, 60.

[85] Breton, 26 and Ménil, 129.

[86] Ralph Ellison, ‘The Golden Age, Time Past,’ quoted in Spaulding, 482-483 and Spaulding, 481-501.

[87] Klotman, 281.

[88] Ellison, Invisible, 31.

[89] Sartre, 271.

[90] Ellison, Invisible, 271-271.

[91] Lee, ‘Knucklebones,’ 469-470.

[92] Ellison, Invisible, 273.

[93] Ellison, Invisible, 272-273 and Lee, ‘Knucklebones,’ 470.

[94] Ellison, Invisible, 275.

[95] Ellison, Invisible, 279.

[96] Ellison, Invisible, 281.

[97] Žižek, 80.

[98] Ellison, Invisible, 475-476.

[99] Camus, 11.

[100] Camus, 27, 11.

[101] Ellison, Invisible, 432-433.

[102] Reed, 268 and Ellison, Invisible, 436.

[103] Fanon, 140.

[104] Ellison, Invisible, 483-499

[105] Ellison, Invisible, 498, 493.

[106] Ellison, Invisible, 493.

[107] Ellison, Invisible, 498.

[108] Ellison, Invisible, 495, 498.

[109] Ellison, Invisible, 498.

[110] Ellison, Invisible, 497 and Camus, 63.

[111] Ellison, Invisible, 500.

[112] Ellison, Invisible, 501.

[113] Ellison, Invisible, 502-503.

[114] Žižek, 26-27.

[115] Ellison, Invisible, 508.

[116] Ellison, Invisible, 510.

[117] Ellison, Invisible, 507-508.

[118] Ellison, Invisible, 504.

[119] Žižek, 30.

[120] Žižek, 31.

[121] Žižek, 35.

[122] Camus, 39-40 and Žižek, 26.

[123] Žižek, 30, 27

[124] Camus, 11.

[125] Ellison, Invisible, 552-553.

[126] Ellison, Invisible, 553.

[127] Žižek, 80.

[128] Žižek, 48.

[129] Breton, 14.

[130] Ellison, Invisible, 33.

[131] Ellison, Invisible, 568.

[132] Ellison, Invisible, 569.

[133] Jackson, ‘Absurd,’ 370.

[134] Biko, 29.

[135] Camus, 110.

[136] Ellison, Invisible, 569.

[137] Žižek, 85.

[138] Camus 8, 63.

[139] Ellison, Invisible, 570.

[140] Ellison, Invisible, 570.

[141] Ralph Ellison, ‘What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,’ quoted in Lott, 1.

[142] Lott, 9-10.

[143] Ellison, Invisible, 4.

[144] Jacques Lacan, Écrits quoted in Lott, 10.

[145] Lott, 20.

[146] Fanon, 176.

[147] Fanon, 212.

[148] Ellison, Invisible, 568, 566.

[149] Ellison, Invisible, 570, 3.

[150] Camus, 54-55 57.

[151] Brenan, 167.

[152] Biko, 48-49.

[153] Ellison, Invisible, 573.

[154] Ellison, Invisible, 566-567 and Žižek, 81.

[155] Ellison, Invisible, 573.

[156] Žižek, 81.

[157] Žižek, 81.

[158] Camus, 10.

[159] Ellison, Invisible, 579.

[160] Ellison, Invisible, 576.

[161] Ellison, Invisible, 579.

[162] Camus, 51-52.

[163] Camus, 118-119.

[164] Ellison, Invisible, 577.

[165] The Notorious B.I.G., ‘Juicy.’

[166] Atlanta, ‘Bang.’

[167] Camus, 12-13

[168] Esslin, 346.

[169] Žižek, 33-34.

[170] Donald Glover quoted in Friend, ‘Save You.’

[171] Glover quoted in Friend, ‘Save You’ and Yousman, 372.

[172] hooks, 35.

[173] Njee, ‘Share Cropping.’

[174] Cashmore, 1.

[175] Atlanta, ‘Value.’

[176] Atlanta, ‘Value.’

[177] Fanon, 146-148.

[178] Planas, ‘New Florida’ and Fanon, 148.

[179] Atlanta, ‘B.A.N.’

[180] Atlanta, ‘B.A.N.’

[181] Fanon, 191.

[182] Atlanta, ‘B.A.N.’

[183] Atlanta, ‘Perkins.’

[184] Luckhurst, 166-167.

[185] Bjerre, ‘Southern Gothic.’

[186] Atlanta, ‘Perkins.’

[187] Atlanta, ‘Perkins.’

[188] Atlanta, ‘Perkins.’

[189] Cashmore, 5.

[190] “Labour in Vain,” Express and Star.

[191] hooks, 17.

[192] Atlanta, ‘Perkins.’

[193] Atlanta, ‘Perkins.’

[194] Freud, ‘Uncanny,’ 236.

[195] hooks, 1-2.

[196] Lott, 6.

[197] hooks, 21.

[198] Atlanta, ‘Biebs.’

[199] Atlanta, ‘Biebs.’

[200] The Cambridge Dictionary, quoted in Cherid, 359.

[201] Castillo, “Benefited off of Black Culture.”

[202] Castillo, and France, ‘Racial controversy.’

[203] Ochiagha,‘White Rappers.’

[204] Atlanta, ‘Biebs.’ Rich, ‘So Much Weed.’

[205] hooks, 1 and Atlanta, ‘Border.’

[206] Atlanta, ‘Waves.’

[207] Atlanta, ‘Waves.’

[208] Atlanta, ‘Waves.’

[209] Atlanta, ‘Waves.’

[210] Atlanta, ‘Waves.’

[211] Atlanta, ‘Shawty.’

[212] hooks, 18.

[213] Atlanta, ‘Biebs.’

[214] Fanon, 35.

[215] Atlanta, ‘Money.’

[216] Atlanta, ‘Streisand.’

[217] Lott, 6.

[218] Camus, 50.

[219] Yousman.

[220] Yousman, 378.

[221] Žižek, 43, 51.

[222] Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, quoted in Brenan, 168.

[223] Ralph Ellison, ‘Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” quoted in Lee, ‘Knucklebones,’ 461 and Fanon, 165.

[224] Ellison, Invisible, 520.

[225] Atlanta, ‘Bang.’

[226] Žižek, 54.

[227] Atlanta, ‘Waves.’

[228] Žižek, 54.

[229] Atlanta, ‘Bang.’

[230] Žižek, 73.

[231] Žižek, 35-36.

[232] Atlanta, ‘Border.’

[233] Atlanta, ‘Border.’

[234] Lott, 9.

[235] hooks, 23-24.

[236] hooks, 17.

[237] Atlanta, ‘Biebs.’

[238] Atlanta, ‘Biebs.’

[239] Yousman, 387.

[240] Lott, 9 and Hooks, 23-24.

[241] Fanon, 212.

[242] Childish Gambino, ‘Bonfire.’

[243] Boots Riley, quoted in Kelly, ‘Sorry, Not Sorry,’ and Sorry to Bother You. [Abbreviated as Sorry henceforth].

[244] Sorry.

[245] Sorry.

[246] Sorry.

[247] Esslin, 336.

[248] Jennifer Lynn Stoever, ‘The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening,’ quoted in Austin, ‘Horse-People.’

[249] Webster, 3.

[250] Weinbaum, 13. [Weinbaum cites the work of labour historians David Roediger, Theodore Allen and Moon-Ho Jung to make this assertion].

[251] Fanon, 18.

[252] Sorry.

[253] Kelly, ‘Sorry not Sorry.’

[254] Butler, Notes, 14.

[255] Sorry.

[256] Sorry.

[257] Sorry.

[258] Weinbaum, 13.

[259] Sorry.

[260] Sorry.

[261] Sorry.

[262] Sorry.

[263] Sorry.

[264] Sorry and Atlanta, ‘Club.’

[265] West, ‘All Falls Down.’

[266] Weinbaum, 13.

[267] Butler, Notes, 15, 10.

[268] Sorry.

[269] Sorry.

[270] Sorry.

[271] Butler, Notes, 14.

[272] Melamed, 77.

[273] Riley, Dystopian Satire.’

[274] Sorry.

[275] Riley, ‘Hit Movie,’ and Sorry.

[276] Kelly.

[277] Sorry.

[278] Bernard Wolfe, ‘L’oncle Remus et son lapin,’ quoted in Fanon, 174.

[279] Sorry.

[280] Marx, Capital.

[281] Lauro and Hovanec, 127.

[282] Foucault, History, 139 and Sorry.

[283] Foucault, History, 139.

[284] Foucault, History, 139.

[285] Foucault, History, 141.

[286] Torchin, 34.

[287] Sorry.

[288] Marx, Capital.

[289] Marx, Capital.

[290] Marx, Capital.

[291] Melamed, 77.

[292] Marx, Capital.

[293] Sorry.

[294] Sorry.

[295] Sorry.

[296] See Styhre and Sundgren, Bioeconomy; Lettow, ‘Biocapitalism;’ Braun, Biopolitics; Cooper, Life as Surplus.

[297] Foucault, Society, 243-244.

[298] Foucault, Society, 243.

[299] Foucault, Society, 255-257.

[300] Sorry.

[301] Foucault, Society, 258.

[302] Marx, Capital.

[303] Sorry.

[304] Braun, 150.

[305] Braun, 147.

[306] Sorry and Kelly, ‘Sorry not Sorry.’

[307] Fuseli, The Nightmare.

[308] Sorry.

[309] Marx, Capital.

[310] Sorry.

[311] Sorry.

[312] Bjerre, 4.

[313] Fanon. 159.

[314] Bowen, ‘Gothic Motifs,’ and Torchin, 29.

[315] Spillers, 75-76.

[316] Weinbaum, 17, 8.

[317] Sorry.

[318] Alan Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction and Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, ‘Introduction,’ in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, both quoted in Bjerre, 2.

[319] Miller, ‘Afro-Surreal.’

[320] Kelly, ‘Sorry not Sorry.’

[321] Sorry.

[322] Sorry.

[323] Boots Riley, quoted in Harris, ‘White Voice.’

[324] Riley, ‘Hit Movie.’

[325] Camus, 26 and Ellison, Invisible, 570, 573.

[326] Sorry.

[327] Sorry.

[328] Sorry.

[329] Sorry.

[330] Ellison, Invisible, 573 and Camus, 52.

[331] Sorry and Camus, 52,

[332] Sorry.

[333] Sorry and Camus, 7.

[334] Sorry.

[335] Sorry.

[336] Camus, 52.

[337] Camus, 52.

[338] Camus, 89.

[339] Esslin, 338.

[340] Butler, ‘What is to be Done?,’ 327.

[341] Sorry.

[342] Glover quoted in Friend, ‘Save You.’

[343] Ellison, Invisible, 573.

[344] Glover quoted in Friend, Save You.’

[345] Riley, ‘His Hit Movie.’

[346] Sorry.

[347] Sorry.

[348] Riley, ‘Hit Movie’ and Sweedler, ‘Art.’

[349] Camus, 94

[350] Camus, 94.

[351] Ellison, Invisible, 508.

[352] Ellison, Invisible, 14 and Camus, 94.

[353] Camus, 98, 112.

[354] Ellison, Invisible, 559.

[355] Camus, 17-18.

[356] Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, quoted in Fanon, 115.

[357] Camus, 56.

[358] Atlanta, ‘Dream.’

[359] Camus, 91.

[360] Fanon, 228 and Ellison, Invisible, 14.

[361] Ellison, Invisible, 559.

[362] Atlanta, ‘Streisand.’

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Max Savage

‘What Did I Do to be so Black and Blue?’: Afro-Absurdism in ‘Invisible Man,’ ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Sorry to Bother You’

‘A road that may lead nowhere’: Coetzee, Welsh and Becoming