Abstract
Mobilizing home: Thomas Nail and the literature classroom
Everything is connected, and sometimes we, like little fishes, are swept up in these big and powerful currents. Carried far from home … (Raami’s father, In the Shadow of the Banyan (Ratner, 2012: 43))
When I designed an elective course for undergraduates in Duke University’s English Department, I imagined it to be a course about the home, far away from which would be carried most of the historical and fictional individuals we would study. I entitled my course “Homes in Crisis in Literature” and intended to focus my students’ analytic attention on the labor of (re)producing homely conditions in unhomely dwelling spaces, as well as on what authors perceive to be lost in the loss of a home under oppressive circumstances. I hoped for students to reflect on the value of safe living conditions and on the global patterns of violence that have threatened them. Given the elective nature of the course—exploratory rather than focused on coverage of necessary knowledge for English majors—I chose a broad approach, one that would begin by focusing on slave narratives and Jim Crow segregation in the United States before transitioning to a global and more overtly comparative project with literature treating “camp” sites: Hoovervilles, Japanese Internment facilities, Nazi concentration camps, Cambodian genocide relocation communities, and the Gaza strip’s refugee camps. 1 Over the semester, my students and I discovered that I had incidentally designed a course as much about mobility or migrancy as about home, which becomes the point of departure—or more specifically, the site of expulsion—for people who enter into the figure of the migrant, which “is not a fixed identity or specific person but a mobile social position” (Nail, 2015: 16). Here, I will narrate how reading Thomas Nail’s (2015) The Figure of the Migrant while teaching contributed to re-visioning my course, and I will argue for the value of a text like Figure as an anchoring heuristic counterpoint in a literature classroom. Most importantly, Figure contributed to a shift in my attention from the static to the mobile, from sites and objects to circuits and rituals, and from the paradigmatic to the figural. While I had always envisioned teaching students about the violent potential of the sovereign state as central to the precarity of homes for racialized populations, Nail’s (2015: 37) concept of “expansion by expulsion” has given me a shorthand for this array of violence and for the sovereign state’s investments in its systematic practice. 2
Beginning the semester with Harriet Jacobs’ ([1861] 2001) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, paired with a specific passage from Jacques Derrida and Dufourmantelle’s (2000) Of Hospitality, delayed the emergence of mobility as a central concern for this course. In Incidents, Jacobs ([1861] 2001: 156) famously idealizes a stable home, emblemized by “a hearthstone of my own” and invested in the stasis possible for white Americans with recognized property rights in the antebellum United States. Much of her fugitivity in the text, furthermore, takes place in the cramped attic of a shed, the “loophole of retreat” where she spends 7 years, compared to which her literally mobile fugitivity occupies an (arguably) less dramatic narrative space (Jacobs, [1861] 2001: 91). Jacobs also flees slavery in other spaces of confinement: under kitchen floorboards, in a neighbor’s attic, deep in a swamp. In one significant scene, a white militia invades her grandmother’s home to look for signs of a local slave uprising. Jacobs ([1861] 2001) laments that “the dwellings of the colored people, unless they happened to be protected by some influential white person, who was nigh at hand, were robbed of clothing and everything else the marauders thought worth carrying away” (p. 51). Elsewhere she says of the poor she observes in Steventon, England, “Their homes were very humble; but they were protected by law,” and she explains that “the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, were too sacred for the richest noble in the land to violate with impunity” (Jacobs, [1861] 2001: 143). In other words, Jacobs construes the ideal home as a fortress wherein one has the right to expel intruders regardless of racial or class status. This is an especially static image based on property ownership anchored in a plot of land, however small. Nail (2015: 28) would read these seemingly static spaces as junctions - “the house is a territorial junction” as opposed to a “node” because it organizes movement—but more on that in a moment.
I paired Jacobs’ narrative with a passage from Derrida’s Of Hospitality that also depicts the home as a stronghold. Here, Derrida aligns the host with hostility and argues that an overly liberal hospitality places the host at risk of being taken hostage and losing his authority to make a house hospitable any longer. Derrida and Dufourmantelle’s (2000) summarizes, “No hospitality, in the classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home, but since there is also no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and this by excluding and doing violence” (p. 55). Again, the home’s walls and its gatekeeping mechanisms, its bulwarks and barricades, mark it as homely and safe for habitation. The home’s membrane refuses to cede at its most performatively effective. Jacobs’ yearning for a home in which she could assert the finitude of her hospitality, read next to Derrida, focuses our attention toward the owner of the home (a position in which Jacobs imagines her future self) rather than the expelled, and rather than on Jacobs herself as always already expelled via slavery. Not even at the conclusion of her narrative does Jacobs figure Derrida’s host. Instead, under chattel slavery, she has been multiply expelled by the nation state, a supremely hostile host of black Americans. Several generations back Jacobs’ ancestors were expelled from Africa as what Nail (2015: 113) calls a “future surplus” 3 which later led to expulsion in America from both the political and legal realms as racialized persons to whom citizen rights did not extend and who could not appeal to the law for assistance. This expulsion intensified after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case in 1857, which, respectively, made free states unsafe for fugitive slaves and stripped free black Americans of rights, thereby expanding the American judiciary’s power and slaveholders’ territorial reach (see e.g. chapter six Hartman, 1997). Rightlessness meant that free black Americans could never be sure of their landholdings, an instability which pre-figures the migrant. 4
Of course, migrancy exceeds the loss it often entails. Nail (2015: 13) cautions readers to recognize that “with respect to movement, displacement is not a lack but a positive capacity or trajectory” and that “to understand migration and movement as lack is to accept the banality of social dispossession.” It is difficult not to perceive migration via expulsion as ordinary and predictable (even as its forms, figures, and instigating forces evolve) given Nail’s sweeping historical narrative of displaced populations, in which the rise of sovereign nation states has depended on consolidating power through territorial, political, legal, and economic expulsions. But to recognize the frequency with which expulsion occurs does not preclude treating mobility as Nail advises, as the prerequisite for the production and reproduction of seemingly static social spaces, cultural forms, and alternative forces (which Nail labels pedetic and classifies as the raid, the rebellion, the revolt, and resistance) by those who figure the migrant. Even as Harriet Jacobs’ leg muscles atrophied in her grandmother’s attic, she continued to evade the “junction” or point of contact that could have swept her back into the mobile “circulation” dictated by re-enslavement (Nail, 2015: 27–32). 5 Her relatively immobile fugitivity averts a too-mobile incarceration that would have involved the daily circulation of slave labor and, more substantially, could have entailed the broader circulation of the domestic US slave trade. Only in narrative (which orders movement onto the page and into episodes) does her fugitivity have a set of bounded “nodes” or static sites: “From the perspective of the migrant, these points are simply relays or portions of a continuous trajectory that have been arbitrarily or strategically selected as discrete from the continuum of social motion” (Nail, 2015: 14).
Indeed, Nail’s perspective on the motion within apparent confinement has much in common with the concept of the fugitive in the subset of African American studies characterized (not necessarily by the authors labeled as such) as Afro-optimism. Fred Moten (2008: 182), in theorizing blackness as a mode of “fugitive” being, states that “some/thing escapes in or through the object’s vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what I’m interested in—an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions.” Moten (2008: 188) looks at social death as a terminology which cannot fully explain black life’s “terribly beautiful vitality” in its conceptualization of black people as fully objectified, partitioned off from subjectivity, and subdued into colonialized habits of thought. Similarly, Nail refuses to see expulsion, even at its least voluntary, as the reactionary motion of a body through space. It is worth noting that while Nail uses fluid kinetics to explain social forces and counter-forces, Moten envisions air escaping an enclosed frame. These images of elemental fugitive motion, of deviation within and through bounds both too rigid and too porous, invite a mode of analysis that locates and recognizes the significance of micro-political acts without overstating them as liberatory writ large.
Looking to the micro-political is a worthwhile endeavor in a literature course that follows expulsions through tightly focused, individuated narratives. What my students tended to recognize as most homely in unhomely spaces were the rituals and motions that migrants could reproduce even as the objects and sites associated with home disappeared. In narrative segments wherein protagonists’ movements were tightly circumscribed into circuits of labor and basic self-maintenance (especially in genocidal camps), these movements became quite small. Vaddey Ratner’s (2012: 279) Cambodian genocide novel In the Shadow of the Banyan details a moment in which Raami’s, the young narrator’s, mother diverges from her place within a stream of workers building a levy in order to bring her starving daughter a bug to eat:
There was a continuous flow, as many lines going up [the embankment] as those coming down. Mama was on her way down and heading toward me, taking the long way around, passing one crater after another where she could have exchanged her emptied baskets [of earth] for a pair of full ones. If a soldier caught her taking the detour, she would be punished, forced to work longer than everyone or, worse, deprived of a meal. (Emphasis added)
Ratner’s writing densely mirrors Nail’s investment in flows as a descriptor of human social motion. The people building the levy in this scene are primarily Cambodians who formerly resided in urban centers and who represented for the Khmer Rouge regime the social ills of modernization, bourgeoisification, and intellectualism. Because of these affiliations, the regime expelled them from cities like the capital, Phnom Penh, into the countryside for use as a labor force in state projects, especially the project of re-routing Cambodia’s waterways to dramatically increase rice production and ensure the state’s economic ascendancy. Banyan follows a single family converging with other streams of people leaving the capital and entering into the circulation of labor in the Khmer Rouge economy. Nail’s concept of the junction draws attention to the new regimes of movement as Raami’s family enters into the ordered patterns of rice farming, for example. In the scene above, Raami’s mother uses mobility to resist, minutely, the Khmer Rouge prohibitions against privileging family members over the community and against inefficient labor. She signifies to her daughter in diverging from the prescribed flow that her motherly affection has survived the violent expulsion from their home, from meaningful citizenship, and from privileged class status, and that it even bursts through the rigid circuit of the labor camp. I posit that these aberrant movements are migrants’ assertions of their humanity in de-humanizing conditions of expulsion. They keep a person particular to herself within a flow of de-individuated bodies.
As the illustration from Banyan indicates, Figure would provide a useful framework for a literature class. Whereas Nail (2015: 15) rarely zooms in to the scale of the individual, identifiable migrant and demurs to “put forth a theory of what we ought to do,” he provides a vocabulary for the types of expulsive forces to which individuals are subjected, the regimes of motion into which they are thrust, the figures of migrancy which they then inhabit, and finally the counter-forces of resistance in which they might participate. The typological nature of his text, which takes up each era of history and its special, emergent migrant figure in turn, lends itself to the work of comparative study, which some of my students initially found uncomfortable. They specifically questioned the ethics of discussing similarities in events and images in Maus, a biographical graphic novel treating the Holocaust, and in other texts depicting camps. They had read an article by Lana Zannetino (2012) describing the concept of the camp as a space produced by racialization and which, in her account of Giorgio Agamben’s formulation, paradoxically imagines the (previously racialized) internee as stripped of all particularity, including race. This conceptually prepared them to discuss the camp as a type of racialized space prone to certain human rights infractions; however, when it came to comparative discussion, students were quick to note that, for example, the images of Japanese internees standing behind a barbed wire fence looked much like Holocaust photographs, but “surely nothing could compare to the Holocaust.”
In order to dislodge the Holocaust as the paradigmatic camp, and especially as the paradigmatic genocide against which all others must be measured, I attempted to re-frame the discussion of state-sponsored violence to make comparison seem non-judgmental—less about evaluation, less about numbers. I presented a brief overview of trends in the field of genocide studies to demonstrate the value that scholars in history, anthropology, political science, and ethnic studies find in comparative work. 6 A turn from looking at genocidal events (as isolated in time and space) to looking at genocide as a process whose necessary components and most common patterns can be determined with an aim to prevention helped students to see the value of comparative readings of literary narratives of genocide and camps. We could consider which actions by a state contributed to the simmering phase of a potential eruption of mass violence and which actions seemed to take the simmer to the boiling point of atrocity. A continuum emerged—a capacious and variable figure of the camp, one might say—instead of a contest to reach the status of the paradigm. Introducing the work done in other disciplines clarified the special role of literary study. The aforementioned disciplines often do the broad, macro work of schematizing political violence, whereas literature reminds us that no single, unified Holocaust experience exists, much less a unified experience of genocide. Literature offers a range of subjective expressions of why it matters that human individuals experience political violence, what significance one might draw from witnessing it, and what narrative can (or cannot) do to organize life in its wake. Nail’s Figure could also productively serve as an extra-disciplinary counterbalance in the literature classroom insofar as he provides a vocabulary for conceptualizing expulsion and tracking the different figurations of the migrant that appear in literature. While Nail (2015: 182) provides a case study of the Latinx migrant in the United States at the end of his text, he justifies it not as a paradigm—the ultimate figure of the migrant—but rather as one figure who happens to encapsulate all of the figurations of migrancy that have historically emerged, “a microcosmic guide.” Nail’s approach to comparative study is itself a guide worth following.