I Can’t Hate This Like I Want To: On Newberry’s Seeing Race Before Race Exhibit
by Dontay M. Givens II
“As Hammonds instructs, one detects the presence of a black hole by its effects on the region of space where it is located, as in the case of observing a binary system in which a visible star circles an invisible companion. The existence of a black hole is not seen optically but rather is inferred from its ability to distort the orbiting star.” -Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void”: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics
I did not simply waltz into the Newberry’s Seeing Race Before Race exhibition. It was something I had to plan to see. Walking into the exhibition I was oriented by the space: glass cases to house the manuscripts and printed books, large colored paintings, maps, and words. Oh so many words. The first feeling is that of desire. The second is that of dissection. Which text(ile) should I start with first? Between the Newberry’s working definition of race or Rembrandt’s Ethiopian Eunuch, my eyes settled on Rembrandt. It’s only a sketch, the tentative lines abound, but the lines become more decisive the closer I observe the Ethiopians. Difference is marked through sight. There can be no confusing the Ethiopians with the man in Ottoman –or perhaps Persian–dress mounted atop a horse with his spear and falchion.
When I move past a large painting of a Black Madonna and Child, the exhibit then bends: the space opens itself, into the white I move toward the names I could recall. Temporality receives a brief interlude as 13th-century manuscripts sit next to 18th-century maps. It makes sense to me to dispense the notion of linear time to layer text(ile) and image, sculpture and map, atop each other — can I notice the seams? Does the curators’ definition of race hold when I move from one side of the exhibition to the next?
An exhibition is a curated event. It is like walking into an archive with documents already on the table. An archive already tells a story; what would it mean to narrate it further? Which story about the history of race does the Newberry wish to tell with its curation of maps, emblem books, manuscripts, and painting? By locating race, before 1492 or 1619, what past is (re)imagined? The selection of these seven items is my attempt at further narration, an attempt to layer these images atop each other to illuminate aspects of the exhibition that may escape enframement.
Trusting my (re)memory, what Toni Morrison called a Black methodology of knowledge-production, I write here about the exhibit, race, and their relation to the Black. The Black — its ontology, subjectivity, and becoming — should be thought of in terms of its conceptual multiplicity within the European imagination. (Re)memory, as an extension of Morrison’s use of the term, becomes a method of (dis)orientating existence in relation to the world. If (re)memory begins with an ontology of the (dis)located body, (re)memory unfolds as a relation of non-relation, multiplicity proliferates as differences that differ. This multiplicity is imagined as a Black(/hole) — a substantive distortion–whose dense gravity and strong pull affects the things around it. Thinking in line with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, the Black(/hole) should be understood in terms of its divergence(s) with other concepts of race — which is marked by its distortion of any singular concept of race — its collapsing of these varying concepts into one. The Black(/hole) is the conceptual distortion through which I use to better situate premodern concepts of race.
What would it look like for a Black(/hole) to saunter into our galaxy? Would Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a Brazilian anthropologist, say a Black(/hole) has the potentiality to travel anywhere? For Viveiros de Castro many non-human entities could see themselves as humans. The ability to assume humanity is about the potential of the non-human to inhabit the perspective of a human to themselves. Would the stars be the Black(/hole)’s neckbones? Would a moon be their Remy Martin? Could a text do human things, let’s say speak or dance or sing? Would I stretch de Vivieros Castro’s perspectivism too far? But ain’t that what Black(/hole)s do? Distort?
Joan Blaeu, Le grand atlas; ov, Cosmographie Blaviane, v. 11 (1663) Star systems of races (if I could invoke something so romantic) — Tupí, Romani, Jewish, Turkish — bend when they collide with a Black(/hole). If you look close enough there is almost no mistaking a Chinese merchant for a Black Turk (although I have seen it done, just not here). My eyes are trained to look for racial differences: attention to dress, the absence of ‘cultivated’ land in the background, a subtle somatic identifier — you know a Black(/hole) when you see one. I can distinguish between mapping differences and tracing them. I know the intensified effects of a Black(/hole) can only exist in relation to the whole of the star system. A Black(/hole) is not central or all-encompassing, while it might alter all that it touches, it is still beholden to the laws of gravity.
Albrecht Dürer, Les Qvatre livres…de la proportion des parties & amp; pourtraicts des corps humains (1557) Albrecht Dürer, Nicolas de Nicolay, and Jacques Callot knew a Black(/hole) by its effects. How to draw the features of un Éthiopien? Der Mohr? How to perfect the marks of their difference? The nose and the lips have to be just right. Be sure not to overextend, or you will create wild men like our ancestors. Did Dürer complete an exercise in the extremes of ‘human’ proportions? Did something inhuman emerge once the exercise was done? Perfect me with your pen. Sit me on the throne of your imagination. How would I have been (re)born on the other side of Dürer’s pen?
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parsival (1477) Feirefiz collapses light and dark, heaven and hell. Were you Black with white spots? Or was it the other way around? You were spotted like a ‘magpie’ (Geraldine Heng called it a ‘piebald’). Scientists claim light does not escape a Black(/hole). How would they explain your spots? (I’ve heard scholars with a medical background claim it was vitiligo.) What happens when a Black(/hole) cannot hold all parts of itself? Which erodes first, heaven or hell? The hermeneutic Black or the somatic parts? Your mother, Belkane, was Black as me. She faded into the darkness of silence; Feirefiz, tell me how it felt when she wept. Did you, like the raven colored Moriaen, venture on behalf of her broken heart? All readers will remember is your spotted skin, your dual abandonment is an afterthought. Does Parzival’s virtue distort when it is written so closely to the story of your mother’s pain?
Andrea Alciato, Andreae Alciati Emblematum libellus (1536) I stood at the blanchir un more (whiten a moor) the longest of all. I wanted to burrow into the emblem book and force it to speak. I wanted to ask the Ethiopian man if it hurt when they tried to scrub away his Black. I marveled at how he held his head down, averting his eyes from me, almost as if to say: I can’t hate this like I want to. I can’t hate this as much as you. I wanted to shout, be resolute, the way is not the same in two directions, a downcast head is the mirror of a saddened spirit. This book is for teaching. The Black(/hole) becomes a proverb captured in Latin, Norman French, Middle Flemish. Is it wiser to attempt washing and fail? Is it foolish to never ask if the Ethiopian can change his skin? The emblem book didn’t speak back.
Bernard Picart, Engravings from Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses des peuples idolatres (1723)* Nietzsche called it the Dionysiac, the living Primal Oneness which melts all subjectivity, an intoxication which collapses all suffering, joy, pain, and laughter into the body. What would you have called this dance? For whom do you perform? I feel the body’s movement, folding into itself, reaching outside of itself, moving to a captured rhythm. Viveiros de Castro knew it was something in how your metaphysics ordered your view of ontology, he would call this the manifestation of a different ontology of relation. Nakedness? Civilization? Treatises on land rights? These are concerns of the one etching, twisting the acid–or woodcut–into the page. Your job is to be captured in dance, to whip your bodies around that damned fire, letting the Primal Oneness pull your body to the flame’s light. I would dance among you, but I am bound to the laws of gravity; in that sense, I can only dance beside you.
Jacques de Gheyn II, Two Studies of a Roma Woman and a Roma Boy (ca. 1605) Why ain’t that Romani woman dancing? She smiles so softly, an image with the intention of taming. Even a smile is performed. Her performance is one of tolerance, she must bear with de Gheyn II posing and directing her smile: less teeth, shift the weight to their left leg, don’t sneeze. The Roma boy has given up on smiling, he has not learned that it is sometimes better to tolerate an annoyance (only sometimes). He tilts away from de Gheyn II and creates distance between himself and the viewer’s gaze. Did he refuse to take off his hat? The attempt to escape being enframed is a type of dancing — one performs this escape with subtle movements, revolting gestures — that pushes against the gaze. Dancing can reveal too much. Retain your mystery because they want so much more from you.
John Speed, America with those known parts in that unknown worlde both people (1626) I am interested in what escapes enframement. I know it is only a map, but it feels so empty; it frames nothing, maps nothing. Something is lost when a map claims to speak truth, when the land exists only on paper. But don’t the lands live? Don’t they, in our mutual aid, breathe like you and I? I’ve decided Speed’s map is a tracing. There is a lack of originality. This is no map. It is ugly, it takes life away from space, taking its power. “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.” Yes. Deleuze and Guattari. This tracing has forgone all contact with the Real, imposing its narcissistic boundaries, attempting to cut through the Real.
“By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities)… I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.” -Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
Like Saidiya Hartman I could only speak in the subjunctive. Using my imagination I intended to fill out parts of this exhibit that have no ability to speak on their own (the living-dead, our guests, can speak through us): etchings, French emblem books, illuminated manuscripts written in Middle High German. Each of the text(ile)s chosen spoke in one way or another, each telling a story of how race unravels and weaves back upon itself. How to get at the matter, the substance, of race-making? How to convey both the ‘nothingness’ and ‘infiniteness’ of race conveyed by Frantz Fanon? How to, like bell hooks, get at the strange and oppositional nature of this Black(/hole)? One way is to create. When moved by something so well-done, I cannot help but attempt to tell that impossible story in the spirit of the gifts given to me by my ancestors. As Toni Morrison says, “I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others.”
So many have a claim in this conversation: books like The Image of the Black in Western Art series, Peter Martin’s Schwarzen Teufel, edle Mohren (“Black Devils, Noble Moors”), scholars like Carissa Harris, Kim F. Hall, Margo Hendricks, Geraldine Heng, Haruko Momma, and Jennifer Morgan. New, old, and consistent voices are blossoming in our ever-expanding field. Some claim race is not substantive, others taking a Fanonian tack speak of its ontologies, while some think of its historical anthropological manifestations, and all the while new methods are still forming. Still it lives. Our field grows, our mobs swell. The Newberry’s exhibit is a thoughtful example of the changing landscape of premodern critical race studies. It is concerned with synthesizing the polyphony, the utter proliferation of voices, in the field in a way that the public can understand. The field moves from its ivory tower — from our conferences, roundtables, and journals — to the people, or at least some people.
But why did I choose to think of Blackness as a Black(/hole)? Why did I choose to speak with the living-dead? I did what I could to avoid falling sick, to avoid the all too common feeling among Black folk when they encounter something devastatingly beautiful. I was moved to cry, to celebrate, to level critiques. I chose to think about each material image, to approximate myself to (a form of) understanding and enter into each text(ile). At least that was my intention. I did not choose to ‘explain’ the exhibition, because it is something worth experiencing. Its value lies in its affective qualities to stir parts of your spirit. I chose to share how I was moved, to push my fingers into the site of memory, a memory that begins before 1619, 1492, 1291.
Author’s Note: Each vignette is based on 7 pieces curated from the Newberry’s exhibition. I want to give special thanks to Yeukai Zimbwa for looking at earlier drafts of this essay. Her feedback and comments helped me think through how to write about the exhibit in an authentic and comfortable way.
*Due to the cultural sensitivity of this engraving, we have chosen not to include it with the other images. For those interested, the full citation is 5. Bernard Picart (1673–1733), engraver and etcher; Jean Frédéric Bernard (1680–1744), author, Pages from Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des peuples idolâtres (Amsterdam: Jean Frédéric Bernard, 1723). Chicago, Newberry Library, Edward E. Ayer Collection, Ayer 301 .C41 1723 Plates.
“Seeing Race Before Race” at The Newberry is open to the public through December 29th, 2023. Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World is available in open access and for purchase from ACMRS Press and the Newberry Bookstore.
Dontay M. Givens II (they/he) is a writer, poet, and a medieval and renaissance studies Ph.D. student in New York University’s English department. Dontay was born in Chicago, Illinois to a working-class family that instilled in them their love for literature, art, and aesthetics (their mother always organized space very beautifully, making sure that the space had life). Dontay’s research interests include premodern critical race studies, the phenomenology of race, Black feminisms, critical indigenous studies, aesthetics, historical anthropology, and premodern globalities.
