Autumn Womack - The matter of Black living : the aesthetic experiment of racial data, 1880-1930

Autumn Womack

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80674-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80691-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80688-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226806884.001.0001

This publication is made possible in part by the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Womack, Autumn, author.

Title: The matter of Black living : the aesthetic experiment of racial data, 18801930 / Autumn Womack.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021030560 | ISBN 9780226806747 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226806914 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226806884 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans in literature. | African Americans in motion pictures. | African Americans in art. | American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. | Motion picturesUnited StatesHistory20th century. | PhotographyUnited StatesHistory20th century. | African AmericansSocial life and customs19th century. | African AmericansSocial life and customs20th century. | Social surveysUnited States.

Classification: LCC PS173.N4 W66 2022 | DDC 810.9/896073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030560

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), W. E. B. Du Boiss first published novel, stages a racial data crisis. An account of the intersecting worlds of cotton speculation, liberal reform, and post-Reconstruction politics, Quests fictional territory is populated by a motley crew of reformers, students, farmers, and financiers, all of whom are variously invested in Tooms County, Alabama, a fictionalization of Lowndes County, where Du Bois coordinated research for his lost social study Negro Labor in Lowndes County, Alabama. In Tooms, Du Bois introduces Bles Alwyn, an enterprising boy who arrives to attend the local all-black school, and Zora, a heathen hoyden of twelve untrained years who is as captivating as she is categorically confounding. Certainly, the violent process that sought to order, control, and systematically quantify black life are not particular to the turn of the twentieth century. The revolutionary nature of racial data at this moment, then, is owing to the particular ways that innovations in data technologies met the specificity of the post-emancipation landscape to produce a frenetic outpouring of racial data in the name of addressing and resolving the Negro Problem.

Against the compulsion to isolate, atomize, and apportion black life as an object of knowledge and a problem that could be measured, classified, and contained, in Quest Zora emerges as an inscrutable force who defies the moments taxonomic compulsions and evades even the best attempts at social ordering. A swamp-dwelling girl who earns her living in a brothel and rejects the purported value of both formal education and narrowly defined domestic duties, Zora is stationed outside of normative social and gender categories, rejecting the social legitimacy and sociological legibility that her status as either a student or participant in a capitalist economy would afford. Simultaneously poised as the ideal candidate for social reform and exploding the social containers that seek to define her, Zora materializes at the intersection of Du Boiss commitment to an empirically driven approach to the Negro Problemwhat he summed up in 1898 with the mantra if we would solve a problem we must study itand the realization that, when it came to studying social life, facts... were elusive things that could not be easily converted into actionable information. In the pages of Quest, Zora is ultimately transformed into a bourgeois subject who renounces her morally questionable, if economically independent, life, first as a pupil in the Negro school and ultimately as Bless partner in life and business. Nevertheless, the slippage between Zoras incalculability and her susceptibility for reform deserves pause. For even as Quest manifests the Victorian-inspired reformist vision that Du Bois was never quite able to shake, it also articulates the productive oscillation between datas instrumental horizons and the elusive nature of free black life. This interplay is at the heart of The Matter of Black Livings exploration into the aesthetic offspring that are produced when black social life confronts datas disciplinary regimes. Mounted on stages and in photographs, and surfacing in technical missteps and strategic narrative decisions, the dissonant interface between blackness and data is animated by the project of squaring the vitality of black life with data. This data crisis, as it were, finds expression in aesthetic innovation at the historical juncture when racial data was as much an experiment as was black freedom.

To unpack the stakes of this claim, consider more closely Quests opening vignette. Quest does not begin on a plantation or at a school, settings that feature prominently in the text and yet are redolent with disciplinary histories. Rather, the red waters of the swamp are the books entry point. Impelled by some strange power, Bles is drawn to a ragged and black cabin, a dark and dreamy site of sensory overload where, in midst of white patrons hoarse staccato cries and peals of laughter, Zora emerges:

Amid this mighty halo, as on clouds of flame, she was dancing. She was black, and lithe, and tall, and willowy. Her garments twined and flew around the delicate moulding of her dark, young, half-naked limbs. A heavy mass of hair clung motionless to her wide forehead. Her arms twirled and flickered, and body and soul seemed quivering and whirring in the poetry of her motion. As she danced she sang.... It was no tune nor melody, it was just formless, boundless music. The boy forgot himself and all the world besides. All darkness was sudden light; dazzled he crept forward, bewildered, fascinated, until with one last wild whir, the elf girl paused.