Unembodied Blackness and Social Critique: John Keene’s Annotations

One of the most remarkable features of John Keene's thoroughly remarkable 1995 publication Annotations is that it manages to register as a distinctly African American work without even attempting to depict any recognizably African American characters.1 Indeed, the closest it gets to such depiction is in its opening sentence: "Such as it began in the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, on Fathers' Day, you not some babbling prophet but another Negro child, whose parents' random choices of signs would disorient you for years."2 This constitutes the only instance in which Keene's highly elliptical and aphoristic text directly ascribes black identity to a specifically invoked personage, and that personage itself is never named nor comprehensively delineated, but only vaguely conjured through reference to an ever-shifting assortment of personal pronouns — in this case you, but elsewhere throughout the book he, one, we, and they. If the recurrent appearance of these pronouns within a highly regularized compositional pattern suggests that they do in fact always denote the same person — who thereby emerges as the cognitive and moral center of Annotations's textual world — that "person" is nonetheless never presented to us as a fully developed character, their putative blackness notwithstanding. What emphatically does manifest in Annotations as both fully developed and incontrovertibly black is the set of sociocultural interests borne by the persons whom the text only obliquely references — and those interests, too, are registered through a distinctive rhetorical pattern that is discernible in three passages excerpted from among the first dozen of the volume's roughly seventy-five text pages:

And, from the succeeding page:

Finally, from the page after that:

Each of these three passages presents a general thematic consideration (scholastic pursuit, artistic undertaking, urban-neighborhood deterioration), a subsequent pronominal reference to an undefined person for whom that thematic is thus established as a primary concern (and who is further shown to bear certain distinguishing attributes — educational experience, avocational interests, familial relations — despite not being explicitly identified as a distinct individual), and a concluding allusion to a matter of clear black-racial import: the communal reading of "the 'Negro' poets"; an art teacher's promotion of "more identifiably 'African' forms"; and "Black folks"' particular experiences of "Urban Renewal." Thus establishing its blackness as a function of its investment in such racial matters, Annotations at the same time recruits readers to its ethical perspective, not by inviting them to identify with recognizably black characters but by soliciting their investment in those identifiably black interests.

That solicitation is deftly forwarded through yet another set of distinctive discursive and rhetorical strategies, which effectively require readers to assume the work's perceptual vantage in order to comprehend moments that would otherwise remain inexplicable. The "Urban Renewal" passage quoted above provides an economical demonstration of this process, forwarded here through the word as in the phrase "as his cousin said." Meaning most fundamentally "in accordance with that which," the word as it appears in this clause indicates that the facts under review objectively substantiate the cousin's contention that "when officials speak of 'Urban Renewal,' it's the Black folks that got to go." It thereby endows that proposition with an authoritative validity that we as readers cannot deny without contravening the moral logic of the entire work — especially inasmuch as its invocation here signals that the narrator, too, subscribes to the cousin's understanding of the matter. Hence this iteration of as essentially sutures together the perspectives — and so correlates the judgments — of the cousin, who first posits the relevant opinion; the narrator, who subtly endorses it; and the reader, who must accept it in order not to violate the ethos of the work as a whole.6

In thus conscripting the reader to its own analytical perspective through its repeated deployment of such rhetorical tactics, Annotations intensifies the purchase of its social critique, which entails demonstrating the historical — or, in other words, the mutable — character of the structures and conditions it addresses. It does this especially effectively with respect to social identity itself, conceiving such identity not as an intrinsic property of either individuals or groups but as a function of situational factors that are themselves potentially subject to change.7 We can see this especially clearly in the book's engagement with gender and sexual identity:

Epitomized in the "fragile character" cited in the final sentence, the aberrancy at issue here seems more a function of the very jeers it presumedly elicits than a recognized aspect of an inwardly prevailing personal "nature" — partly because it is specifically under the onslaught of derision that "he" "crumples" in the first place (this being the only action recounted that might corroborate the hecklers' charge of "sissiness") but also because he morphs into she in the report of concern about "her emotional development," suggesting that for all the effort to prevent psychic "warping," the narrative subject's "development" had already been affected by factors beyond the strict purview of "they" but still by no means irremediable. This sense is additionally furthered in a passage that appears a scant fifteen pages later:

Here we have an early invocation of a particular social identity (i.e., the mention of "gay or lesbian people"), followed by a series of narrative snippets that do not so much ascribe that identity to any specific individual as sketch the experiential means by which it is realized: "slurs" and "epithets"; unsanctioned advances; guilt and self-reproach; longing after "normality"; physical self-consciousness and interpersonal awkwardness; keen attunement to gender norms; carefully concealed desire; interactional uncertainty; and so on. The relative impassivity that generally marks these experiences as described here suggests that lesbian or gay identity is constituted at least as much by external factors to which one is subjected as by deliberate actions that one undertakes — and, in accordance with this, that modification of those factors could alter the meaning of such identity in any number of ways.

Indeed, alteration constitutes both a primary topic and a signal modality of Annotations, which mobilizes it to maximum critical impact. Consider, for instance, the book's midpoint reminiscence that, with a view to those occasions when "they would put on the albums or forty-fives and dim the basement lights, and begin to perform the newest dance," "everyone studied their moves with care so that at someone else's house they would not slip up. In this way," the passage continues, "a sense of tradition was nurtured, which others wrongly attributed to their 'nature.'"10 These final clauses explicitly adapt a formulation that first appears much earlier in the book, in the same opening segment that invokes "another Negro child." "Old folks," that earlier passage tells us, "liked to say he favored the uncle who died young, an artist. In that way, a sense of tradition was upheld, one's place in the reference-chain secured."11 In recontextualizing tradition, the later sentences broaden the meaning of the word to encompass not just genealogical lineage but a communal heritage that is recognized even by unaffiliated "others." At the same time, the passage insists that those others "wrongly" construe that tradition — obliquely but clearly identified here as a collective facility for dance — taking as a "natural" legacy that which really derives from assiduous practice over time. In thus exposing a stereotypically native-black characteristic as in fact an effect of repetition and refinement, the passage posits blackness itself — and by extension racial identity per se—as a historical construction. Further, though, by actually manifesting such repetition and refinement in the shift from "in that way, a sense of tradition was upheld" to "in this way, a sense of tradition was nurtured," the passage enacts the very principle of historical modification that it takes as its thematic focus.

This enactment is in evidence throughout the entirety of the text. For instance, in a complement of passages that includes one we have already cited, we get the following:

Then, thirty pages later:

And, finally, thirty-six pages beyond that:

Not only does the shift from "the 'Negro' poets" to "the Black Arts poets" track an evolution in African American culture from the first decades of the twentieth century through the 1960s, but the multiplicity of contexts in which the poetry is reviewed — ranging from the schoolroom (as is implied by the larger passage in which the first excerpt appears) to the community assembly to the private home — suggests the myriad circumstances in which that culture is continually constructed, and hence the dynamism that necessarily characterizes it.

 Similarly, just as the second sentence of the book, which recalls the birth of "you . . . another Negro child," establishes an association between black urban unrest and patterns of African American nomenclature ("It was a summer of Malcolms and Seans, as Blacks were transforming the small nation of Watts into a graveyard of smoldering metal"), so do two later sentences simultaneously reaffirm and comment on that association:

And:

In addition to charting both the geographical scope of postwar African American dissent (extending from Los Angeles to Detroit to Miami) and its temporal duration (running from 1965 through 1967 and all the way to 1980), these passages together suggest that repeated efforts at nominal self-fashioning are a perennial aspect of African American life, while the slight variation in the final clauses of the two later sentences figures the uncertain import of those very efforts, tacitly raising the question of whether the legacies they are meant to jettison really are unambiguously "oppressive."14            

Finally, an additional set of sentences explicitly thematizes historical effect per se, without yoking it specifically to considerations of racial blackness:

And, eighteen pages beyond that:

On the one hand evoking the lineal continuity typically associated with cultural tradition (through explicit reference to "our ancestors"), these passages in the same instant openly acknowledge that continuity's inevitable rupture over time (manifest in the fact that the current generation has only a minimal appreciation for the experiences of its forbears), formally enact that rupture (in the variation that distinguishes the two initial clauses from each other), and yet warn that the experiential disjuncture between an older and a younger generational cohort does not immunize the latter against the consequences of what has gone before (i.e., "the burdens of history bear unmovably upon us").

These are just a few examples of the varying repetition that characterize Annotations, but they give a sense of how the device operates in much of the book. As an intrinsically self-enhancing rhetorical feature (since for it to register in the first place is for it to register as already redoubled), repetition performs the fundamental abstractionist function of impressing readers with the text's formal construction, as distinct from its semantic import.16 At the same time, of course, since it is precisely semantic expressions that are being reiterated, the repetitive structure cannot help but draw attention to meaning as well as to form, and specifically, in Annotations, to the semantic mutation that occurs across iterations — the discrepancy, for instance, between the meanings of "their heritage" and "their oppressive heritage," and what it might imply in the context in which it arises. Annotations thus figures rhetorically the very principle of historical change that it otherwise establishes as constitutive of racial blackness itself. It thereby exposes the latter's susceptibility to productive revision — the object of all social critique worth the name.

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Phillip Brian Harper is program director for Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation and Remarque Professor of Literature Emeritus at New York University. He is the author of numerous works on US and African American literary and cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and aesthetic and social theory.

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