Du Bois, Kinlessness, and the Catachrestic Novel

Abstract

For diasporic African peoples, the transatlantic slave trade created a condition of “kinlessness,” a legal and social exclusion from recognized forms of family affiliation. This kinless condition, moreover, was transmitted through birth, making kinlessness a logical impossibility even while it remained a historical reality. Faced with the notion that African Americans had “no family tree,” some black writers responded with novels that located recognizable bloodlines for African American families. But an unpublished novel by W. E. B. Du Bois offers a strikingly different analysis of the notion of black kinlessness. In this narrative, a black Harvard undergraduate convinces his white classmate to undergo an operation that will temporarily make him a “Negro.” Once he undergoes the operation, however, the student discovers he has entered “the fourth dimension of color,” a new domain in time and space that is “outside the bounds of humanity.” At a time when ideas of black kinlessness still had potency in US law and society, Du Bois's strange representation of blackness as a fourth dimension in space is counterintuitive. Why forgo the conventional novelistic categories of family and kinship? Although Du Bois's narrative repeats an image of black kinlessness, it creates a catachrestic novel form through which to uncover the illogical historical logic of kinlessness. Only a catachrestic narrative space like Du Bois's fourth dimension can make kinlessness intelligible as a fully human condition and a historical reality.

The case of Sparkle Rai: A violent patriarchal narrative of conspiratorial kinship and race

“…The plantation as the site of Agamben's (2017) “bare life” serves as the proto‐generational reproducer of what Mbembe (2008) calls “necropolitics,” or the institutionalization of Black death and the socialization of anti‐Blackness (Sexton 2010). Further, kinlessness as an inherited condition of both legal and social exclusion exists undeniably in the archive, while indicting the “impossibility” of normative kinship (Bentley 2009) by its very absence from the archive (Hartman 2008).…”