c yraina J ohnson -r oullier Object Lesson By Déjà Vu: Rodney King, Representativeness, and Anna Julia Cooper’s Rhetoric of Law in a Post-Exceptional American Study 1 My one aim is and has always been…to hold a torch for the children of a group too long exploited and too frequently disparaged in its struggling for the light…� In the simple words of the Master, spoken for another nameless one, my humble career may be summed up to date: -‘She hath done what she could�’ Anna Julia Cooper, “Souvenir” (Undated) On April 29, 1992, the city of Los Angeles, California, was in flames. Following the acquittal of the four police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department who were involved in the brutal beating of Rodney Glen King, an African American construction worker - Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Stacey Koon - uncontrolled violence broke out in South-Central Los Angeles in scenes of arson, mass looting, random violence and rioting crowds� From April 29 until May 4, 1992, the riots in South-Central Los Angeles continued, even though soldiers from the California Army National Guard, in addition to 2,000 U�S� Army soldiers and 1,500 U�S� Marines, were called in to restore order because the local police were overwhelmed and could not dispel the chaos� All told, during those six days, more than 50 people lost their lives, over 2,000 others were injured, more than 1,100 buildings were damaged, over 3,000 fires were set, and the city of Los Angeles suffered $1 billion in property damage� (Gray; McDonald; Devore) 2 The violent disorder that was the result of the acquittals did not stop at Los Angeles, however� Spreading to other parts of the country as well, it created a strange sense of moving backward in time, of revisiting the American landscape of 30 years before, making real again the racial upheavals and the civil unrest of the Civil Rights Movement which, captured and chronicled for all time in the excellent photography of Life magazine, 3 had seemed to have long ago receded into a distant, less enlightened past, as compared with the modern, soon-to-be-turn-of-the-century present of the 1990s� In this vein, the Rodney King beating seemed an abrupt and violent usurpation of that present, which had all the appearance of being comfortably removed from the 1 Research for this essay was made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame� 2 The South-Central Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King beating were considered more severe than the riots of the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement thirty years earlier, even the Los Angeles Watts riot of 1965� 3 See a selection of Life Magazine Civil Rights issues at http: / / life�time�com/ ? N=0&Nty =1&p=0&cmd=tags&srchCat=LIFE&s=civil+rights+movement� Web� 15 July 2014� 328 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier embarrassments of prior racial strife� It brought that same past tumult front and center into that present, because in at least 84 seconds of the fateful video, shot by George Holliday, which documented the incident, there existed for all to see, over and over, a scene which belied its seemingly untroubled truth superior in all respects to that supposedly - and gratefully - far away past� 4 The truth of the video, on the other hand, could not be denied - it depicted a defenseless, helpless black man crawling on the ground amid a shower of blows administered by three white men while another looked on, all of whom were not just white men but uniformed white men from the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), signaling their status as representatives of the power and authority of a state whose law and order they were sworn to uphold, maintain and protect� Obviously, something was very wrong with the story told by the video, something that went radically counter to the story told by the idea of an unruffled present, in which such things could only be considered gruesome representations of an unfortunate but happily bygone era� The visual truth of the video asked a bald question of the present, that is, was it really so comfortable as one would surely want to believe, and as one had been led to believe, at least by appearances alone? Or was there something of that difficult racial past that had remained, albeit submerged, lurking unseen in the neglected corners of contemporary reality? The disjuncture between commonly held beliefs about American culture’s advancements in the realm of race relations since the 1960s, and the visual reality of the Rodney King video tore a ragged hole in that belief system, beyond which lay an unassimilable truth: perhaps American culture had not really advanced beyond the more egregious difficulties of its troubled racial history, so much as it had simply buried them beneath a powerful façade that imagined it in terms more in keeping with the best of what it had always been meant to be� In his recent work, The New American Exceptionalism, Donald Pease describes this situation in terms of his notion of the “state fantasy,” which “does not refer to a mystification but to the dominant structure of desire out of which U�S� citizens imagined their national identity�” (1) In developing this idea of “state fantasy,” Pease relies on Jacqueline Rose’s conception of the role played by fantasy with regard to states and nations in her study States of Fantasy, one in which the state becomes an entity that is completely bound up with the idea of fantasy, especially in terms of the relationship between the state and its citizens� As Pease explains: State fantasies lay down the scenarios through which the state’s rules and norms can be experienced as internal to the citizens’ desire� Fantasy endows the state’s rules and laws with the authority of the people’s desire for them� Fantasy does so by investing the state’s rules with the desire through which the state’s subjects imagine themselves to be the authors of these rules and laws as well as their recipients� The state’s subjects’ capacity to recognize a series of events as belonging to the same symbolic order also requires the guidance and supervision of state fantasies� These fantasies align the people’s beliefs with the regulative discourse through which the state is empowered to bring the chaos of political events into order� (4) 4 “Rodney King Beating (Full Version)” YouTube. Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 329 The visual image displayed in the Rodney King video could not be assimilated to the extant state fantasy articulating the untroubled present, as there was no narrative within that fantasy that could incorporate it� Instead, the truth of the image potently “recovered the memories…of slaves beaten by their masters, of migrant laborers forced into transfer centers, of Indians slaughtered by the thousands, or Vietnamese families dragged from their huts and shot and burned, of Iraqis forcibly separated from their homeland - that haunted the present with this record of injustice from the historical past…” (38-39) For Pease, the Rodney King video thus represents an “empty space” (39) standing between past and present� Through it, past and present are, as a result, also brought into uneasy relation with each other� In this unsettled relation, however, this “empty space” can also be said to represent a tell-tale moment in American culture, one reflecting a hidden juncture at which both the image and the film’s visual interpretation of reality collide with the subject’s interpellation as an American citizen and his or her own personal relationship to and understanding of the film’s visual content. (Fluck, “Transnationalisms” 365) 5 Because the Rodney King beating was not just yet one more racial incident, subject to run-of-the-mill reporting in newspapers and other media outlets, but was accompanied by an image whose power was neither diluted nor mediated by words, it signifies in American culture with many different meanings on many different registers� These various significations serve to challenge the narrative of the dominant state fantasy with multiple alternative narratives of American reality, whose origins lie in the meaning of the connection of many different individuals to the incident, at an individual level� Due to the multiple nodes of this juncture, the cultural meaning of the event is necessarily stratified across a trajectory from personal to communal, rendering its meaning much more complex than would seem on the surface, especially when it is approached not just from the perspective of its role in American culture, but from a view of how it might signify to the individual American citizen in the context of American culture, and in what ways it might in this way disturb the interpellation of that individual to the state fantasy of what it is to be an American citizen� In other words, through its revelation of the invisible fault line that exists in America between white and black 6 , state and citizen, power and authority, weakness and subjection and any number of other such binaries, and because it does this along a racial alignment, the video powerfully reveals the radical failure of the exceptionalist American idea which would ordinar- 5 Fluck describes the problem of interpellation to the nation-state as one of subjection, the escape from which has been made possible by the emphasis on minority voices and subject positions within the transnational turn, which destabilizes the primacy of the nation-state by ranging beyond its borders and focusing on those cultural locations and intersections that lie between nation-states� 6 This is not to say that the line between white and black is the only racial line to be drawn in American culture� There are of course many other ethnicities that may be considered in this context, but I have chosen to focus on this one because it plays a central role in the Rodney King beating, and the author whose work I will treat later in the essay is also an African American� 330 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier ily operate to conceal this problematic reality behind a fiction or “fantasy” of American democratic ideals� The video in a sense went “viral” before going viral became a commonplace of contemporary American culture; it was displayed, again and again, on the national news, discussed in all major media outlets and in this way fuelled a submerged outrage on the part of those not on the side of state authority that quickly bubbled violently and uncontainably to the surface on a national playing field. Considering the Rodney King beating from this vantage point brings out a number of subtle nuances that would otherwise be lost� When the “empty space” represented by the Rodney King beating is, for example, considered in relation to what Günter Lentz would call the “gaps” (Lentz Kindle File) that exist between the internationalization, globalization and/ or transnationalization of American Studies, it becomes possible to see in what ways this moment in American culture and history can become a particularly revelatory one� This is so especially in terms of what Shelley Fischer Fishkin identifies as the transnational turn in American Studies and its potential for an American Studies practice that can move beyond what Amy Kaplan has described as its struggle with the tenacious grasp of exceptionalism, thus opening the door to the exploration of a new, post-exceptional possibility in the study of American culture� Transnationalizing the Exceptional It goes without saying that this turn toward the transnational in terms of its potential to open up American Studies to a much broader and more ethnically, culturally and historically complex understanding of American culture has become one of the most important (if not the most important) contemporary issues in the field. Because it shifts the terms of debate from a direct engagement with the idealistic notions of American culture described by American exceptionalism to a critical stance toward those ideals based on its grounding within perspectives long excluded from the exceptionalist understanding of American culture, it creates a fissure from which vantage point it is possible to gain a completely different perspective on the meaning of America� Or does it? In considering the broad issue of theories of American culture, Winfried Fluck addresses precisely this problem, by suggesting that although transnational American studies is presented in contemporary critical discourse in the field as an “antidote” (Fluck, “Theories” 61) to the problem of American exceptionalism, it too, like that construct, must be considered a “theory of American culture�” In Fluck’s view, all critical perspectives are embedded in a set of assumptions reflecting a “number of underlying premises about one’s object of study and the best way to analyze it,” without which “we would not be able to make meaningful claims about a particular object of interpretation within a larger context” and would not, in effect, “have any object” (62)� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 331 The problem that Fluck identifies here is extremely important, however, in terms of any consideration of the field of American studies that would seek to transcend the difficulty of American exceptionalism, as a closer look at its implications will reveal� As critical debate in American Studies has moved from the wholehearted embracement of American exceptionalism to the questioning stance of transnationalism to the effort to envision what some have begun to call a “post-exceptional,” or “post-national” American Studies (Rowe; Pease, “C�L�R�”), it yet continues, as Fluck observes, to build itself around the same object of study, in essence, creating and recreating new and different “narratives” about “America,” suggesting that newer perspectives like the transnational approach do “not mean that we have come to the end of American Studies and of theories of American culture, but that prior versions of American Studies and American culture are replaced by new versions�” (59) Taken at face value, what this idea would seem to suggest is that because the object of study will remain the same in any case, the effort to escape or transcend the problem of American exceptionalism is not really a question of analytical approach, as the exceptional standpoint is always already embedded in the idea of “America�” In this sense, not only is there no escape from the problem of exceptionalism, but focusing on trying to escape or transcend it actually muddies the waters by diverting critical energy away from new interpretive avenues that might lead to real progress� In this light, the question becomes not whether or not transnational studies should supplant American studies in becoming the “new” American studies, nor whether or not exceptionalism must always be viewed as a kind of unwanted specter inevitably hiding in the shadows of any attempt to analyze U�S� culture in isolation� Perhaps moving beyond the idea of exceptionalism in American Studies requires not the entire repudiation of American exceptionalism, but rather a more concerted investigation into its meaning, its claims, its implications, its significance in light of the turn toward transnational studies� What, for example, does it mean that American Studies is, in contemporary discourse in the field, internationalized, globalized, transnationalized? While Fluck, Lentz and others discuss the gaps introduced in the interstices between these conditions as potentially problematic because they may be construed as consciously or unconsciously reinstating exceptionalism in a different way, what if they are also viewed as providing a potential opportunity to write beyond the exceptional? (Pease, “C�L�R�”; Giles; Kaplan, “Violent”; Rowe, “Said”; Waller; Kadir; Kaplan, “Tenacious”; Fluck, “Inside”; Emory; Pease, “Re-thinking”; Traister; Shulman)� 7 What if exceptionalism is understood as something that has been built upon a rhetorical and linguistic structure that denies itself even as it instantiates itself? What if, within the idea of exceptionalism itself, are to be found the clues to its own unravelling? And what if, in fact, the issue is not either the advocation of transnationalism, internationalism, or exceptionalism in isolation, but the acknowledgement 7 Contributions to this debate are too numerous to list, so what appears here is a representative sampling of perspectives since the year 2000� See also Jay for a discussion of these debates from the perspective of the influence of globalization in literary studies. 332 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier and practice of all three, together, weaving in and out of each other in a complicated fabric of signification within which alone can be found the most subtle nuances of understanding regarding American culture? Object Lessons It is in approaching this question that it becomes possible to begin to identify the true crux of the problem. While contemporary debate in the field of American Studies centers on the battle between these three vectors and what they may offer to an understanding of the proper focus of the object of study, in so doing it overlooks what may be learned by critiquing the role of an object of study itself� What exactly is the function of the object of study in critical interpretation? Without an object of study, it is, as Fluck has established, difficult if not impossible to produce meaning. (62) Taking this further, it becomes in this instance, difficult if not impossible to produce knowledge. The object of study provides a central focus around which meaning may be ascertained, what in the Foucauldian sense would constitute a “unity�” But, equally in the Foucauldian sense, such unity may be considered as itself problematic, embedded as it is and must be in a vast system of discursive relations whose variety and dissemblance from one another would seem to belie any possibility of true unity, as given this situation, the solid ground upon which such unity must be founded cannot exist� From this perspective, that solid ground, in other words, must always be an assumption, albeit one that is, in Foucauldian terms, equally subject to interrogation in terms of its source or origin and the authority by which it is given expression� (Foucault Chaps� 1 &2) Or, as Bernard Traister has described it, the problem of the object in American Studies becomes that “we are to study something other than what goes by the name of America, or to study ‘America’ only and perhaps exclusively to the extent that our studies lead us out of its constitutive fieldimaginary and into a post-American critical paradise�” (3) Viewed in this way, then, “America,” as object of study, cannot be considered in isolation from the vantage point of any one of either the self-aggrandizing America of American exceptionalism, the sovereign America as one such country among many others of international American studies, or the interrelated America as imbricated in a global system of international, political, economic and historical associations of transnational American studies� Rather, it must be understood, at one and the same time and at any given critical moment, as simultaneously containing elements of all three� What this means is that it is not because one adopts the viewpoint of transnationalism that one escapes or repudiates American exceptionalism� In other words, it must be understood that the transnational perspective does not and cannot absolve the American studies scholar of the legacy of American exceptionalism� When considered in this way, the need to interpret American culture from a perspective that is internal to itself also does not and cannot automatically imply or involve the accusation of a hermetically sealed Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 333 American exceptionalism. The need to recognize the significance of all three of these vantage points to an understanding of American culture reflects the fact that the legacy of American exceptionalism indelibly remains - not to engulf any interpretation that does not make clear its distance from that relationship to the U�S�, but to complicate those readings through the more profound consideration of the reality of American culture that its recognition makes possible. The challenge for the field of American Studies, then, is not so much to determine in which of these directions the terms of future debate in the field must lie, but to understand the complexity of their multifaceted contributions to and combined impact on that debate, and in what ways the recognition of their complicated interrelationship might serve to advance it beyond what any one of these directions could do alone� Fluck underwrites this understanding by recognizing that although there has been much “consensus” (Fluck, “Transnationalisms” 365) among American Studies scholars with regard to the cultural significance of the transnational turn, it cannot be viewed as a simple substitution that becomes a panacea for all of the difficulties presented by the problem of American exceptionalism� He writes: Like any other term, transnationalism can acquire different meanings in different contexts, depending on the interests…that motivate scholars to pursue this approach. It is thus not sufficient to discuss transnationalism merely as an interpretive procedure that is open-minded enough to go beyond the borders of the nation-state� A method or interpretive procedure is always used for certain purposes and always stands in the service of certain interests, so that a term like transnationalism can actually hide very different agendas… There is not just one approach called transnationalism; there are several different versions of transnationalism that give different reasons for going beyond the borders of the nation-state and envision different rewards for doing so� The transnational can thus not be separated from the national from which it takes its point of departure� In effect, one constitutes the other, and both remain interdependent� Seen from this perspective, transnational American studies, despite their own programmatic claims to go beyond the American nationstate, also imply theories for and about “America�” …The transnational project … also pursues the goal of reconceptualizing America - that is, the very thing from which it apparently wants to escape or distance itself� Consciously or not, there is always��an underlying assumption at work about the current state, not only of American studies, but also of “America,” and this assumption will determine the direction in which a transnational approach is taken� (366-67) From this vantage point, then, what may be understood as “consensus” among American Studies scholars describes only the surface significance of the transnational turn, while eliding the underlying complexity of the approach, which on that level must not only recognize the problem of American exceptionalism, but radically engage with it as well� Thus, what would seem to be “consensus” regarding the cultural significance of the transnational in American Studies becomes merely an outward attempt to create unity - a problem that has been amply examined and critiqued by Donald Pease, Winfried Fluck and John Carlos Rowe in their 2011 anthology Reframing the Transnational Turn. 8 8 See especially the Preface and Introduction in this volume� 334 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier Marginal Exceptions, or the (Post)Exceptional Margin What then is the larger import of this recognition of the complicated interweaving of contemporary approaches within the field of American Studies? If transnationalism is to be understood as a critical response to the moral superiority of an American exceptionalism whose tenets “had been carried to a point where subjection by means of interpellation through the nation-state seemed to be all pervasive, so that resistance had to resort to ever more marginalized subject positions as possible sources of disinterpellation,” (Fluck, “Transnationalisms” 365) then it is only one step away from a critical reality in which “the search for subject positions that would not yet be subject to the power-effects of interpellation…[leads] to border regions and intercultural spaces …[going] beyond the border altogether into spaces like the Southern hemisphere, the Pacific Rim, or the transatlantic world, or still even further, to reconfigure the object of analysis as global or planetary.” (365) The difficulty here, however, is that because it does not transcend the object of study itself, “America,” the seemingly endless search of the transnational cannot avoid leading right back to that which it attempts to deny, that is, the American exceptionalism that is unavoidably, inextricably and inevitably imbricated in that object of study� It is then, in the identification of the significatory multiplicity of “America” as object of study that another American Studies, one not limited on the one hand by a stubbornly persistent American exceptionalism, nor on the other by a seemingly free-floating, endlessly seeking transnationalism, can be discovered� This American Studies is one in which there exists no fear that the interpretation of cultural issues internal to the U�S� will engender the accusation of American exceptionalism, because it acknowledges and embraces in advance the complexity of its exceptionalist legacy, perceiving that legacy as not just unavoidable, but as a vital and obligatory piece of a labyrinthine cultural puzzle. Neither is it one in which the field of American Studies is necessarily transformed into a deterritorialized transnationalism serving as a shield against a difficult and unpleasant historical past, because unless the implications of that problematic past are brought to the fore, any transnational inquiry must end up lacking in a certain depth� In unloosing itself from the parameters of a troublesome debate often seemingly stalled on a number of important issues, this is an American Studies that becomes post-exceptional, moving toward another, more encompassing critical practice substituting interpretive complexity and nuance for critical impasse� In this American Studies, there is not one, unified understanding of “America,” the object of study� Rather, the subtleties of multiple meanings, the acknowledgement of various cultural goals and perspectives and the recognition of disparate cultural voices and locations becomes more important than the critical consensus by which viable contributions within the knowledge industry has been Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 335 characterized in the traditional university� (Readings 69; Said 43-44, 316) 9 Considering the cultural importance of the Rodney King beating, then, from the perspective of such an American Studies opens the door to the untrammeled consideration of its multiple nodes of signification, with the necessity to ponder neither the charge of American exceptionalism nor that of a transnationalism seeking to use the marginalized subject position as a means to resist its overweening interpellation� If the Rodney King beating is understood to have signified in American culture on many individualized registers, then at the level of the individual its particular nuances may be identified and interpreted in a way that digs deeper than could simply the effort to consider the global ramifications of an act of police brutality in American culture. A case in point is my own experience of the incident� On April 30, 1992, I was at the University of California, Berkeley, for the “Passions, Persons and Powers” conference that was being held there for the International Association of Philosophy and Literature� Just one day after the acquittals of the police officers charged in the Rodney King beating and the eruption of riots and random violence in South-Central Los Angeles, the cultural climate in California was already very tense� In Berkeley, the very air seemed to crackle with an unfamiliar energy which seethed below a surface normality that was marred by the strange occurrence of merchants closing up shop early mid-week and boarding up their windows in the manner of those in other parts of the country threatened by an advancing hurricane� Despite the charged atmosphere outside, however, the conference continued to roll along for the most part as conferences normally do, with plenaries, panels and my own presentation taking place in due order� The one break in that unremarkable trajectory came on the evening of April 30, 1992, when the conference 9 Describing the project of the modern University along the lines of Humboldt’s plan for the University of Berlin, Readings discusses the University as an entity in which the University’s social mission becomes one where “the state and the University become two sides of a single coin,” in which the “University seeks to embody thought as action toward an ideal; the state must seek to realize action as thought, the idea of the nation� The state protects the action of the University; the University safeguards the thought of the state� And each strives to realize the idea of national culture�” This idea of “national culture” then finds its most perfect realization in “the invention of the notion of national literature.” The point Readings is trying to make is that knowledge production in the university becomes centered upon the expression of a national identity, which is most visibly and concretely expressed in the form of a national literature� See also Chaps� 3, 4 & 6� Said discusses the transformation of knowledge from the more Humboldtian vision of Weltliteratur or world literature described in comparative literary studies to an understanding of the “modern history of literary study” as having “been bound up with the development of cultural nationalism, whose aim was first to distinguish the national canon, then to maintain its eminence, authority, and aesthetic autonomy�” This aesthetic autonomy is something that Said describes as a somewhat Foucauldian discursive web within which is deeply embedded a hierarchical, imperialist understanding, placing the West in a position of power over and against all of its others, and this, for Said, is as clearly realizable in the discipline of literature as it is in other disciplines� As a central characteristic of American Studies has been an emphasis on literary study, approaching it from this perspective can reveal to what extent American exceptionalism may be understood to bring a potentially unavoidable influence to bear over the field. 336 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier participants were gathered on the Berkeley campus for an opening reception� The usual mixing and mingling with hors d’oeuvres in one hand and a drink in the other was going on among the scholars in attendance, when there was a sudden sharp inflow from the outside, slicing the crowd into two sections and centered on two female scholars who rushed in with wide eyes, panicstricken faces and an ominous warning “They’re rioting outside! They’re rioting! Breaking windows and looting and starting fires! ” All seemed to hear the word “rioting” in shock� There had just been the cataclysm of Los Angeles which had been broadcast across the nation and those images were extremely fresh in the minds of all� There was an abrupt and heavy silence, and then shock waves began to spread throughout the crowd and people started eyeing each other in dawning yet confused and alarmed comprehension� I soon noticed that many of them were eyeing me, albeit in not the same way that they were eyeing each other� I immediately felt that this had much to do with the fact that as the Los Angeles riots of which the Berkeley riots were the offshoot had had a racial and class conflict at their root, and as I was the only African American in the room, the panic and hysteria being caused by the events outside were being easily transferred to me as a representative of that racialized threat, even more threatening, perhaps, because right there in the same room, seeming to bring the pandemonium raging beyond closed doors into acute and too-close range� Nothing verbal was said, but many of the glances spoke a language of their own, visibly translating the image they saw into potential danger, menace and possible attack, outside of all probability of a common desire to avoid being caught up in the chaos without� Not only did those glances not suggest any recognition of a common goal, it seemed to me - they denied any such possibility� Along with the glances, as we learned more in hasty revelations, “Telegraph Avenue is covered in glass and looters are everywhere! ,” “There are crowds of people running in the streets! ,” “The city shut down the BART system and closed off this area! ,” “It’s going to be really hard to get out! ,” a small but noticeable space opened up around me, as if the crowd had been pulling back in one single motion of unconscious concert� Even so, reactions to the news were extremely dissimilar, ranging from outright fear to amazement� As I watched these developments I began to feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu 10 that was as uncomfortable as it was strong, and that sense began to permeate my understanding of the many reactions to the shocking news before me, as it slowly took on a historical significance. Outright fear, for example, seemed to be on the faces of many of the older scholars, those who had taught on university campuses or been a part of Berkeley itself during the Berkeley Student Riots of the 1960s, when hundreds of students involved with the Free Speech Movement took over Sproul Hall, the University’s administration building, in the wake of the 10 A spate of newspaper articles from the time of the beating and after also represent this idea, comparing the incident to the 1965 Watts race riots and revealing the greater magnitude in damages of the Los Angeles Rodney King Riots to this and other race riots of the 1960s� For a representative selection, see Applebomes; “Poverty”; Aubry; Samad� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 337 arrest of Jack Weinberg, a graduate student� (Cohen and Zelnik 115-21; Cohen 1-5) Other conference participants seemed simply confused or apprehensive� Most seemed concerned about their safety and that of others, in the event that things were to get out of hand in Berkeley to the extent that they had already done in Los Angeles� And almost everyone seemed to be affected by a collective cultural memory of Berkeley’s history, the legacy of the progressive stance it had taken in the 1960s to all authoritarian power and control, as well as the reputation in general of San Francisco itself to a larger degree, through the growth of the Haight-Ashbury community and its liberal ideology� I too shared in that collective memory, but this was also tempered by my own individual experience of that memory� For even as I recognized my physical interpellation in the event as a black individual and thereby for some, if not many, an objectified representation of all that was feared beyond the parameters of the event, I also registered the mistake - the enormous error of that interpellation if indeed this is what it was� The error was there plain as day, but discernable only to me in my own individual experience of déjà vu in relation to the event: although I was physically perhaps a symbol of the altercation for some, subjectively, and in historical material reality, I couldn’t be further away from that understanding� The Berkeley Rodney King Riots brought back to me powerful memories of the Civil Rights Era which I had experienced not as an activist but as a child-witness to the vigorously committed activism of others while growing up during the 1960s in Yellow Springs Ohio, the home of Antioch College, a progressive stronghold of liberal attitudes from its founding in 1853, and a prime bastion of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. There, hippies and flower children had proliferated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, bean sprouts and tofu abounded, astrology, meditation and yoga were part of life’s everyday fabric, and the most familiar scents, beyond those of nature, were those of patchouli and incense� The knowledge that riots swarmed outside brought all of this back to me in a powerful realization that while during that time I had been but a bystander, now I was at the center of events swirling beyond my control, and perhaps even soon to be a victim of them� The similarity between the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s and the racial overtones of the current situation were definitely not lost on me, and I wondered at this fact, though thirty years stood between my childhood experience and my current experience of the Berkeley Rodney King Riots� But it was the error of the interpellation that was most compelling to me, brought to stark reality because of the socio-historico-cultural context of its manifestation� What assumptions lay behind the fact of those glances? How did those assumptions translate into a horizon of possibility or limitation with regard to my own personal intellectual engagements and endeavors? Had I been old enough during the 1960s, certainly there would have been no way that I would have found myself in the middle of that room at Berkeley, full of philosophy and literature scholars� This would have been a realm that would most likely have been entirely closed to me, primarily because of my race, and perhaps even because of my female gender� While the difference from that time was marked for me by the fact that I did indeed find myself 338 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier in the middle of what would probably have been that historically off-limits room, it was strangely similar to that time in that even with the passage of thirty years, I was the only black person in that room in 1992� What was wrong with that picture, I thought, was not unconnected to the cultural significance of the Rodney King beating. Why I was the only black person in the room was not unrelated to the question of why were there not more black scholars working in the area of philosophy and literature in 1992� Although this did not necessarily mean such scholars did not exist, I did not know of any, other than myself� This in turn was not unrelated to the fact that when I arrived on the SUNY/ Buffalo campus as a first-year doctoral student in the fall of 1988, I was met not with intellectual engagement and curiosity, but proudly presented with a gift, a copy of Henry Louis Gates Jr�’s recently published “Race,” Writing and Difference, no questions asked, even though my stated field was modernist studies. What assumptions lay behind the offering of this gift? They did not seem to be terribly different from those that I had encountered at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature conference reception, in the problematic glances of those who surrounded me on the night of the Berkeley Rodney King Riots� These were unarticulated assumptions, certainly not acknowledged on a conscious level� Surely the assumptions behind the Buffalo gift had incorporated an understanding of how short the time had been since African American literature had assumed the status of a field of inquiry in the academy - undoubtedly this must be the field of any black scholar, particularly the only black doctoral student in the department� It had been, I realized, a gesture of kindness, intended to make me feel welcome� Assuming the Exceptional While Embracing the Post- By discussing these assumptions, however, I want to bring to the fore the way in which they are very subtly linked to a discourse of American exceptionalism that has been so deeply submerged within the field of American Studies - and even the academy itself - that it is not even recognized as such� The suppression of this understanding, that of the relation between physical reality and intellectual preoccupation, or representativeness, what Robyn Wiegman would call an “epistemology of the visible,” especially in the field of American literature, is one of the most profoundly exceptionalist of critical ideas, yet the implications of this reality have not been adequately engaged in critical discourse� (23) Nevertheless, this idea is so deeply ingrained within the object of study - “America” - that it is simply taken for granted� It is there in stark simplicity, in the disciplinary norm that recognizes American literature and African American literature as two separate entities, as well as recognizing Ethnic literature as something apart from American literature proper, while also carefully separating the literature of each specific ethnicity within its purview� Toni Morrison examines this problem as inextricably, almost symbiotically, tied to our understanding of American literature� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 339 For her, the question of race cannot be extracted from any understanding of American literature. It is this recognition that reveals the deep significance of American exceptionalism within it and, by virtue of its relation to American Studies, in that field as well. In this vein, American exceptionalism is not just about the notion of America as somehow special, as morally superior to other nations� It is the understanding of this specialness and this superiority as also being subtly, silently and ineradicably tied to whiteness and the hegemony of white supremacy. Morrison describes this difficulty in terms of the way in which American literature was shaped as an area of inquiry: For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States� This agreement is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was…one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature� The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination� (4-5) What Morrison suggests here is that American literature has been described from its inception in terms of an invisible racial dividing line that places the “black presence” outside of that literature’s disciplinary formation� In other words, when American literature was formed as a discipline, this racial division was incorporated and naturalized within it, so that it was not even necessary to consider it when evaluating the cultural significance of the field. 11 In fact, following Morrison, it was because of the invisibility of this racial dividing line that American literature was even formed as it was� Post-Exceptionalism, in a Literary Sense The incorporation of racial difference, in Morrison’s view, lies at the heart of the project of American literature� In this sense, then, it can also be understood that very deeply embedded within the idea of American literature is the belief that it refers to an understanding of “America,” the object of study, as a white America, one that institutes and solidifies its whiteness against a submerged and suppressed blackness without which it could not have succeeded in establishing its whiteness as preeminent� Thus, from Morrison’s perspective, whiteness is blackness as much as blackness is whiteness in American literature� For her, in this context, the two are virtually inseparable. The subsequent naturalization of this cultural situation, then, reifies this problem and renders it for the most part invisible� Morrison asks, “What part does the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction 11 This is an idea which Said later frames more broadly, as described above, regarding the hierarchical relation between Western and non-Western cultures� 340 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier of what is loosely described as “American’? ” (9) She then critiques what she identifies as what was at that time a glaring lack of critical attention to this issue: One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse� Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate� (9-10) Certainly over the last twenty-four years since Morrison wrote these words in 1990 the attention to race in literary critical discourse has radically increased� However, there are perhaps yet traces of what Morrison reveals that still remain, particularly in terms of the way in which the relationship between the different ethnicities that make up American literature are organized, considered and studied� Why, for example, is American literature of whatever stripe not considered as, simply, American literature? Would doing so mean that there would be no opportunity to study ethnic literatures in their historical specificity? Or would it offer a singular yet unrecognized opportunity to consider both ethnic literatures and American literature overall in a context that could bring far more historical depth and complexity to bear on the critical endeavor in this area of inquiry, what might begin to represent what John Carlos Rowe has identified as a “post-nationalist” American Studies practice? (Rowe 12-15) In light of these issues, what Morrison’s analysis offers is a perspective on the questions facing the field of American Studies today, questions which are deeply disciplinary, and which go to the heart of the academic enterprise, especially in terms of its central project of knowledge production� The biggest question facing American Studies today, then, is not, in the face of the challenges posed by transnational American Studies, whether or not it should be substituted by that new perspective, but rather how exactly should the terms of knowledge production in this area of inquiry be re-negotiated in relation to the changes brought about by the transnational turn? Contemporary literary knowledge production exists in and through particular critical categories that are described by centuries and nation-states, as well as the specific cultural project of whatever nation-state is in question, much like what Gauri Viswanathan has elaborated with regard to the inculcation of British literature in 19th-century India� 12 In the 1970s, women’s literature, black literature, and the literature of ethnic others were added to this basic epistemological structure in the same way, using race or sex or some other qualifying characteristic as the central organizing factor of the category along much the same epistemic lines as described the use of the nation-state in literary knowledge production� The problem with the idea of transnational American studies is therefore not whether or not we approach 12 See also Said, Note 8 above, and 101� In Note 8, Said discusses the structure of literary study in the modern university� On page 101, he describes the indoctrination with British literature as being meant also to instill in Indian subjects a sense of the power, majesty and above all, superiority, of British culture� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 341 the field from this perspective, but how we do so� In other words, to reiterate this point: the question is not whether or not transnational American studies should take the place of American studies nor, equally, whether or not it should become the overarching field-imaginary, but rather, in what ways we can begin to think about it as a method, one which allows certain kinds of approaches to the study of the materials it organizes that would be precluded from a more traditional standpoint� (Fluck “Transnationalisms” 366) 13 Rather than thinking about transnational American studies as a new category to be instituted along the lines of traditional knowledge production, then, what would thinking about it as a method bring to a deeper understanding of the field? Such an approach would immediately suggest a radical change in the terms of knowledge production, since as a method transnational American studies would promptly imply a seemingly infinite number of critical possibilities� Such a large number of possibilities becomes intellectually overwhelming, however, only if considered from a more traditional approach to knowledge production - that is, one in which the object of study remains at the center of the critical project, with mastery in terms of overall knowledge as the end goal� But what if the end goal were to become exploration and interrogation instead? What if the acquisition of knowledge were to be judged by breadth, complexity and depth, rather than mastery alone, or some combination of all of these things? (Said 43-44)� 14 These are questions whose implications are certainly much more difficult to implement than simply raising them would suggest, as there are many unavoidable professional, institutional and pedagogical issues that would necessarily come into play. But the ramifications of transnational American studies, or perhaps simply those of transnational studies itself, in any discipline, would seem to point in the direction of at least asking these types of questions and others along such lines� Such questions would begin to reconceive of the place of literature in the traditional university, where its role has been, and is often still today, to reinforce a particular understanding of the nation� Approaching American literature in this way would not only suggest the subtle ways in which American exceptionalism is to be found within this area of inquiry, but also the ways by which it can be laid bare, not in order to be eradicated once and for all, but to foster and encourage deeper investigation� 13 Related to this idea is Fluck’s admonition to move beyond the recognition that transnational American Studies opens up broad new vistas of intellectual inquiry, to consider to what uses the approach is being put� For Fluck, examining the way in which the approach is being used is much more likely to provide a new understanding of the re-conceptualization of American Studies� 14 The distinction made in this line of questioning is one that Said makes between “criticism,” what we as scholars practice today, and “scholarship,” what Said identifies as an early 20th-century practice that “has now almost disappeared�” In this vein, he describes the comparatist as someone who was not just qualified in terms of a narrowly defined critical category of which he or she has become a master; rather, for Said, the comparatist is first and foremost a “philolog,” someone who is so extremely learned across such a broad range of intellectual inquiry that we could not hope to approach such vast knowledge using the methods by which scholars are trained today� 342 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier A Post-(Trans)-Exceptional Study of Exceptional Magnitude To open the door to this possibility is to move toward the post-exceptional in identifying this hidden reality and accepting not only its legacy but its contemporary influence. Considering “America” from a transnational perspective whose premise is to deny this exceptionalist history by co-opting a marginalized subject position as the means of escape from it is to both radically distort the cultural register and undermine the very goal it seeks to accomplish� But to move in the direction of post-exceptional American studies would demand the embracement of this troubled history so that a deeper understanding of “America,” as object of study, might be gained, by reading it in, through, and out of its painful contradictions from the vantage point of its gaps and silences, rather than its enunciative realities� This is especially useful in terms of an American Studies approach to literary interpretation� Within those gaps and silences, considered in terms of their relation to American exceptionalism, rather than as a representation of cultural resistance to it, it is possible to discover new approaches to and readings of texts and authors whose significance might seem, from more traditional perspectives, less meaningful than they appear when studied for what might be learned about American culture from the interaction between those gaps and silences and these “less important” authors and texts� One such author is Anna Julia Cooper, a 19th-, early 20th-century black female intellectual whose work is only now slowly beginning to gain broad recognition� Anna Julia Cooper published one full-length book during her lifetime, a collection of essays about the role of black women in American society, entitled A Voice From the South. Since its re-publication as part of Henry Louis Gates Jr�’s Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, this collection of essays has been the subject of not a little critical attention, especially from the perspective of its importance to black feminism� But it is in both Cooper’s speeches and her dissertation, which have received little or no critical attention 15 , that it is possible to derive an understanding of how her relationship to the gaps and silences in American culture can suggest an approach to a cultural understanding of “America” as object of study within American literature, one that might serve also to suggest a likely postexceptional American Studies� Reading Anna Julia Cooper from a perspective that uses transnational American studies as a method, rather than a field identifier, avoids the problem of American exceptionalism, first because Cooper is already positioned outside the traditional “American” category, and second because by reading her in this way, it is possible to understand the significance of her work in ways that would be impossible from within that category, traditionally defined. As a result, rather than a slippery slope, in this instance, American exceptionalism becomes an insightful way to understand Cooper’s significance within American literature with new depth and complexity� Read from a transnational perspective, Cooper’s work suddenly becomes “literary” in 15 For an illuminating look at Cooper’s work, see Vivian May� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 343 ways that would ordinarily be denied it because it does not adhere to the established norms of what is considered literary, especially in the terms of American literature as traditionally construed� First, Cooper’s corpus is woefully small, compared to that of the greats of American literature� But what falls out of the equation in this regard is the socio/ cultural/ historical context of that truncated output: that Cooper was a widow who had to work to sustain herself, that she adopted and raised five children alone, that she was black and a woman at a time when both designations denoted a lack of privilege and an oppressive daily reality not conducive to creativity, which in her case was already deeply challenged by the paucity of available time at her disposal. Second, Cooper’s corpus is made up primarily of non-fiction pieces, speeches and essays whose goal is to analyze with sharp rhetorical specificity the egregious inequalities that she recognized in the world in which she lived, and which she had no choice but to bear� As such, because not fictional, Cooper’s work falls out of the realm of “art,” as it must be construed within a traditional canon of American literature� Using transnationalism as a method, however, allows for a reconsideration of Cooper’s work along lines that can revalue its cultural importance� This is because once the apparatus of the nation-state is troubled, so too are the norms around which the literature of the nation-state has been organized� In this new relation, Cooper’s “non-literary” work can become a different kind of literature, and its contribution can then be considered as an alternative example of American literary output� In addition, this destabilization also troubles the racial differentiation by which Cooper’s work would ordinarily be categorized� In this regard, the fact that she is American becomes more important than the fact that she is African American, whereas under the old rubric, the appellation African American would be the primary determinant of the role and place of her work� This does not mean that it becomes impossible to consider her work solely in terms of its meaning for African American literature� But once Cooper’s work is repositioned in this way, it can take on a completely different cultural significance, one that enables its meaning to be considered in both larger and smaller contexts� No longer devalued because “not literary” and “not quintessentially American,” it can also begin to speak more fully on its own terms� What is interesting in this regard is that a closer examination of Cooper’s work from this standpoint reveals that she effects a very subtle rearticulation of the very terms upon which American exceptionalism can be said to rely - the notions of universality, of democracy, of purity, equality and freedom, of moral right, of justice, of faith and human kindness, and the expansive and all-encompassing glory of Christian piety� The core of American exceptionalism, as expressed by John Winthrop in his notion of America as a “city upon a hill,” is the evangelical sense of mission and of right, which can be found in these selfsame values and ideals� But for Cooper, none of these ideals could describe the parameters of her daily life� For Cooper, daily life was a perpetual reminder of their constant violation� In her estimation, this unceasing violation was the great wrong of American civilization, an egregious 344 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier misstep of an otherwise great nation which must at all costs be righted� To repair this wrong, then, was the great “mission” of Cooper’s work - a mission every bit as encompassing as was the supremely “American” mission of “manifest destiny�” But in prosecuting this mission, even in creating it as a mission, Cooper unveils the possibility of a complete rearticulation of American exceptionalism, by using the terms of the “American” mission itself to rewrite the meaning of that mission� This rewriting entails creating within the American mission the effort to bring about true equality and true democracy, things which, as Cooper inevitably saw them, through W� E� B� DuBois’s veil of race, were grievously lacking in the American context� By turning these American exceptionalist values in upon themselves, then, Cooper effects a radical alteration of their cultural import� Transforming them in this way, she uses the exact same values to mean something entirely different� In, effect, she engages in a rhetorical battle for power and control over the cultural terms of signification. But this battle, and its implications, can only be seen in its full measure from a transnational viewpoint, where the transnational is used as a method to get at what lies outside the more traditional frames within which knowledge production is conventionally effected� Approaching Cooper’s work in this way is about building neither an American nor an African American canon of literature� Rather, it becomes a post-exceptional representation of what it is possible to learn from a cultural artifact freed from the artificial constraints of the identitarian politics lying at the heart of American exceptionalism, as well as the conventional structures that undergird the work of knowledge production in that context� A Post-Exceptionalist Exception On May 18, 1893, Anna Julia Cooper gave an address at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, one of only three late 19th-century black women who had obtained the right to speak as part of the renowned Chicago World’s Fair, which was held from May to October during that year� Cooper’s address, entitled “Women’s Cause is One and Universal,” sought to give voice not only to the historical plight of black women, but to the courageous response of those women to what were and had been at that time their deplorable circumstances, while simultaneously, and in keeping with the overall goal of the Fair, outlining the great advances these women had helped their race to make since its emancipation from slavery 28 years before� In this 1893 speech, Cooper evidenced many of the basic values that undergird all of her work, including her later dissertation, L’Attitude de la France à l’ égard de l’esclavage pendant la revolution (Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists) -most importantly her perspective on the significance of women’s contributions in any major effort to achieve social progress� Given the untenable historical position of African Americans in American society at this time however, a people only just released from the bonds of slavery, finding themselves at the tail end of a failed Reconstruction, Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 345 hemmed in on all sides by legal, illegal and even extralegal limitations on their hard-won freedom, Cooper’s efforts to make a space for consideration of the plight of black women seemed sure to fail, if only because it would have to compete with so many other and much more pressing problems whose worthiness appeared to be more assured� Thus, in proffering a speech that sought to provide a factual understanding of the new place of black women in 19th-century American society, Cooper, whose position at the Congress of Representative American Women was itself dubious, (Davis 68) 16 revealed the staunch courage and belief in her cause which lay beneath her carefully chosen words and which motivated her larger work� The opportunity to utter those words in a potentially hostile environment, in a context where no black woman had been granted any sort of managerial role in the organization of the event, where public participation of this kind on the part of any black woman was an exception obtained only by struggle and assuredly not the rule, presented Cooper with a difficult dilemma: certainly to tell the truth, certainly to offer as accurate a vision as possible of the current state of affairs in the black community, particularly that concerning the activities of black women - but also how exactly to convey, without overly forceful criticism of the very powers that had afforded her the possibility of speech in that context, all that yet remained hidden from view concerning the untenable social condition of African American women in the late 19th century� No critique at all would have meant an opportunity of great magnitude lost to be heard; overly aggressive critique would have brought about the same result in a different way� A great responsibility thus rode on Cooper’s shoulders, a staggering weight with only one goal: to speak for herself and others to good effect� Because she was to speak at the Congress of Representative Women, in the context of the World’s Columbian Exposition, whose most important and central purpose was to reveal the immense progress American society had achieved since the time of Columbus, Cooper assuredly had to highlight the strides made by African American women since Emancipation; but because the opportunity to be heard in a such a public venue on any subject was of such rarity for any black woman at this time in American history, it was necessary also for her to do everything she could to make of herself that muchneeded representative for all African American women, herself included� What this instance describes, however, is a cultural juncture at which Cooper may be said to have been over-determined by the values of American exceptionalism� Here Cooper strains the state fantasy to its limits in both speaking and appearing in a context within which, for the state fantasy of the time to be able to maintain the order it prescribed, her designated role had to be both invisible and silent, completely devoid of agency� That role would 16 Davis describes the position of other black women at the World’s Columbian Exposition as heavily commercialized, such as was Nancy Green, who was the living embodiment of Quaker Oats’ Aunt Jemima� Against this vision of black womanhood, Cooper’s appearance at the Congress of Representative Women becomes even more radical� 346 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier not, in other words be to deny the fair its “one-way white gaze�” (Ngai 61) 17 If not invisible and silent, then in keeping with that fantasy, she could only appear as representative, as dictated by the constraints of an American exceptionalist cultural understanding that viewed black civic participation in a particular and very truncated way� As representative, then, Cooper’s situation becomes strikingly similar to that of my own at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature conference reception after the Berkeley Rodney King Riots� However, it also differs in that while ostensibly accepting the terms of her representativeness, Cooper performs a subtle rhetorical maneuver that forces the American exceptionalist terms within which it is grounded to signify in a way that is inclusive, rather than exclusive, of her racial heritage, thereby broadly negating the power of those terms to frame her cultural reality in the public sphere� (Habermas Parts I, III & IV; Anderson Chaps� 3, 5 & 6; Black Public Sphere Collective; Piepmeier 130 )� 18 Charged with the public task of putting forward one overt message, i�e�, the progress made by African American women since Emancipation, and the private task of delivering one more covert message, i�e�, the unacceptable social condition of those same African American women since Emancipation, Cooper focused not just on the message she was trying to get across, but also on the language she was to use in order to do it� For Cooper, this was a delicate proposition, because the structural inequality under which black women had been forced to live during slavery and beyond was rooted in 17 Ngai discusses the role of cultural “others” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in terms of the way in which the transnational turn has foregrounded the issue of “human agency,” by virtue of the fact that a focus on the transnational can serve to transform the ‘other,” by revealing the subjectivity of non-western cultural perspectives� This does not, however, solve the problem of whether or not the transnational, in so doing, actually co-opts the minority voice� 18 Aspects of Cooper’s role at the World’s Columbian Exposition relate in very important ways to Habermas’ idea of the bourgeois constitutional state, which arises in the 19th century and seeks to couple the public sphere to law through the rational-critical debate that, in his view, came about in the 18th century, in coffee-house discussions around literary culture� Cooper’s position in the public sphere as a black woman, thereby hopelessly inferior on all fronts, is radically policed by a discursively normalized public consensus grounded in the authority of law, which is also a discursive formation� Habermas’ notion of the rise of the 19th-century public sphere in this regard can also be reinforced through a consideration of Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” and the rise of nationalism in connection with the development of print culture� In this context, Cooper’s position is also clearly affected by the norms of 19th-century American print culture, in which the dictates of rape-lynch mythology, the idea that black men, who were being lynched on a routine basis in 1893, were the victims of such violence because their overweening desire for white women had to be kept in check� Newspaper reporting regarding the lynching of black men was common during this time. Its flip side was less commonly noted - the unspoken but prevalent consensus that black women were promiscuous and sexually depraved� Considered in this context, however, these were not just ideas about black life and experience, but a “nationalizing” discourse (Piepmeier)� The Black Public Sphere is a collection of essays devoted to the kinds of problems Cooper would have faced in 1893 due to the precarious public position in which she found herself as one of only a handful of black women with the right to speak at the Congress of Representative Women� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 347 a politics of silence whose power was established and maintained by and within the rule of law, as that law was expressed in language and then enforced in material fact� (Tamanaha; Binham) Through the authority of law, the American exceptionalist values that would exclude Cooper by virtue of her racial heritage were sealed into both language and belief� In order to counter the cultural reality they evidenced, then, the only recourse open to Cooper was her own rhetorical prowess� To reclaim the black female voice denied - even made invisible - by established law and custom, then, Cooper thus had to address the power of law to both create and naturalize an artificial reality that left no door open to question� As a result, in her Columbian Exposition speech, as well as in most of her work, she relies on what I have termed a subtly articulated and interwoven “rhetoric of law,” through which she incorporates both silence and voice by making skillful use of the opposition between natural law (the law of nature or the idea that law obtains its authority because it can be justified by reason) (Burlamaqui; Waldron) and positive law (legislation created by man to bestow or remove privileges from an individual or group)� (Murphy) The American exceptionalist values Cooper sought to resist are almost symbiotically related to the tenets of natural law, which often derive from an overtly pious, humanitiarian and Christian worldview� Thus, by using her work to pit these two understandings of law against each other, Cooper weaves a complicated textual fabric in which she creates authority for her “silenced” voice as that of a black woman by couching her assertions in the frame of natural law, while simultaneously posing numerous implied questions that challenge the status quo as it has been articulated within the frame of positive law (which covertly creates and overtly upholds that status quo, a simultaneous, unremarked and essential aspect of the racial legislation of the time)� In so doing, she both conveys and authorizes the alternative social understanding of which she is a committed advocate, by communicating its silenced reality through the surety of natural law while simultaneously challenging and weakening the unquestioned hold of positive law over the cultural understanding of American social reality - particularly that between the different races� Positioning herself in opposition to positive law in this way, Cooper radically challenges and then completely rearticulates one of its foundational assumptions, that the racial reality it legislates is part of a preexisting natural order of things, rather than one that is covertly brought into being as a result of such legislation� In her World’s Columbian Exposition speech, Cooper reveals her implication in this violent language-based battle by both identifying the black woman as one who could only be “silent” before others whose adjudicated right to speak had not had the same challenges to overcome, and recreating that same black woman as the champion of humanity, as a woman like other women, as part of a group whose cause goes beyond mere womanhood to include all of humanity, in following a naturally determined path of moral right: 348 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier ��� while in the eyes of the highest tribunal in America she was deemed no more than a chattel, an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither and thither at the volition of an owner, the Afro American woman maintained ideals of womanhood unshamed by any ever conceived� Resting or fermenting in untutored minds, such ideals could not claim a hearing at the bar of the nation� The white woman could least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent� (Cooper “Universal”) In this passage, Cooper makes a rhetorical gesture which uses the tenets of natural law to subsume race within gender, thus also sidestepping the moral imperative facing black women in the 19th century to place the problems of the race over and above those of gender - to work to better the condition of the race at the expense of the equally pressing demands of gender� In so doing, she replaces that moral imperative with one greater and more urgent, concerning the question of natural law and its relation to morality, and how this in turn relates to all of humanity, from the perspective of both race and gender, thus beginning to broaden the American exceptionalist terms embedded within it to include those of her racial heritage, as well as those of her gender. In her description of the difficult social condition of the black woman, Cooper immediately identifies the opposition between positive and natural law, by discussing the power of what she calls the “tribunal” of the nation, as supposed arbiter of American social reality, to classify the African American woman as no more than a “thing�” In highlighting this, Cooper marks an important parallel between the historical or objective condition of the black woman in America, that of a “chattel” or “dull block” with no will of its own, and the authoritative arbiter of that reality, the institution of law, or the “highest tribunal in the land�” In this context, then, by making reference to the idea of the African American woman as a “chattel” or “dull block” in the eyes of the law, Cooper would seem to make two crucial points� First, she suggests the possibility that the legal perspective on the black woman is only just that - a perspective - and as such, only one among many other possible perspectives; more importantly, however, in so doing, she also links her critique to the idea that the reality to which the law refers is an artificial reality that has nothing to do with actual historical reality but that is, even so, taken as such, as a given, as established law and thereby incontrovertible fact� Counter-Exceptionalism, Transnationalism and the Minority Voice Always in view of these two points, Cooper manipulates terms and language to suggest a number of perspectives whose implications radically - and silently - counter those which she expressly communicates� It is thus equally in what Cooper writes or gives voice to, and in what she doesn’t write, or her silence, that Cooper is able to put forward her counter-exceptionalist message� Playing silence off of voice and vice versa, Cooper highlights the problems of silence, silencing and being silenced, and then transforms them into a skilled and powerful weapon, so that silence in all its forms becomes both what it is and what it is not, in becoming a surprisingly effective yet subtle Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 349 way to speak, and forcefully, without voice� In order to grasp the full import of Cooper’s message, then, it becomes necessary to read between the lines, so as to consider what is revealed in both what is conveyed in Cooper’s language itself, and what that language doesn’t convey or, rather, what it might be said to imply� In this regard, Cooper’s use of the word “tribunal” becomes significant, as in it she conveys by allusion much more than what a simple consideration of the word on its face might suggest� A brief examination of the etymology of the word “tribunal” reveals that in the context in which Cooper uses it, it signifies on many simultaneous levels, all of which are rich with relevant meaning� The fact that Cooper uses the word at all brings the issue of law squarely front and center in her argument, as in both the past and the present, the word “tribunal” had/ has a legal signification. In ancient Rome, “tribunal” was a derivative of “tribune,” which referred to the raised semicircular or square platform where magistrates were seated in the Roman basilica, forming a court of justice where legal cases were heard and judged� The basilica was a building that served as both a marketplace and a place for the adjudication of law, thus representing an important center of public social contact� (Adkins 136-37) The words “tribune” and “tribunal” come from the Latin tribunus, which is also related to tribus, the Latin word for “tribe” - “tri-” meaning “three,” and “bu” meaning “to be,” or to be a tribe (OED)� The word “tribe” originally refers to the three tribes of Rome, “Ramnes,” “Tities,” and “Luceres,” but it also points to the Twelve Tribes of Israel, so it incorporates within its etymology both a secular and a religious or spiritual meaning (OED)� However, since both “tribunal” and “tribe” come from the same root, Cooper’s use of the word “tribunal” also suggests that the tribunal to which she refers represents the law of a particular tribe, in this instance, that of white Americans - a “tribe” to which African Americans, including herself, do not belong� By highlighting this idea, Cooper insinuates that rather than the democratic society meant to be the cornerstone of American culture, in keeping with its exceptionalist values, given its policies on race, it is in fact more like those early, less “civilized” cultures that existed before the advent of the nation-state, organized according to various tribal interrelationships based largely on kinship - its laws, therefore, serving to protect only the interests of the “tribe” or “clan” in power� This notion becomes even more telling when considering the etymology of the word “tribune” in this context� In addition to referring to the raised platform representing the court of justice in the Roman basilica, the word “tribune” designated a very important elected official in the society of ancient Rome� In 490 BCE (494 BC), the common people, or plebeians, won the right to elect their own officials to represent their interests against those of the upper classes, or patricians. These officials, “tribunes,” were charged with the task of protecting the lower classes, and ensuring that the laws created by the upper classes were enacted fairly, and did not unduly take advantage of those less powerful. (Mackay 32-39) The word “tribunal” was meant to refer to the office of the tribune, and is therefore closely connected with the idea of establishing 350 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier and maintaining justice for those without power� As representatives of the people, the tribunes were thus meant to ensure justice for the plebeians, and to restore a modicum of equality with regard to the balance of power in ancient Roman society� Moreover, as representatives of the people, the tribunes were also meant to be the embodiment of the people, and therefore sacrosanct, or extremely sacred, existing in a distant realm far above the daily lives of those they were elected to represent� (35; Flower 17-21) Because they were sacrosanct, tribunes were made powerful in the person, that is, as tribune, they possessed an inviolate personhood, which also became the source of their power� (McCormick) In alluding to the “tribune,” then, Cooper also underscores the demonstration of her own personhood, particularly as a representative of the black woman, at the Congress of Representative Women: if the figurative “tribune” alluded to in her use of the word “tribunal” is not truly a representative of the people, then that “tribune” also cannot be the embodiment of the people and, as such, cannot possess the inviolate personhood which is the sole foundation of the tribune’s power� Since that power can only be found in one who performs the function of representative of the people, of those who are poor and downtrodden, and if that is indeed the function which Cooper assumes in delivering her speech, then she has set up a very powerful rhetorical opposition that, in demonstrating and re-establishing her own discredited personhood in the form of her own embodiment in language, simultaneously casts doubt on the legal authority by which that personhood was originally denied� By allusion, then, through the use of just one word, Cooper quietly exercises the exceptionalist authority of history and historical jurisprudence to question the normalized power wielded by what she has termed the “highest tribunal in the land” in denying the personhood of the African American woman through the use of legislation to transform her into a “thing�” The Law(s) of (Post)Exception Having carefully presented this perspective as ineradicably aligned with natural law in the form of shared moral values that transcend the problem of race, Cooper is then able to create an express construction of the institution of law - as the most important moral foundation of society - in which it would seem to be the one place where it is possible to turn and expect to find a reliable truth; instead, she instigates an ingenious shift in the reader’s understanding, one that questions the truth value and authoritative vision of a legal institution that would perceive and construe the black woman in the way she describes. By casting doubt on the significance of law in this way, Cooper opens up the possibility that it is in fact, not the unshakeable and unquestioned bedrock of truth, justice and right that one would normally desire and/ or expect it to be, but rather an uncertain, possibly even misguided, and horrific distortion of the very cultural beliefs it is meant to uphold and protect� In this, she makes her most radically counter-exceptionalist statement, Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 351 by reversing the underlying signification of these values so that it is possible, through this juxtaposition, to understand them at one and the same time as what they are and what they are not� Thus, through her covert critique of the views on black women of the “highest tribunal in the land,” Cooper brings the silent and silenced reality of black women into direct confrontation with the power that both created this forcibly hushed reality and would seek to maintain it as such� It is, however, precisely because she does not approach the problem from the vantage point of a direct challenge, seeking instead to give it voice through an indirect critique of the status quo, that Cooper provides the means to break its hold over the experience of black women in American culture� By using her work to translate her vision of the unheard reality of black women’s experience into the English language, Cooper positions herself to wage a powerful and symbolic battle, a linguistic parry in which she seeks to wrest from language - and its power both to convey meaning and create worlds - the cultural relation to language that, for her, black people were denied from the moment of their entry into a soon-to-be globalized slave system in the early 17th century� It is thus through Cooper’s rhetoric of law that the African American woman, while in Cooper’s view conceived of as a “thing” with no volition of her own save that of an “owner” (and who in this condition would seem only to be able to attain the corporeal reality of a beast, and even that with difficulty), becomes in actuality a being whose inner resources sought and maintained the highest of ideals available to all womankind, without reference to nor circumscription of color, and who achieved this immense moral height against all the odds stacked against her� By couching her assertions in a lofty rhetoric drawing on deeply religious, exceptionalist values and ideas of justice, morality, civilization and culture, or natural law, and placing the black woman within this frame, Cooper seeks to address the immense incongruity between her desire to recover a sense of the black woman’s lost claim to inviolate womanhood (what Barbara Welter in her now classic and oft-quoted essay of the same title has called “the cult of true womanhood”) and the most prevalent view of the black woman in late 19th-century America, that of a highly sexed and wantonly promiscuous near-animal� (Carby; Morton 9, 28, 32, 109, 149) In describing this circumstance, however, what Cooper brings to light is not the reality of the basic racial injustice that lies at the heart of the U�S� American democratic experiment; knowledge of this reality was not new in her time, nor before her time, and is certainly not new beyond her time� It is thus not the knowledge of this reality that is salient� Rather, for Cooper, what is crucial is to recognize not so much that this difficult reality exists, but that it has been silenced, made invisible and powerless, and that were this situation not so, should a language finally be found to communicate the actual experience of this reality, it is only this that could even hope to radically change how we think about, understand and view the world in which we live, and only this by which that change could also be made manifest in the material world in ways that could palpably change social reality for all - not just African-Americans - and for the better� And it is only in this way as well, in 352 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier Cooper’s estimation, that the artificial reality by which the black woman’s voice is silenced can be overthrown, her perspective brought to bear on the racial problems plaguing the U�S� American social reality of her time, and the attributes of true democracy made more tangibly evident in everyday life� Without it, for Cooper, all assertions of democracy must remain mere pretense, only a seemingly democratic sham� What stands out most clearly in this regard is Cooper’s effort, through language, to recreate not just herself as an African American woman, but all black women, and beyond that, all black people touched by the vicissitudes of Western society, with its hereditary and racially determined slave system, by and within which black civic, social and cultural participation was historically eschewed� Moving beyond even this recreation of all black people, Cooper sought to cast her efforts with those who hoped to change the world itself, to make of it a more loving, just, and equitable place whose emblem could be compassion and caring, rather than the satisfaction of greed and the desire for power� Giving credence to her famous words, in her 1892 essay, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race,” Cooper’s work represents the material manifestation of her belief that “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’” (Kindle File N� pg�) In all of her efforts always conceiving of herself as a representative for all African Americans, Cooper’s most heartfelt desire was to open doors previously closed, to create possibilities where before there were none, through her own sweat, toil and suffering to forge an easier, clearer path for those to follow, in the hopes that their race would as a result be less of an impediment to them than it had been for her� Putting it clearly in her Columbian Exposition speech, Cooper explained: Now, I think if I could crystallize the sentiment of my constituency, and deliver it as a message to this congress of women, it would be something like this: Let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract� We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether or sex, race, country, or condition� If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken� A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier an [sic] its weakest element� Least of all can woman’s cause afford to decry the weak� We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity� The colored woman feels that woman’s cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman’s lesson taught and woman’s cause won - not the white woman’s nor the black woman’s, not the red woman’s, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong� Woman’s wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 353 “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of the earth� (Cooper “Universal”) In this passage, Cooper continues her efforts to bring about a radical alteration in social reality, using her rhetoric of law to create the justification and authority for her black female voice� Firmly grounded in the tenets of natural law, Cooper uses its spiritual authority to support the “rightness” of her argument that the cause of woman is one and universal� What is important to recognize, however, is that in this passage, coming at the end of her speech, Cooper no longer speaks from the perspective of the black woman, nor of all black women, but from the perspective of all women, regardless of color� In putting forward this view, Cooper makes a very important and suggestive rhetorical shift, one to which she has been building throughout the body of her speech� Jumping from a consideration of the kinds of advances made by black women in the years since Emancipation, Cooper suddenly speaks simply as a woman delivering her “message to this congress of women�” From here, she uses a very significant “we,” eradicating the problem of race altogether by addressing the Congress of Women as one of their own number� In so doing, she aligns the racial inequality experienced by black women with the gender inequality experienced by white women, powerfully linking both forms of inequality to an exceptionalist idea, what she calls the “unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms�” In this she implies that both gender and racial inequality are manifestations of such “special favoritisms,” and, therefore, wrong� She then consolidates this perspective by using the metaphor of a chain which must necessarily be considered broken if even one link in that chain is broken� Suggesting here that all women, regardless of color, form a part of the same chain, she provides a convincing justification for the recognition of the unjust condition under which the black woman is made to labor, and for an understanding that, as a result, the black woman represents a link in the chain that is broken� (Cooper “Universal”) After creating this strong solidarity, Cooper then comes firmly back to the voice of the black woman, in saying that hers also is a cause that is “one and universal” - that the colored woman wants, like the white woman, to see the “universal triumph of justice and human rights�” And in keeping with this desire, the colored woman wants, therefore, to return home from the Congress of Representative Women having put forward one pressing demand: not to be given “an entrance…through a gateway” for herself, but to build together with white women “a grand highway for humanity�” In this Cooper suggests that the creation of this “highway for humanity” would naturally encompass the “gateway” that would allow black women, in addition to all black people (including other groups who also found themselves poor, downtrodden or otherwise excluded from mainstream prosperity) access to the true justice that was sorely needed and so glaringly missing in the social reality of late 19th-century America� 354 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier By making this larger claim, Cooper also draws the Congress of Representative Women into an assumption of “right” - that the “solidarity of humanity” and the “injustice of all special favoritisms” are rights belonging to all regardless of color, class, or any of such “special favoritisms�” In so doing, she broadens the tenets of American exceptionalism, from which she would ordinarily be summarily excluded, to include those of her racial and gendered heritage by emphasizing the actual meaning of the terms themselves� Believing wholeheartedly in the essential “rightness” of natural law derived from her deep-seated religious commitments and faith in God, Cooper thus asserted a justice that transcended that of the courts of her day, where “justice” - 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