Bearing witness to atrocity: Racial Violence and the Limits of Representation in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Works
- Autores: Eva Puyuelo Ureña
- Directores de la Tesis: Rodrigo Andrés (dir. tes.), Cristina Alsina Rísquez (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2022
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: María del Mar Gallego (presid.), Dolores Resano (secret.), Cynthia Stretch (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Lingüísticos, Literarios y Culturales por la Universidad de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) is nowadays considered one of the most detailed registers of the different forms that racial violence takes—from direct manifestations of physical assaults, including arrests, beatings, maimings, and murders; to less conspicuous expressions of racism, such as racist stereotyping, legal disenfranchisement, or redlining (Goodman 2015; Nance 2015; Guerrero 2017). Between the World and Me is the letter that Coates writes to his son, Samori, who is about to enter adulthood and will head off to university soon. Coates knows that once his son leaves, he will no longer be able to protect him; and so he writes driven by the need to caution him against all the threats that may endanger his life just as they had endangered those of countless others before him. Coates’s concerns to protect his son are not unfounded. Trayvon Martin had been murdered in 2012 by a man who believed he looked suspicious; Michael Brown, in 2014, for trying to run away from a police officer. Both were teenagers and unarmed at the moment of their deaths. In between, thousands of others lost their lives to racial violence; and in the next years, the number of Black people murdered in the streets raised significantly. In 2015, when Coates published his memoir, the number reached a historical high—1,134 people of color were killed in the streets in the U.S. The memoir attracted a vast variety of different responses. Many critics celebrated Coates’s beautiful and sharp rhetoric and contended that the carefulness with which he approaches the contentious issues he deals with may in fact help a whole generation push forward (Bodenner 2015; Pollack 2015; Lewis 2016), but several others used Coates’s position to cast doubts on the legitimacy of his arguments and criticized both Coates’s pessimist stand and his understanding of racial brutality, which in his text is presented as a phenomenon that occurs almost only to cisgender heterosexual Black men (Alexander 2015; Bennett 2015; Chatterton Williams 2015; Hilton 2015; Kennedy 2015). Along these lines, this dissertation draws upon the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates to study the extent to which the representation of violence in general, and of racial violence in particular, can be considered a violent act in itself, and it centralizes three main questions. To what effects is racial violence represented, and what does the representation of racial violence entail? Is there an ethical way to narrate racial violence? How does one represent racial violence without creating more violence? In my attempt to provide an answer to these questions, I have divided my thesis into two different chapters that are framed as a chiasmus—it moves past the study of the representation of violence in the first chapter to focus on the violence of the representation of that violence in the second chapter. The first chapter is structured into three different sections. The first one provides a theoretical approach to racial violence with the intention of elucidating a concept that has traditionally been considered nebulous and complex; the second one addresses how racial violence has been explored in the literary tradition that informs Coates’s writings; and the third one consists of an analysis of Coates’s treatment and representation of racial violence in his own works in general, and in his memoir Between the World and Me in particular. Also divided into three different sections, the second chapter of the thesis addresses the question of whether it is possible to represent violence without perpetuating it. The first section explores the theoretical underpinnings of the relation between violence and the representation of violence and lays the groundwork for my subsequent analysis of Coates’s works. In particular, it addresses the centrality of photographic images in documenting racial violence in U.S. history; it pays attention to how the literary works that have inspired Ta-Nehisi Coates’s texts have negotiated the relationship between the representation of violence and violence; and it examines the extent to which Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work may be a form of “black witnessing”—a term that refers to the ways in which Black people have represented, recorded, talked about, testified against and, in all, denounced the racial atrocities they have been subject to (Richardson 2017). The remaining sections focus on the two main ways in which Coates’s work may be connected to violence—his pessimism and his biased approach to gender (Smith 2015, 2017). Whilst section two offers a critical reading of Coates’s hopelessness, which has also been called despair (Kennedy 2015; Rogers 2015) and even nihilism (Bodenner 2015; Lowry 2015), and which critics have considered to be disabling for Black people; section three explores the extent to which Coates’s memoir fails to account for the ways in which Black women are also victims of racist practices. Taking everything into consideration, I mean this dissertation to intervene in contemporary debates on the vexed interaction between the representation of racial violence and racial violence itself, and to think anew the ethical possibilities of both writing and reading literature. In fact, I contend that many valences are at play in any act of representation, and for it to be ethical in its approach to atrocity it needs not only the artist’s ethical engagement with that which is being represented, but also the reader’s— or the viewer’s, if representations are visual. In this thesis I explain that there are many ways for both writers and readers to develop forms of ethical witnessing—by reappropriating images of suffering, writers can in fact resist the normalization of pain and the threat of dehumanizing victims; and by viewing such images “with solemn reserve and careful circulation,” readers, and witnesses in general, can resignify these representations as potential chances to heal and to learn from a past suffused with violence (Richardson 2020a, n.p.). In all, Coates’s works are proof that, disturbing as it is, bearing witness to atrocity also is, in this way, critical and urgent—it both challenges and empowers us to think about new futures and about the limitless possibilities that exist not beyond, but rather regardless of, violence.
