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Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural

Memory
Richard Crownshaw
Published online: 11 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Richard Crownshaw (2011) Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory, Parallax, 17:4,
75-89, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2011.605582

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 parallax, 2011, vol. 17, no. 4, 7589

Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory

Richard Crownshaw

There has been a turn toward the gure of the perpetrator in recent historical ction.
More precisely, and as Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser (1995, published as The Reader,
1996) and Die Heimkehr (2006, published as The Homecoming, 2008), Jonathan Littells
Les Bienveillantes (2006, published as The Kindly Ones, 2009), Kate Grenvilles The Secret
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River (2006), Valerie Martins Property (2003), Edward Joness The Known World
(2003), Toni Morrisons A Mercy (2008), and Sherman Alexies Flight (2007),
amongst others, suggest, that turn has rendered the gure the perpetrator in
empathetic terms, or rather raised the possibility, for the reader, of an empathetic or at
least an affective relation to the perpetrator. This tendency in ction is correspondent
with recent critiques of memory studies, or rather what might be termed critical
memory studies. Those critiques draw attention to the universalization of the victims
identity in both the theory and practice of cultural memory, and suggest the
possibilities of entertaining less palatable forms of identication, with the perpetrator,
as a means of stemming such universalizing tendencies. This seems to have been an
innovation in memory studies that is Holocaust-related, but it has been exported to
other scenarios of cultural remembrance. The rst concern of this essay is to question
whether, if the universalization of the gure of the victim suggests a form of
transcultural memory that is all too homogeneous, the antidotal use of the perpetrator
simply re-inscribes the same problem. Put otherwise, does the recent theory and
practice of cultural memory that is perpetrator-centered make the perpetrator an
appropriable gure available for facile identication across different cultural
memories where once the victim gured such availability? After tracing
and accounting for the universalising tendencies and logics that have so far been
asserted, this essay will consider ways of reading the ctional perpetrator that reinstall
its particularities as a gure around and through which the work of cultural memory
can be conducted, and by which transcultural, comparative work might take place
a node around which productive tensions and asymmetries between the
remembrances of past events can be generated. Having done some conceptual
groundwork for transcultural remembrance, this essay will turn its attention to
one national instantiation of what might be called perpetrator ction, twenty-rst-
century North-American historical ction that deals with the practice and institution
of slavery, wholly or partly from the masters point of view. The reconceptualisation of
how the gure of the perpetrator could be read in a particularized manner would not
be complete without an assessment as to why he or she gures in the cultural
remembrance of the present moment. In other words, memory studies foundational
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 observation that memories are always (re)constructed according to the desires,
conscious or unconscious, that attend that moment would extend to a consideration of
twenty-rst-century cultural desires in relation to the perpetrator in the guise of
slave master. As this essay will argue, in a post-9/11 literary culture, representations
of perpetrators have centered on attempts to understand the terrorists, via their
ctional renditions, who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11 or who would perpetrate
similar atrocities. What seems missing from this literary reckoning with perpetration
is the idea of the American as perpetrator, or rather as producer, of what the
philosopher Giorgio Agamben would describe as the bare life1 of the internees of
Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and of the civilians who became casualties of the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed the events of 9/11. This essay then will
work towards an understanding of the recent literary representations of the
production of the bare life or the living social death2 of the slave in America as a
screen memory for its twenty-rst-century counterpart. This is not just a
transhistorical literary relation but a transcultural one as well, as the decoding of
historical ction reveals the repercussive traces of empire, the resonance of one history
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of American subjection in another.

To begin with, though, a genealogy for the universalizing tendencies and logic of
memory and trauma studies that have been asserted is needed. The mass distribution
of images made by the perpetrators in current realms of cultural memory is
particularly disturbing to theoretical regimes of secondary memory and witnessing
because it threatens to naturalise that perspective. Marianne Hirsch, for example, has
focused on the iconic photographic image of a little boy contained in what is commonly
known as The Jurgen Stroop Report. Hirsch critiques the ubiquitous reproduction of
this image in post-Holocaust art, which un-self-reexively remobilises the
perpetrators perspective. Even if done ironically, the reproduction of such images
cannot necessarily escape the genocidal gaze focused in the original image, by which
the death of the photographed victim is pregured. Remediated by post-Holocaust
art, such images are loosened from if not stripped of the ideological context and agency
that informed their original usage, making them available as stages for over-
identication with, fantasies of rescue of and vicarious witnessing for the subjects
originally framed by the perpetrator. In other words, the artistic mobilization of what
was once the perpetrators gaze enables and focuses a form of memory work
ungrounded by historical realties. Hirsch advocates instead a postmemorial art that
stages the possibility of heteropathic rather than idiopathic identication, or, as
Dominick LaCapra would argue, empathy rather than identication with the victim.3

For Susannah Radstone, postmemorial art-works ethical value lies not in a self-
reexive capacity to eschew over-identication with the victim whilst also
unwittingly inhabiting the perpetrators perspective but in its capacity to move
its spectator through fantasy identications with perpetration as well as with
victimhood [ . . . ] the task of witnessing and remembering the suffering of others
ought not to be separated from the difcult acknowledgement of testimonial
witnessings darker side.4 Radstones concern is that theoretical anxiety over
postmemorial art compounds the absolute innocence that that art attributes to its
subjects an innocence that is borrowed by those who would engage in fantasies of
over-identication or rescue.
Crownshaw
76
 Radstone is not alone in her concern over the expansiveness of the category of victim.
Amy Hungerford argues that is has been certain theoretical versions of trauma that
have informed the cultural conditions for over-identication.5 In such critiques
of trauma studies and I would add Ruth Leys critique here the seminal
contributions of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman have been found particularly
problematic.6 The charge is that, as Dominick LaCapra might put it, the absences
that structure representations of trauma are confused with historically specic loss,
and the experience of text becomes the experience of historical trauma and it is
in this sense that trauma is culturally contagious.7 If trauma can be textually
transmitted, then, categories of historical actor victim and perpetrator are
subsumed or superseded by textual experience.

This is where the focus on the perpetrator might come in, by way of an intervention
in the theory and practice of memory studies. The universalisation of the victim
compounds the otherness of the perpetrator and obfuscates the processes of
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perpetration. Gillian Roses critique of postmodern, post-Holocaust philosophy

is illuminating on that last point, centering as it does on postmodernisms
delegitimisation of Holocaust narratives, as if all representation is contaminated by
the violent logic of the master narratives that rationalised Auschwitz. For Rose, the
argument for the overcoming of representation converges with the inner tendency of
Fascism itself. For example, placing Jews beyond representation surely echoes
Nazisms abstraction of Jewish identity. Only through an always contestable and
fallible representation can we know where the representation of fascism converges
with the fascism of representation. Otherwise in our Holocaust piety, we render the
event ineffable, which is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear it
may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are human, all too
human. In theory, Rose imagines something akin to Primo Levis concept of the
grey zone.8 In practice, Rose imagines the possibility of something like a Nazi
Bildungsroman in which the future allegiances of the protagonist are unknown to the
reader, and by the time they are known, the reader has already empathized. A crisis
of identication in the reader would signify that empathetic bond.9

On the one hand, this model of the perpetrator may stem the universalisation of the
victims identity, the continued othering of the perpetrator and processes of
perpetration, as well as the contagion of trauma as it travels through the materials of
culture and their consumption. On the other, in its export to a variety of cultural
scenarios my list of ction above spans the Holocaust (Schlink and Littell), settler
violence in Australia (Grenville), the genocide committed against and ethnic
cleansing of Native Americans (Alexie), slavery in nineteenth-century America
(Jones, Martin) and in the transatlantic America of the seventeenth century
(Morrison) is there a danger that the guring of the perpetrator may be
underpinned by a universalising logic similar to that found in certain versions of
trauma studies? Put another way, attempts at empathy might lead to an over-
identication with both victim and perpetrator and might take place along
structural lines according to abstract textual templates. The literary gure of the
perpetrator would then populate an all too symmetrical landscape of transcultural
memory.
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 Maria Torgovnick analyses a corollary of this turn to the perpetrator in
contemporary literature in terms of the fascination with Adolf Eichmann what she
describes as the astonishing willingness in contemporary culture to see Eichman
as one of us. Is identication with Adolf Eichmann a reasonable act? asks
Torgovnick. Only, I would claim, under generalisations so large as to be almost
meaningless: he was a human being, he did these things; I am a human being, I could
do these things, and so forth. Roses argument that Holocaust piety obfuscates the
all too human nature of perpetration is perhaps in need of buttressing, for
Torgovnick differentiates between the idea that Eichmann is in all of us and
that anyone could be Eichmann. The former, like the generalized denition of
humanity that we shared with him, lacks the contingency of the latter. In fact, that
universalisation of the potential of perpetration is the means by which the
contingent nature of perpetration is overlooked. As Torgovnick argues, by
imagining ourselves capable of mass murder that we know at heart we could not
commit, we bypass the very circumstances in which perpetration could be possible.
Put otherwise, it is the scale of the crime that makes it a fantasy of the impossible and
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which relieves us of ethical responsibility for considering the personal, quotidian,

local and normative circumstances by which we might be implicated in
perpetration. However, that anyone could be Eichmann suggests the historical
contingencies of perpetration, by which one becomes a perpetrator, and which any
act of empathy should negotiate in other words a situational ethics of that
empathy. As Torgovnick reminds us, in a post-9/11 world, the cultural fascination
with Eichmann and the banality of evil along the lines he is in all of us has been
anything but a means by which American culture has immersed itself in the grey
zone of American history, but rather a means of reinstalling binary oppositions
between good and evil, victim and perpetrator.10 How, then, might a situational
ethics of reading and relating to the gure of the perpetrator be realised?

By way of answering that question, I turn to an instructive reading of Toni

Morrisons 1986 novel Beloved: Dean Francos 2006 retrospective on literary-critical
attempts to read the novel as inherently ethical, because the reader is burdened with
a historical consciousness informed by the novel and so takes part in a putative
healing process that is shared with its protagonists as they mourn the traumatic
losses of slavery; or, if readers are not ethically so burdened then they are haunted by
memories they come to share with the protagonist. In other words, memory and text
are conated, as text is read as memory itself. If traumatic affect is entirely a textual
property engendered by the narratives disclosures of injury then it follows that
traumatic injury can be mourned and healed by the readers interpretation of
narrative closure. Franco works towards a different reading of the novel, arguing
that the text may not actually foreground the possibility of empathy (or
identication, to recall LaCapras and Hirschs distinction) but instead the processes
by which its protagonist Sethe lays claim to herself. It is not necessarily a contagious
text, from which trauma spreads because it is written and read. The semantics of
claim suggest a historically-loaded phrase in terms of insurance and property law:
the masters claim on the black body as property, his insurance claim on that body
when damaged or absent, when those bodies were liberated after 1865, and when
Sethe claims ownership of herself not to mention reparations claims of the
twentieth century. Her claim is not the internalization of a self-perception as
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78
 property, Franco argues, but a necessary negotiation of the semantic eld that
forcefully locates her. This is also the semantic eld that the empathizing (or
identifying) reader has to countenance. Empathy here is not made possible by the
texts aporias its affective failures of representation, disruptions, and absences,
or abstract textual patterning but made more difcult by the presence of
the semantic density of phrases that, given their historical traction, cannot be
disarticulated from their material effects. This semantic eld locates both
protagonist and reader in terms of their respective historical positions and relation
to the powerful discourses of law and property and their legacies. If, then, the text
is to be read in reparative terms, by which past injuries are redressed by their
narrativisation and the consumption of that narrative, reparation must be
conceptualized psychically and materially. The narrative depiction of trauma by no
means guarantees social justice and so must be mediated by speaking for those
aggrieved and to a discursive system which sustains oppression; studies of injury need
to provide methods of redress in order to be effective, and theories that do not
account for material injury do not advance the claims of literature into the
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literacy, or discourse, of the world at large. Without, in this case, recourse to elds
of law and property, in other words, material redress, mourning through the
cathected cultural symbols of literature produces the reader as mute witness or at
best engaged in a perfunctory ritual of working-though and narrative closure.11

How might this relate to the ction of perpetration, or, in this case, slave-owning?
Edward Joness The Known World (2003) represents the black and white slave-
owning society of Manchester County, Virginia, often focusing on and around the
life and death of Henry Townsend, who, born a slave, dies, in 1855, a slave-owner.
The interesting thing about Joness novel is that its narrative voice is focalized,
directly and indirectly, by the discourses of slave-owning society and its institutions
and agencies, as well as twentieth-century historiography, itself often infused with
a tendency to romanticize the South. The narrative voice shifts uently between
these ofcial voices and registers and those of individual slaves and their owners.
Put simply, it is impossible to think through slavery and enter into an affective
relationship with the slave owner in this text outside of the terms complicit in
enslavement.

Henry Townsends candidacy for empathy, as a victim and perpetrator in the

institution of slavery, notwithstanding, the following scene concerns the Sheriff,
Skifngton, who, along with his wife, disapproves of slavery but who nevertheless
owns one, by the name of Minerva. Although a daughter to them, Minerva
ultimately ees to her sisters sanctuary in Philadelphia. In the meantime,
Skifngton presides over his duties at the town jail, which include, one morning, the
arrest and charge of Broussard for killing his own business partner. Broussard and his
partner had planned to sell slaves to a local plantation owner, Coalfax. As
Skifngton writes a report to request a circuit judge for the murder trial, he is taxed
by questions such as Nature of Alleged Crime, Name of Alleged Victim, Are their
witnesses to the alleged crime?, Can such witnesses be believed? Whilst writing the report,
he is paid a visit by William Robbins and his slave Henry Townsend, as Williams
wishes to complain about Henrys violent treatment by a slave patrol. (In this
analeptic narrative segment of the novel, Henry is still a slave; however, the novel
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 opens with his death). Whilst making the complaint, Robbinss attention turns to
Moses, one of the slaves Broussard planned to sell, whom he purchases after
inspecting as if he were livestock. Mosses is separated from his wife, Bessie, the other
slave that was in Broussards possession, who remains unpurchased, but not after
Robbins threatens to shoot Moses for complaining about the separation. The
indirect discourse that follows the threat articulates Skifngtons thoughts, as he is
interrupted once again from lling out his report: I arrest you for the murder of this
nigger right in front of my eye. That this thought is facetious is not in doubt; it is also a
crime the witnessing of which would be unambiguous compared to Broussards case
(in which Broussard is the only witness). The assumption here is that witnessing
could produce some kind of transcendent or objective testimony. The irony is of
course that Skifngton fails to see the crime unfolding before his very eyes: the sale of
Moses. The irony is not though the means of Joness general, humanist critique of
slavery but situational and historically specic. Skifngtons failure to witness this
crime of slavery is because he is ideologically blinkered, despite his liberal disposition
compared to most white and some black residents of Manchester County.
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Skifngtons understanding of the American scene is, like the rudimentary, colonial
sixteenth-century wood-cut map of America, entitled The Known World, created
by Hans Waldseemuller, that hangs on the wall of his jailhouse, framed and
circumscribed. As Franco would argue, nineteenth-century Southern discourses of
law and property and their material effects locate slave owner and slave in this scene
and inform what they know and see.12

Rather than suggest a premediated perpetrator, a replication of a gure rendered

exportable from other historical scenarios and ctions and made too easily
transcultural through an abstract textualisation that accommodates the readers
facile identication, Joness ction suggests something far more intractable. In
other words, Jones, doesnt present a textually abstract stage on which a perpetrator
may be identied (as opposed to empathized) with. Joness novel dramatizes the
discursive densities that locate the slave and slave owner in the material world,
which a difcult empathy (or at least affective relationship) with either victim or
perpetrator, or victim-cum-perpetrator in Henrys case, must negotiate. In sum,
reconguring victims and perpetrators in this manner substitutes historically specic
scenarios for empathy for exportable textual formula for identication.

That Joness novel inscribes the mediations of the slave and the slave owner, from
the period contemporary to slavery to the present day, is a reminder of the
fundamental operation of cultural memory, its construction and reconstruction of
the past moment according to the desires that inform the moment of remembrance.
Having argued one way of grounding the perpetrator and the mediations of a
readerly relation with him (or her), the question remains: why the literary turn to
the perpetrator (slave owner) at this particular moment of literary production? In a
post-9/11 culture, the concept of the perpetration of atrocity is often aligned with
terrorism. Most American ction written about 9/11 and/or its aftermath that deals
with the concept of perpetration tends to congure the perpetrator in terms of the
terrorist rather than the military or para-military perpetrator of atrocities
committed in Afghanistan and Iraq following the events of 9/11, or in other theatres
of American war.13
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80
 In an exception that might prove the rule of the above observation, Jonathan Safran
Foers novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) relates the trauma of 9/11 to
Allied re-bombings of Dresden and the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Those events are relayed by eye-witness testimony: Foers protagonist reads an
edited version of Kinue Tomoyasus testimony; and the experience of Dresden
is related wholly within the realms of the novel by the letter written by the
protagonists grandfather.14 However, as Laura Frost argues, these historical
references are the means by which the Foer and his protagonist indirectly and
allegorically represent the traumatic experience of 9/11, an experience that, in the
novel, dees, eludes, arrests and disrupts its narrativisation.15 In other words,
I would argue that it is uncertain as to whether these congurations of traumatic
experience are meant by Foer, sub-textually, to represent or at least implicate
America as a perpetrator of atrocities. Even if that were the intended implication,
would it not also operate as a historical displacement, as American perpetration is
admitted but not in the present moment? Along these lines, Jenny Edkins has argued
that the signier of ground zero places the 9/11 attacks in the context of atomic and
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nuclear warfare in a hypervaluation of lives lost on American soil. Edkins does not
go on to contemplate the historical contexts of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki that subtend her critique of the operations of that signier. Her
critique does, though, extend to another form of perpetration, the disclosure of
which depends on redening 9/11 trauma. Where trauma has been dened in
individual, psychical terms writ large, as an injury to psychical integrity, those terms
lend themselves to medicalisation, healing, and a therapeutic resolution, in other
words, a form of governance and disciplinary practice by which the social and
symbolic order is restored and maintained. Prompted by Kai Eriksons notion of
traumatic tears to the communal fabric following environmental and natural
disaster, Edkins redenes 9/11 trauma in non-medicalising and non-redemptive
terms that relate to our place in a built environment. Drawing on the work of Eric
Darton and Mark Wigley, Edkins argues that the trauma of 9/11 derives, at least in
part, from the revelation of an impossibility of a sustained distinction between body
and building, esh and object, protected and protector, vulnerable and
invulnerable, animate and inanimate. The horror of 9/11 is the revelation of the
common ground shared by terrorisms instrumentalisation of life (the indistinction
of people and buildings) and nance capitalisms and corporate architectures
abstraction of life. That life is rendered invisible, and indistinct from capitalisms
systems and structures, and only made visible as those structures are traumatically
breached and fail, along with government, to protect life.16 So, the historical context
of World War Two works in conjunction with notions of the unrepresentability
of 9/11 trauma (in Foer), and in terms of substituting for the trauma of
instrumentalised lives indistinct from the built environment the trauma of (an
ination) of the scale of the loss of life (in nuclear terms). Tracking that substitution
reveals an American perpetration of a kind, but not the production of barelife.

Cultural theory after 9/11 has brought the gure of perpetrator closer to home, but
still in the guise of the terrorist. Jean Baudrillard argues that terrorist attack and the
war on terror and terrorism constitute a fractal, cellular war. Put differently, this is
an auto-immune war in which the system is attacking parts of itself it does not
recognise. In this sense, the collapsing towers and the terrorists were in suicidal
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 complicity, in a globalised system that can only consume (destroy) itself because it
has no outside and so is inherently self-destructive as it nears perfection. The act of
terrorism is the restitution for the singularities subsumed by a world circulation,
a generalised system of exchange, an avenging gesture that is simply a
transference of the system. There is no clash of civilizations, religions, regions,
ideologies, or good and evil in the war on terror and terrorism, but rather an
internal fracture. Put another way: this is triumphant globalization battling against
itself. Terrorism, then, can emerge as the phantasmatic enemy in the sense that it is
systemic but also in the sense that it is a haunting presence of negativity that has
been absorbed by the system. Yet the system is obliged to respond but can only do so
through destroying parts of itself.17 As W. J. T. Mitchell has put this more recently
and with more attention to the ideological and discursive grounds on which the
gure of the terrorist is produced and reproduced, and to the media technologies of
reproduction terror and the terrorist have been cloned, fear of the terrorist is
clonophobia, and the War on Terror is a clone war. Mitchells point is that events
of 9/11 were received by an American culture, and an Administration, anxious
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about advances in biotechnology, and for which the articial, clinical cultivation of
forms of life (stem-cell research, cloning) were themselves a source of terror. The
concept of a copy or an imitation with a life of its own was extended to the cancerous
terror cell, which, self-generating, has a tendency to metastasize, leaping over
the boundaries between organs in a process accelerated by the very systems of
communication . . . that are necessary for the healthy functioning of a bodily
constitution. While the spread of terrorism is facilitated by those systems of
communication, the phobic perception of that spread is equally enabled by the
systems of a globalised media, themselves informed by the ideologically-charged
representations of terrorism issued by the Bush administration. An iconology of
terror then must track the literal and gurative cloning of terrorism, and the trafc
between the two processes.18 Judging by these examples, the preponderance of post-
9/11 cultural theory has been to offer a dialectical understanding of terror and
violence that undermines the distinction between them and us, revealing the
dependence of us on the guration and objectication of them in the Wests, and
particularly the USs, construction of a terrorist other.19 Despite this dependency
and perhaps inextricability between us and them, theory still nds the gure of
the perpetrator as Other even if it is, partly, an American conguration.

Post 9/11, it is in the American historical ction of slavery that the American
production or perpetration of barelife can be found, as in Valerie Martins 2003
novel Property, which is set in 1828 and explores the experiences of Manon Gaudet,
mistress of a sugar plantation in Louisiana. Manon witnesses the frequent sexual
abuse her plantation-owner husband metes out to female and male slaves alike and
survives a slave insurrection in which her husband is killed. She has, though, no
sympathy for the slaves on her plantation, especially Sarah, her house slave, who is
also concubine to her husband. Rather, the emotion she feels over her husbands
improprieties is shame. For example, the novel opens with the scene of Manon
spying on her husbands abusive games with slave-boys on his plantation that are
designed to sexually arouse them (and him), the sexual frustration of which (for
him) is then relieved by his beating the boy most aroused and raping, if he can nd
her afterwards in the slave quarters, the boys mother. Manons response Often,
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82
 as I look through the glass, I hear in my head an incredulous refrain: This is my
husband, this is my husband renders her the potential subject of empathy for the
reader.20 Or, rather, to qualify that last point, the novel presents the reader with a
difcult but nonetheless intriguing focal point of empathy: a plantation mistress
navigating the suffocating constrictions of a racialised patriarchy in which
hierarchies of race and gender cannot be separated; Manons witnessing of the
operations of the former illuminates her position in the latter. However, we are left in
no doubt that the shame Manon feels does not constitute a common ground on
which she could empathise with the slaves she owns after her husbands death. She
cannot think of Sarah as anything but property (even though both their bodies are
commodiable in the nineteenth-century South),21 cannot understand why Sarah
does not help her escape during the plantation slaves insurrection, in which her
husband is killed, and is even jealous of Sarahs mobility her escape North, albeit
unsuccessful, disguised as a man. Nor does she understand the perspective of the
Abolitionists who help Sarah in the North, nor Sarahs articulations of herself as a
subject, especially when recalling her treatment by the Abolitionists.22 The
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narrative is organized by Manons perspective and her ideologically-circumscribed

understanding of race and gender, and by, as Susan V. Donaldson puts it, a failure
of the master(s) narrative of slavery.23 Her constitutional dependency on slavery is
clear from the start, as demonstrated by the organization of the rendition South of
runaway Sarah, but also in one extraordinary scene that follows the death of
Manons mother. In a state of grief, Manon kneels in front of Sarah and suckles at
her breast. The act is a silent one, but Manons actions are commanding and
irresistible, and Sarah is silently compelled:

This is what he does, I thought . . . . I could see myself kneeing there,

and beyond me the room where my mothers body lay, yet it seemed
to me she was not dead, that she bore witness to my action. And
beyond that I could see my husband in his ofce, lifting his head from
his book with an uncomfortable suspicion that something important
was not adding up. This vision made me smile. I closed my eyes
swallowing greedily.24

The scene dramatizes a Hegelian master-slave dialectic, the slave masters

(mistresss) constitutional dependency on the slave. When Manons mother
succumbed to cholera, from her nose, and ears, a black uid gushed forth [ . . . ] even
her nger nails [were] blackened and wet [ . . . ]. I [Manon] saw two stains unfurling
like black owers at the toes of her linen slippers.25 Engulfed by blackness, this body
metaphorically belies the Southern slave-owning classs claims to racial purity,
thereby racial superiority, where, as so forcefully demonstrated by Manons
husband, miscegenation was endemic to the institution of slavery. The gurative
blackness within suggests the dependency on slavery at the core of slave-owning
identity (the interdependency of slave and slave-holder)26 and so prefaces the scene
of Manons monstrous intimacy to which Sarah is subjected and by which
subjection Manon is made a subject.27 That this scene does not add up for Manons
husband, whose ghost, conjured in this vision, expresses his would-be disapproval
of the pleasure she takes in playing his powerful role but also of her revelation,
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 her transcription in this scene, of normally hidden scenes and structures of power
the rapaciousness and dependencies of slave owners.28

The monstrous intimacies acted out in Property reveal an interdependence between

American subject and slave as socially dead object that is resonant of the structures
of interdependence between us and them identied by post-9/11 theory; the
intimacy also identies the gure of the perpetrator not as one of them, but rather
as one of us as the producers of social death or bare life in the nineteenth-century
American South, but also in Guantanamo Bay and, if we read the novel
proleptically, the sexualized torture carried out at Abu Ghraib. The revelation of an
interdependency also suggests a failure in the framing of bare life or social death as
ungrievable. Judith Butler explains framing in terms of the seen and unseen
casualties of the theatres of twenty-rst-century war, but just as Property resonates
with the production of otherness on that more recent historical terrain, so, arguably
it also allegorises the framing of life thereon.
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For Butler, the recognition of subjectivity is dependent on the way in which

recognisability is framed. Framing is enabled through historically specic norms
that must be reiterated across time and space to establish hegemony, but each
iteration is contingent on the inevitably inconsistent operations of power. In
breaking from themselves in order to install themselves they make it possible to
apprehend something not recognised as life. The norms of recognisability are
consequently haunted if not confronted by the realities of what they claim to know
or of what they cannot know. Therefore, recognition, or the lack of the recognition
of life, is a process, which is never complete but forever shifting, interrupting or
superseding itself as historical conditions change. In fact, normative frames of
recognisability by their very operation produce the unrecognisable that falls outside
of the frame; so what is outside of the frame governs what is inside of it; put
otherwise, what is inside the frame cannot secure the ontology of what is outside.
The constitutional failure of the frame means it cannot contain the scene it was
suppose to limn. In the theatre of war, the unrecognisability of subjectivity, or
rather of life itself, and the failure to grieve that life when lost, damaged or reduced
to bare life, is the failure to recognise the intersubjective and interdependent nature
of all human life, its universal precariousness by which it is all born into, embedded
in and subject to pre-existing social and political discourses and forces. (The subject
I am is bound to the subject I am not, [ . . . ] we each have the power to destroy and
be destroyed, . . . we are bound to each other in this power and precariousness. In this
we are all precarious lives). However, the general constitutional failure of framing
opens the possibility for apprehending life outside the frame.29 Although she may
not recognize the common precarity that binds her to Sarah, particularly in the face
of slave insurrection that deems her life worthless, Manons narrative perspective
still fails to master the surrounding world (the scene it was supposed to limn) both
before and after the revolt. Even when she forcefully imposes herself on the world
(Sarahs body) she can only reveal her dependency on it (the frame cannot secure
the ontology of what is outside).

While the novels discussed so far have dramatized the American production of bare
life and social death elsewhere, historically speaking, it is Toni Morrisons A Mercy
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84
 that offers an allegory of that historical dislocation. A Mercy is set in colonial
America, mostly Virgina, between approximately 1682 and 1690, during which
time merchant Jacob Vaark falls into slave ownership by accepting a slave in
exchange for a debt owed him by DOrtega of Maryland, a tobacco plantation
owner and slave master and trader. It is DOrtegas plantation house and property,
and the idea of enclosing space in a territory the borders of which are permeable and
shifting according to the uxes in the power of colonial authorities and the empires
they stand for, in transatlantic commerce, and in the reach of the Protestant and
Catholic Churches which appeals to Vaark. For Vaark, property anchors identity
and status on such a shifting terrain and demonstrates meritocratic achievement in
the face of aristocracy and those who depend on unfree labour as part of their
colonial enterprise. Although, esh was not his commodity, Vaarks reluctant
acceptance of the slave girl is justied (to himself) as an act of humanity under his
paternal protection she will take the place of his dead childen (albeit labouring on
his farm). In short, Vaark the slave-owner, is humanized and rendered an
empathetic gure for the reader. That empathy is complicated, though, when
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Vaark, wishing to realize his meritocratic ideals and territorial desires, is persuaded
of the merits of producing rum and sugar from plantations in Barbados, which,
fellow merchants emphasise to him, are fuelled by replenishable stocks of disposable
slaves (Like rewood, what burns to ash is refuelled).30

While the presumed horrors of the Barbados plantation unfolds outside of the
novels narrative, the regime on Vaarks Viriginian farm is benign and his
plantation house there is eventually built. Vaark, though, succumbs to the Pox and
can only inhabit the property as ghost: Jacob Vaark climbed out of his grave to
visit his beautiful house [ . . . ]. Very like the way he used to reappear following
weeks of traveling. They did not see him his denitive shape or face but they
did see his ghostly blaze. His glow began near midnight, oated for a while on the
second story, disappeared, then moved so slowly from window to window.31That
Vaarks reappearance is ghostly after travelling to oversee his commercial interests
in Barbados is apt. Where Vaarks Barbadian slaves would embody a living social
death, wholly dened by the labour and demise of their bodies, his presence and
power as a subject would register as disembodied by contrast. However, it is his
relation to property and territory that is of interest to this argument. The enclosure
or territorialisation of his identity is predicated on the perpetration of slavery, but
he can only haunt his territory. Enclosure ultimately produces dislocation or an
absent presence in what he has made his homeland. The relation between the
enclosure of homeland as the grounds of identity, perpetration and consequent
dislocation is structurally resonant of the post-9/11 construction of a Homeland
that Morrisons novel of territory, slavery and dispossession could be argued to
allegorise.

Donald Peases examination of the re-orientation of national fantasies of

exceptionalism after 9/11 and the ultimate failure of their purchase on the collective
political imaginary sheds some light on the dislocation of the perpetrator. As Pease
has noted, the Bush Administration evoked national fantasies of virgin land and
historical innocence (the staples of the discourses of colonialism and Manifest
Destiny), particularly in Bushs address to the nation on 20 September 2001 in which
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 he stated that America had not been attacked on its own soil for 136 years, with the
exception of Pearl Harbour in 1941. In the colonial and nineteenth-century
imagination, innocence of the forcible dispossession of indigenous peoples from their
lands was sustained by the conversion of that land into virgin territory that could not
be violated and that, putatively empty (evacuated), must be settled. To adapt the
national fantasy of inviolable and virgin territory to the violations of the homeland of
9/11 was an avowal and disavowal of the primal trauma upon which the national
identity rests, in effect a cultural recollection of a dispossession twenty-rst century
Americans now perceive themselves to re-enact (this time as the dispossessed) but
which threatens the fantasy of innocence. As Pease puts it, the idea of the violation of
homeland brings that primal trauma into spectacular visibility. In fact, the
conversion of inviolable virgin land to violated homeland generates a whole series of
uncanny effects, as other territorial dispossessions concealed by the national
fantasies of historical innocence have become resonant if not visible in the post-9/11
feeling of loss of homeland, and which are now weirdly familiar experiences: the sites
of residence of the Paiutes and Shoshones had become sites of nuclear waste dumping;
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the crumbling Twin Towers recalled the re-bombing of civilian bombing of Dresden
and Tokyo, and the atomic bombing and fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, the foundational dispossession was brought into quasi apocalyptic

visibility elsewhere, as in, for example, Shock and Awe in Iraq. The dispossession
of other peoples from their lands became the means by which Americans could
reoccupy their own land from which they had been dislocated by the attacks of
9/11 a promised return to a land always already (and destined to be) theirs in
what was tantamount to a reworking of Manifest Destiny. The perception of a
violated homeland and dispossession from it was in fact accompanied by the reality
of suspension of civil liberties in an Emergency State inaugurated by the Patriot
Act, which dislocated Americans from the nation as a shared form of life. So, a
violation of the rights of citizens of other states deemed a threat to the homeland
coincided with the abridgement of civil rights at home. Or, put another way, civil
liberties, along with substraction from civic and political life (the production of
vulnerable biologised life) were exchanged for the enjoyment of a mediatised
spectacle of violation elsewhere (of life reduced to carnality). The dissemination of
photographs taken at Abu Ghraib in 2004 encouraged an American spectatorial
public to begin to refuse to take scopic pleasure in a foundational trauma transferred
elsewhere that at the same time offered symbolic compensation for their own
vulnerable, biologised lives. The photographs of Abu Ghraib revealed the
Homeland Security State as the cause of the trauma it purported to oppose, turning
the spectatorial gaze inward.32

To return to A Mercy, Morrisons attention to the territorialisation and enclosure of

identity reveals that claims to inhabit the homeland while producing barelife
elsewhere are only spectral. In other words, Morrison allegorises the dispossession
and dislocation of Americans subtracted from civic and political life as they inhabit
the Homeland, itself a zone of indistinction, an unlocatable space outside of
the American sovereign state their occupation of which is a present absence. In
exchange, they partook in and ratied an imperialist enterprise that dispossessed
others and reduced them to barelife in a form of compensatory exchange.
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86
 Through their relation of the social death of slavery and post-9/11 production of
bare life, the novels discussed in this essay have located the gure of the American
perpetrator in the face of its cultural inadmissibility. In doing so, they have, in
Butlers terms, made apprehension of non-American bare life imaginable and
demonstrated the constitutional weakness of frames of recognizability (and
grievability). For Butler, the ethics of tracking that life are not just a matter of
revealing its trace but rather of the implication of self in the position of the Other, in
addressing and being addressable by that Other, in sustainable ways. That means
seeing in the midst of non-seeing, or recognizing not just barelife but the frames that
preclude its recognisability, or tracking that life as well as the operations of power
that foreclose its visibility, and indeed the visibility of the American perpetrator.33
By way of conclusion: how, then, to track the operations of power? We might
consider neo-slave narratives to be cultural memories that screen memories of recent
subjection. Michael Rothberg argues that screen memories must not be thought of
in xed opposition to the disturbing memories they replace but as a redistribution, a
layering or remapping of memory: a site of repression but also a site of the projection
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of what remains repressed but which demands decoding. In this sense, screen
memories are potentially generative of other memories, and the mnemonic labour
required to substitute one memory for another always betrays itself.34 When we look
to what lies beneath, though, does the screen memory remain intact and
instrumental as ideological apparatus? Perhaps screen memory can be reemphasised
as the location of the ideological work that mediates memory power projected, in
other words that we need to track when screen memory is opened to dialogue with
other memories. That ctions of slavery resonate with and allegorise twenty-rst-
century production of carnal life does not free them from the ideological implications
of screening such carnality. Nevertheless, the concept of the screen attends to the
ideological work of dislocating memory and allows a transhistorical, transcultural
memory that relates different scenarios of bare life and in doing so apprehends, in
Butlers sense of the term, traces of subjective not just subjected life at the core and
periphery of American empire.

Notes

1
Giorgio Agamben argued that the executive
(presidential order) issued on 13 November 2001,
which authorized indenite detention and trial by
military commission (not tribunal) of noncitizens
involved in terrorist activities, constituted a state of
exception. This order went further than the Patriot
Act (26 October 2001) which allowed seven days
detention of suspicious aliens. The order pro-
duced detainees (from captured Taliban in
Afghanistan) not subject to American law or the
Geneva Convention for POWs. With neither legal
identity nor personhood such detainees were
nationally and internationally unrecognizable or
illegible. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans.
Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), pp.34. For an extended
discussion of bare life, see Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1998).
2
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA. and London:
Harvard University Press, 1982), pp.514 and
35 76. Judith Butler makes passing use of
Pattersons phrasing of nineteenth century slavery
to describe life not framed as grievable in post-9/11
conict. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is
Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2009), p.44.
3
Marianne Hirsch, Nazi Photographs in Post-
Holocaust Art: Gender as an Idiom of Memor-
ialization, in Phototextualities: Intersections of
Photography and Narrative, eds, Alex Hughes
and Andrea Noble (Albuquerque: University of
parallax
87
 New Mexico Press), pp.1940; Dominick LaCa-
pra History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical
Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004),
pp.106143.
4
Susannah Radstone, Social Bonds and Psychi-
cal Order: Testimonies, Cultural Values, 5.1 (2001),
p.61.
5
Amy Hungerford, Memorizing Memory, The
Yale Journal of Criticism, 14.1 (2001), pp.7883;
and The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and
Personication (London and Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003).
6
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.269297;
Shoshana Felman, Education and Crisis, or the
Vicissitudes of Teaching, After the Apocalypse:
Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence, The Return
of the Voice: Claude Lanzmanns Shoah, in
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psycho-
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analysis, and History, eds, Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub (London and New York: Routledge,
1992), pp.156, pp.12064, pp.204 83; Cathy
Caruth, Trauma and Experience: Introduction,
Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp.312; Cathy
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996).
7 Valerie Martin, Property (London: Abacus,
Dominick LaCapra History in Transit, pp.115
27; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing
Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001), pp.234, 278, 30, 35, 37, 41, 46,
48, 59, 64 5, 77.
8
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans.
Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988).
9
Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
pp.41, 43, 46.
10
Maria Torgovnick, The War Complex: World
War II in Our Time (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp.689.
11
Dean Franco, What we talk about when we
talk about Beloved, Modern Fiction Studies, 52:2
(2006), pp.417 29.
12
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (London:
Harper Perennial, 2004), pp. 16674.
13
For example, Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New
York: Scribner, 2007); John Updike, Terrorist
(New York: Knopf, 2006); Jess Walter, The Zero
(New York: Regan, Harper Collins, 2006).
14
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incre-
dibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006), pp.1879 and
20816.
15
Laura Frost, Still Life: 9/11s Falling Bodies,
in Literature after 9/11, eds, Ann Keniston and
Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (London and New
York: Routledge, 2008), p.186; for a discussion of
Crownshaw
88
post-9/11 trauma and temporality in Foers work,
see Mitchum Huehls, Foer, Spiegelman, and
9/11s Timely Traumas, in Literature after 9/11, eds,
Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
(London and New York: Routledge, 2008),
pp.4259.
16
Jenny Edkins, Ground Zero: Reections on
Trauma, In/distinction and Response, Journal for
Cultural Research, 8:3 (2004), pp.24770. See also
Mark Wigley, Insecurity by Design, in After the
World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, eds,
Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (London
and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.713, 75
6, 801, 824; Eric Darton, The Janus Face of
Architectural Terrorism: Minoru Yamasaki,
Mohammed Atta, and Our World Trade Centre,
in After the World Trade Centre, pp.88 9, 901.
17
Jean Baudrillard, LEsprit du Terrorisme, in
South Atlantic Quarterly: Dissent from the Homeland,
eds, Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia,
101:2 (2002), pp. 407, 405, 4056, 409, 40914.
18
W. J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of
Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp.xi-xix.
19
David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemora-
tion, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2006), pp.811.
20
2009), pp.35.
21
Susan V. Donaldson, Telling Forgotten Stories
of Slavery in the Postmodern South, The Southern
Literary Journal, 40:2 (2008), p.279.
22
Valerie Martin, Property, pp. 109, 137 8, 166,
170, 205, 2079.
23
Susan V. Donaldson, Telling Forgotten Stories
of Slavery in the Postmodern South, p.273.
24
Valerie Martin, Property, pp.823.
25
Valerie Martin, Property, p.74.
26
Susan V. Donaldson, Telling Forgotten Stories
of Slavery in the Postmodern South, p.279.
27
For a discussion of intimacy and subjection in
slave narratives, see Christina Sharpe, Monstrous
Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2010),
pp.1326.
28
For a similar reading of this scene, see Susan
V. Donaldson, Telling Forgotten Stories of
Slavery in the Postmodern South, pp.2745.
29
Judith Butler, Frames of War, pp.1, 45, 710,
1215, 23 29, 45, 51, 725, 7880, 95 5.
30
Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage,
2009), pp.811, 2526, 20, 30
31
Toni Morrison, A Mercy, pp.1412.
32
Donald E. Pease, The New American Exception-
alism (Minnesota and London: University of
Minneapolis Press, 2009), pp.155, 1578, 1601,
 1689, 1701, 1735, 178, 183. Adriana Caverero
has noted, for example, that the postures of the
tortured and torturers, the enforced tableaux of
torture, are quotations from an archive of the
history of torture, or more precisely of iconic
images (from Nazi Germany and the Ku Klux
Klans regimes of terror in the American South)
that have been spectacularly disseminated. To
quote Caverero: What stands out in them is a
spectral caricature of torture reduced to the level of
lthy farce. Phantasmic copies . . . [in which] the
Abu Ghraib tormenters and their victims appear
as spectres. In the case of Abu Ghraib, power only
reveals itself in terms of caricature, or bad theatre.
For Caverero, the unmasking of the illegality of
torture is secondary to this structural revelation:
that torture is spectral, ctitious, and that miming
torture before the camera masks torture off-set.
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twenty-rst-century legacy of lynching in Amer-
ican culture. The exhibition of the photographic
images, taken between 1880 and 1960, of lynching,
and the publication of those images, between
20002002 has informed a new-found sensitivity
to racist violence in the present that bears the
hallmarks of lynching (the signicance of which is
often ignored by police authorities). The dissemi-
nation of these images has also been a spur to
the historical consciences of white audiences
in prompting them to think through their
relationship with their counterparts: photo-
graphed enthusiastic, voyeuristic white onlookers
and perpetrators. However, in a post-9/11 cultural
environment in which the signier of terrorism
has come to describe and dene a range of violent
acts, the location of terror in past and present acts
of lynching has often lent unqualied support to

The global reach of the images from Abu Ghraib,

the excessive visuality of the event, became the
perfect means by which power represented itself
to itself. Adriana Caverero, Horrorism: Naming
Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009),
p.111.
33
On the frames subsumption of power in the
case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, see Judith
Butler, Frames of War, pp.725, 78, 945; on
overcoming the frames that we ratify, see pp.99
100; on the ethical act, see p.180. Dora Apel has
argued something similar in her examination of the
the ght against terror abroad in terms of
American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In other words, the identication of social death
on American soil does not necessarily encourage
moral conduct in theatre of war. See Dora Apel,
On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies
of Lynching after 9/11, American Quarterly, 55:3
(2003), pp.457478.
34
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory:
Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009),
pp.1216.

Richard Crownshaw is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and

Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches
mainly American literature. His research interests are in American Studies,
Memory Studies and Holocaust Studies. His publications include The Afterlife of
Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
and, co-edited with Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland, The Future of Memory
(Berghahn Books, 2010). He is currently nishing a book on twenty-rst-century
American ction.

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