“While we do have some guidelines for how to construct language and imagery without gender bias, there is little to no guidance for how to construct language and imagery without anti-Blackness.”

Our cultural imagination trends fundamentally towards anti-Black and anti-woman, denigrating and feminizing “undesirables” and “undesirable conditions” along a spectrum of “white” humanity and “black” inhumanity and what is masculine versus what is emasculine “hysteria.” In general, what is Black and what is female often demonstrates the most degenerate state; and while we do have guidelines for how to construct language and imagery without gender bias, there is little to no guidance for how to construct language and imagery without anti-Blackness.  For the reader and writer to follow some aspects of analysis using African dramatic form, it will be useful to have a definition for anti-Blackness, negative aesthetic, and a literary device called Manichean leitmotif. 

Anti-Blackness directly or indirectly opposes institutions and ideas that, to one, symbolize Black political, economic, and social power. In short, it’s an irrational opposition to, or inability to empathize with, Black humanity as “humanity” and Black justice as “fair” and necessary. Manichean leitmotif is a figurative anti-black device while the negative aesthetic reverses and reimagines the literal and figurative anti-black condition.

Manichean Leitmotif

Manichean leitmotif is a literary term coined by dramatist Dr. Arthur Graham to describe a sequence of contrasting extremes designed, fundamentally, to seat White “supremacist” ideology and imagery against Black “inferiority” in American cultural imagination.

This device reached its maturity as a 19th-century literary craft tool that allowed writers to build anti-black imagery into their narratives, fictional and otherwise, using a pattern of contrasting extremes intended to “otherize” undesirables on a spectrum of white humanity to Black inhumanity. This device allowed that “negroized” versions of non-whites or other marginalized classes— particularly mulattoes, American Indians, and the Irish— could symbolize the elevation of the white soul to redemption or the degeneration of the white soul to damnation, where it became akin to Black humanity. Even Black people could advance or regress along this spectrum, though never truly becoming equal to whites (consider the slave narrative of Elaudo Equiano and its depiction of the African and African condition, despite Equiano being born free in Africa and ending the narrative as a Negro with “free papers” in England).

Manichean Leitmotif was popularized in the fiction of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville and is visible today in our light and dark depictions of contrasting extremes to establish “good” and “evil” imagery but also in the pairing of darkness or Black humanity with “undesirables,” most obvious in, say, the Ku Klux Klan’s fundamental resentment of a “Nigger-Jew Conspiracy”; the association of Black Lives Matter, at its prime, with any social unrest; and the early “negroization” of the Muslim community in America under the “black” flag of the Islamic State.

However, Dr. Graham was notably limiting his lens to American fiction: The lineage, in fact, for this derisive metaphor is ancient and apparent not only in the racial slur “nigger” and its romantic descendants “negro,” noir, or nero, but also in as seemingly innocuous a word as “negative,” which, in most cases, defines the oppositional or contrary condition of a thing (remember, White humanity and Black inhumanity).

See Also: Dark is Not A Feeling (Literal and Figurative Anti-Blackness)

Metaphorical anti-African imagination goes back to antiquity at least, where to be “too dark” made one a “coward, like the Egyptians” according to Aristotle; and the Latin “niger,” meaning “black,” was itself a bastardization of the Kemetic, or Ancient Egyptian, word, “Netjer” meaning Nature, God, or Divine. The word became “black” in Latin imagination as a slur intended, among Romans, to mock the skin of Kemites.

The cultural and implicit biases that resoundingly inform anti-Blackness create disproportionately undesirable outcomes for Black people in policing, judicial punishment, education, healthcare, politics, and banking ultimately resulting in a continued legacy of wealth exclusion, disenfranchisement, and adversely impact ones overall quality of life.

Therefore, it is not enough, simply, to increase Black presence in the production of literature on all sides of the table— author, editor, and press (and without a greater capacity for empathy, non-Black educators may be altogether incapable of imagining and executing upon anti-racist education)— substance and presence will be necessary to extirpating anti-Blackness and creating diverse literary imagination.

Next: The Negative Aesthetic

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