Relational Ethics of Flesh: Fleshly Sensing Against the Politics of Life and Death in 20th- and 21st Century Black Literature

Abstract

Flesh has long been denigrated by the dominant western ideology. At the nexus of conversations about flesh in Black studies, theories of biopolitics, and phenomenology, this study explores how 20th- and 21st-century Black writers’ works reveal and trouble the dominant model of flesh shaped through the discourses of punishment and immorality. These works negotiate and at times challenge the ideology of transcending flesh—the ideology that segregates (human) “life” from flesh and two of flesh’s common associations, animality and death. Closely examining the works of James Baldwin, Jesmyn Ward, and Brit Bennett, my dissertation especially draws from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hortense J. Spillers to rethink the significance of flesh. Synthesizing the insights from Merleau-Ponty’s theory of flesh, which places sensory entanglement at the center of understanding being and relations, and Spillers’s, which conceptualizes flesh as the unbounded site of wounds (from the Middle Passage onward) distinguished from the liberal subject’s self-possessed body, I argue that contemporary Black writers’ works reveal a crucial connection between the dominant white American sense perception and the denigration of flesh in American culture and racial politics. I also argue that literature brings us towards a relational ethics I call an “ethics of flesh” by imagining alternative modes of sensing and belonging. My study concludes that this ethics—shaped through attending to the moments of sensory encounters that radically reduce the distance between the senser and the sensed—helps interrogate and push against the ideological confines of the racializing politics of life and death.