REQUIRED BOOKS
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ISBN #: 978-0679724629
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. ISBN #: 978-0393617092
Elias, The Civilizing Process. ISBN # 978-0631221611
Conrad, Heart of Darkness ISBN#: 978-1673303056
Chandler, The Long Goodbye ISBN#: 978-0394757681
Himes, If He Hollars Let Him Go ISBN#: 978-1560254454
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. ISBN#: 978-0802158635
Assignment: Final Paper–minimum of 5 pages of content plus title page and works cited page; 12pt font, double spaced, MLA, Chicago, or APA format. Support your argument from assigned and recommended readings only.
Please have in text citations as well.
Choose one of the following three options:
Option #1:
In If He Hollers Let Him Go, protagonist Bob participates in a conversation among his middle-class African American peers about Richard Wright’s novel Native Son–which one friend disparages as a “vicious crime novel.” Obviously this was written intentionally as Himes himself was a writer of crime fiction AND (by imitating Chandler’s style in particular) implicitly argues that books like his were better suited to describing how race functions in American life.
Discuss how the noir detective novel (using If He Hollars and The Long Goodbye as examples) can be read as “race” novels. What is it about the specific mixture of race and crime in these novels that makes them more capable than traditional novelistic conventions (such as racial uplift or protest novels) at explaining asymmetric racial power?
Both Chandler and Himes–who deploys a series of several dreams in his novel–borrow from Freud. So be sure to utilize Freud (and/or comment on the authors’ use of Freud) to discuss racialized subjects and their relationship to fathers, other authority figures, and the superego across the genre.
Option #2: Mill, Elias, and Freud each devote considerable space to the emotional and affective characteristics of the “normal,” or “civilized” person, the subject of pacified social space–or what Fanon calls the “perpetrators of pacification.”
But none of them address the emotional and affective characteristics of those whose “bear ocular witness to the infliction of pain (Mill),” the specialists, the colonized (or ghettoized). In fact, much of what social scientists have purported to “know” about such subjects is a fabrication (Fanon), a racialization, a reactive creation of the other as evil, abnormal, or uncivilized.
Using Fanon and Himes, explore the subjectivity of those subject to the violence that civilization relegates, the subject of the “enclaves (Elias)” in contrast to the subject of pacified social space. What insights about civilization’s relationship to violence do these two, alternative subjectivities enable or prevent? What does Fanon mean when he characterizes the colonized subject as “a political creature in the global sense?”
Option #3:
“Is civilization designed to temper violence? Or to satisfy it? –Michel Foucault
According to King Leopold II of Belgium, it was the “sanguinary habits” of the Congolese that necessitated the harsh imposition of civilization. All of which resulted in the death of 11M Congolese. What is the relationship between civilization (as Freud, Mill, and Elias use that term) and violence? What does Fanon mean when he says that the colonized world is “compartmentalized,” “divided in two,” “Manichean?” What has this division of social space to do with the civilizing process, with civilization and its imposition on the colonized? Why does Fanon argue for a “rebellion against pacification?” Is pacification not a good thing? And why is violence necessarily central to this rebellion?
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