Black Anaesthetics: The New Yorker and Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal

Abstract

This essay demonstrates the oft-dismissed centrality of critical race thought to posthumanist studies by excavating the neglected writings of the New Yorker magazine’s earliest black staff writers. Within this early post–Civil Rights archive of “The Talk of the Town” columns and a Russian travelogue, this essay uncovers conditions of possibility for the emergence of racially anomalous strains of contemporary black narrative that have long discomfited canon-makers. Analyzing how the implicitly white persona of “The Talk of the Town” functioned as an avatar of the liberal humanist subject, I show how Andrea Lee, Charlayne Hunter, and Jamaica Kincaid undermined or appropriated this figure of Man. Their experiments with racial legibility in their unsigned columns would give rise to what I term black anaesthetics: narrative practices that disable the reader’s capacity to make meaning of race even as they disclose traces of racialized blackness. Working thus both in and out of touch with racial reality, black anaesthetic texts such as Lee’s Russian Journal (1981), Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” (1983), and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984) suspend processes of racialization vital to the production of Man’s human Others. In doing so, they invite us to rethink the descent of what has come to be called posthumanism.