Mourning and African American Ritual

by

Jermaine Singleton

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0136

Introduction

African American mourning and ritual are cultural by-products of enduring racism in a nation premised on equality of opportunity. Coming to terms with social losses wrought by prolonged dreams deferred or using ritual to channel the hidden affect that results from the inability to do so is the definitive tension of Black life. African American being and becoming is the ongoing process of navigating persistent state-sanctioned violence. The term impossible mourning refers to the trans-historical complex of social and emotional injunctions that travel across time and social space at the intersections of racism and racial formations. As such, impossible mourning is an inextricable component of racialized subjectivity. This tethering of impossible mourning and Black subjectivity is reinforced by the historical pairings of freedom and enslavement, conformity and exclusion, privilege and indifference, and due process and lawful execution in the United States. This tension provides an analytic for understanding and navigating African American being and becoming. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks (1903) is one of the first interdisciplinary explorations of Black being and becoming. Using the tension of unrequited mourning and ritual as a lens for exploring the African American human and social condition, Du Bois’s seminal collection of essays galvanized the field of African American literary and cultural studies in ways that continue to shape its development. As such, African American lives and communities have historically measured and interrogated the moral quotient of US society, tracing its jagged arch of racial progress. From advertisements of Rufus Jones for President (1933) featuring Ethel Waters to Diana Ross’s portrayal of Billie Holiday in Sidney Furie’s Lady Sings the Blues (1972), the cultural production and circulation of representations of impossible mourning have responded to and collided against this jagged arch of racial progress in ways that render racial melancholia studies a relevant and growing topic of investigation. While the notion of impossible mourning uncovers a paradigm for understanding how unresolved racial grievances give shape to Black life, Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Reading of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual (2015) provides a grammar for reading the ways rituals of racial resistance transfer and transform hidden affect discreetly across time and social space, consolidating and connecting racial identities and communities along the way. As such, the vexed intersections of African American mourning and ritual afford individualistic and interpersonal readings of Black subjectivity that do not force “the one” to stand in for “the many.” Moreover, impossible mourning and ritual provide a context for seeing how “the racialized one” is haunted by the psychic and historical resonances that circumscribe “the racial many,” present and past. African American mourning is a proxy for an impossible mourning that connects discrete social, historical, and cultural contexts. The investigation of this psycho-social intercourse, particularly as it intersects with ritual and performance, is an interdisciplinary enterprise that weds psychoanalysis, literary and cultural studies, performance studies, and African American studies. What is more, literary and cultural representations and critiques of this impossible mourning, as Ralph Ellison implies in “The Art of Fiction: An Interview” (1955), take on the form and function of aesthetic ritual. While this article focuses on mourning, its impossibility, and African American ritual as aesthetic, cultural, and critical traditions, it also provides a framework for understanding them as characteristically transnational, transhistorical, multimodal, and mutually reinforcing.

Mourning and Migration

Since President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, migration shaped African American lives and communities. Literary and cultural representations of the African American migration experience trace the personal and collective social losses wrought by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1859, the failures of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, the “war on drugs,” redlining, and mass incarceration. Adera 1993 draws on a collection of stories, studies, and letters to question the equation between the African American migration experience and progress during the early twentieth century. Dodson and Diouf 2004 uses archival representations of migration to interrogate the notion of African American freedom at the intersections of capitalism and the search for justice, opportunity, and inclusion. Griffin 1995 draws on a close reading of Toni Morrison’s Jazz to position African American migration to the South as a source of cultural renewal and recovery from the devastating effects of need-based migration to the North. Originally published in 1987, Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama attests to the unmourned racial loss sustained in resistance to enduring racial struggle. In contrast, Mathis 2013 and Wilkerson 2010 detail the impact southern migrants had on urban cities and American culture from multiple perspectives.

• Adera, Malaika. Up South: Stories, Studies, and Letters of the Century’s African-American Migrations. New York: The New Press, 1993.

  This collection of stories, studies, and letters enlarges the frame of the African-American migration experience and, moreover, the narrative of racial progress during the early twentieth century.

• Dodson, Howard, and Sylviane A. Diouf, eds. In Motion: The Afro-American Migration Experience. Washington, DC: The National Geographic Society, 2004.

  Through a close examination of archival materials, this study uses migration to reexamine African American freedom at the vexed intersection of capitalism and the search for justice, opportunity, and inclusion. In doing so, the book shatters monolithic framings of the Black population in the United States.

• Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “New Directions for the Migration Narrative: Thoughts on Jazz.” In “Who set you flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative. By Farah Jasmine, 184–197. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

  An analysis of Toni Morrison’s depiction of the African American migration experience in Jazz. Griffin positions African American migration to the South as a means of African American cultural renewal and recovery from the devastating effects of forced and need-based migration to the North. For Griffith, Morrison’s literary success is grounded in the writer’s invocation of folkways of being and knowing that bridge lost connections between readers and their ancestral roots.

• Mathis, Ayana. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

  This novel traces the migration story of fifteen-year-old Hattie Shephard from Georgia to Philadelphia to the premature death of two of her eleven children. This story of hope and adversity is told in twelve narrative threads.

• Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010.

  Wilkerson draws on more than a thousand interviews to tell the untold story of the decades-long Great Migration, from 1915 to 1970. Told in three narrative threads, this epic migration narrative explores the mutual transformations of Black migrants and the urban cities in which they made new homes for themselves.

• Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. New York: Plume, 1990.

  Published in 1987, Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama depicts the tension between a family’s past under racial slavery and a racial present haunted by unmourned social loss.