Soiling the Black Body: Ishmael Reed Engages White Shit

Abstract

This chapter argues that Ishmael Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers deploys metaphorical play with sewerage to describe the soiling of African American subjects within the nation as they are marked by the abject of whiteness. Readers’ first encounter with the satirical literary landscape involves a reference to the iconic Uncle Sam—renamed Harry Sam—animating civic and national policy from his position on a toilet throne. Analyzing Reed’s work, the chapter explores the resultant impact of white subject formation that refuses bodily excess and associates racially marked others with human waste. Inspired by the environmental crises and social upheaval of the period, this 1967 novel indicts a toxic white masculinity that fuels attacks against both the organic world and black populations with the excess denied in the construction of a cleansed civic and national identity. Set in a metropolitan area akin to New York City, the novel links the rampant pollution of waterways with industrial, municipal, and military wastes to the experiences of African Americans within the city who navigate civic life through the run-off of an imagined pure and productive whiteness that leaches onto the African American body, marking it with an imagined slovenly and excessive blackness. Linking this novel to the environmental justice movement and discussions of environmental racism, textual analysis shows how communities of color within the United States historically and currently carry the burden of industrial and civic waste. Still, for Reed and for environmentalist thinkers like Robert D. Bullard, environmental justice for communities of color does not mean moving waste to other locations, away from the homes of impoverished neighborhoods and to unpopulated regions where other life forms will be left to suffer. Instead, the novel suggests that the experiences of communities of color can be linked to injury to the organic world. Thus, the novel calls for a critique of the production of toxic waste and an altered understanding of the body as intimately connected to the world, where waste can fertilize life, instead of bringing injury and death. Combining historical documentation of water pollution during the 1960s through the present day with psychoanalytic readings of literary scenes following Frantz Fanon, Reed’s novel roots violence against the environment and the black body in a white subjectivity that fantasizes transcendence from bodily life and worldly embodiment. In this way, The Free-Lance Pallbearers overturns the logic of whiteness that opposes itself to the organic world and racially marked others who carry the bodily excess denied in the construction of a fantasized unique difference from other beings and an imagined independence from planetary ecology.