The Weight of World Literature

The “trouble” with world literature, wrote Graham Huggan in 2013, is that it advances the assimilationist agenda of a liberal or “transnational humanism” without accounting for the long histories of imperialism and continuing global inequalities that, ironically enough, made world literature’s cosmopolitan aspirations possible in the first place.Footnote ⁴ On the one hand, Huggan argues, we have David Damrosch’s quasi-Saidian “worldliness,” which advances a model of world literature predicated precisely on the weightlessness of literary texts. Writing from a formalist tradition, Damrosch argues that the literary text must “lift off” from its “culture of origin” and travel across regions and borders to be read elsewhere: only once it arrives does it become “world literature.”Footnote ⁵ Postcolonialists baulk at this notion of “world,” which smooths over the fragmentation of the earth’s surface into political territories and politicized immobilities, both historically and today, while simultaneously making a duplicitous claim for some kind of de-historicized, “universal” humanism.

On the other hand, Huggan continues, we have Franco Moretti’s more “progressive” model, which begins by at least acknowledging world literature as a “problem,” before “scientifically” modeling a “single and unequal” literary world system along a sociological and geographical axes of periphery, semi-periphery, and core.Footnote ⁶ With the resolution of Damrosch’s “problem,” however, the act of close reading a single literary text is itself erased. It seems that the best way to avoid the contradictions of liberal humanism is to remove the “human” entirely, and even then it remains “ideologically wedded to the anti-nationalistic imperatives of a dominant (Euro-American) model of Comparative Literature.”Footnote ⁷ As Moretti writes, it is only by adopting a more-than-human perspective that something like a world literary system comes into view: “you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object [with] ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level.”Footnote ⁸ For Moretti, it is not the literary texts that are weightless, but the methodology instead. “Distant reading” lifts us away from the heavy proximity of the page by swapping out, in Moretti’s words, the “infinitely rich” and dense “reality” of the text for the “abstract poverty” of concepts: from the metaphoric “height” afforded by distant reading we see “less,” which Moretti takes to be “more”, and which others have taken to be something else entirely.Footnote ⁹ For my part, I worry that such an extraterrestrial methodology loses sight of the human who must, in the end, be applying it: as Hannah Arendt might remark, “The human brain which supposedly does our thinking is as terrestrial, earthbound, as any other part of the human body.”Footnote ¹⁰

The most sustained effort to reintegrate readings of single literary texts back into materialist models of world literature has been undertaken by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), whose model of “world-literature” as a “combined and uneven” system is formulated explicitly against Damrosch’s metaphoric weightlessness, which they read as “self-consciously indifferent to historicity.”Footnote ¹¹ Although their effort is welcome, the result is an extremely heavy methodology that restrains and restricts those literary texts taken into its orbit. Profoundly suspicious of close reading—even Apter’s “close reading with a worldview”—for its tendency to abstract literature from its “social determinants,” the WReC insist that individual texts might only “mediate” or “register” the modern world-system, a process that then becomes somewhat tautologically central to world-literature’s definition.Footnote ¹² In more recent applications, this riskily prescriptive methodology has been rearticulated in positively confrontational terms:

It is my argument in this article that a close reading of Washington Black might break open the claustrophobic triad assumed in this question: Are “politicised” literary critics really cornered by a universalising liberal humanism, distant “datafied analysis,” or the reduction of texts to little more than “critiques” or “inflections”?Footnote ¹⁴ To answer this question in purely theoretical terms would be to efface this article’s argument: my aim is instead to show the critical potential of attentive reading as a practice that unsettles the weight of world literature and its attendant sociopolitical discourses.Footnote ¹⁵ By listening to the text, and following up on its intertexts, I will show how Washington Black suggests a radically terrestrial humanism that explicitly opposes the overbearing methodologies of world literary studies. As I see it, terrestrial humanism is not a self-contradictory liberal dead end, but a potentially generative point of departure.

I want to conclude this section by noting that it is not my intention to instrumentalize Washington Black for larger theoretical gains, nor to foreclose other readings of the novel. Even a brief note on Edugyan’s now long-held interests—which include themes of displacement and belonging—indicates why her work might have something to say to world literature’s long-running concerns. Born in Canada to Ghanaian parents, Edugyan’s writing builds on what David Chariandy describes as second-generation Black Canadian literature’s dual interest in, on the one hand, “fictions of belonging,” and on the other, “the fiction of belonging.”Footnote ¹⁶ Edugyan frequently uses revealing spatial metaphors to describe her own work, nowhere more so than in her Henry Kreisel Lecture, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home (2014), delivered after the international success of her second novel, Half Blood Blues (2011). There, she speaks of “the special territory of fiction,” conceiving of home “both as a place and an idea,” and asserting her belief “in the power of stories to affect and alter the realities of our world.”Footnote ¹⁷ This emphasis on the redemptive practices of storytelling has led some to read an implicit cosmopolitanism in her work, though as Isabel Carrera-Suárez responds, when Edugyan’s “recognised historical awareness” is accounted for, accusations of a de-historicized or overly liberal cosmopolitanism carry very little weight.Footnote ¹⁸ As I will now show, physical territories and human bodies are central to her most recent novel, Washington Black, and it is the weight of these themes—along with the images she uses to bring them to life—that runs a cosmopolitan politics aground and makes space for a terrestrial humanism instead.

Washington Black’s Contrapuntal Geographies

Set mostly between 1830 and 1836, Washington Black tells the life story of its eponymous hero, Washington Black, a young Black boy who has escaped his enslavement on a Barbadian plantation with the help of a white abolitionist, Christopher Wilde, also known as Titch.Footnote ¹⁹ Titch is an Enlightenment man, committed to scientific rationalism, and obsessed with “measurements, equations, [and] outcomes” (103); his father is James Wilde, Royal Fellow of the Royal Society, a figure variously celebrated and criticized for his unforgivingly “mechanical view of the world” (72). Titch befriends Washington after taking him on as an apprentice from his violent brother, Erasmus Wilde, who is also the master of Faith Plantation, the source of the Wilde family’s fortune. In the two Wilde brothers—the one a scientist and, it transpires later, abolitionist (Titch), the other a ruthless plantation owner and slave driver (Erasmus)—Edugyan sets up slavery as pivotal to, rather than an anomalous break with, her narrative of global modernity.Footnote ²⁰

In his remarkable study, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011), Simon Gikandi shows how slavery was not anachronistic to a culture of European modernity “premised on the supremacy of [an individual] self functioning within a social sphere defined by human values,” but fundamentally constitutive of it.Footnote ²¹ Gikandi exposes the cultural contortions required to explain a transoceanic system of dehumanization at a time when the merits of the “human” were being newly proclaimed, reaching the conclusion that slavery, which constructed Europe materially, was folded into its social, cultural, and symbolic economies as well. Following Gikandi, Washington Black not only explores slavery “in its powerful and painful materiality,” but in a “figural or semiotic sense, as the sign of the social and moral boundaries that made modern culture possible,” as well.Footnote ²²

Written in the first person, the novel covers the first eighteen years of Washington’s life, focusing especially on his adolescence and describing the fraught process of his socialization as a young Black man in a globalizing world built upon rather than around him. With the exception of two important short chapters detailing the violence of plantation life, the novel begins with the beginning of Washington’s life—“I was born in the year 1818 on that sun-scorched estate in Barbados. So I was told” (13)—and concludes with his coterminous arrival into adulthood and a state of (relatively) secure freedom. Edugyan thus repeats the shape of many “I was born a slave” narratives that circulated during the historical moment in which her novel is set.Footnote ²³ Throughout, the text presents itself as such a document, reproducing the genre so convincingly that it almost reads as a “found” and autobiographical, rather than contemporary and fictional, narrative.

However, with its multiple books and the epic scope of its plot, not to mention its sustained thematic interest in artistic realism and human freedom, Edugyan’s novel also comes close to the related genres of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel and its close cousin, the bildungsroman. It begins, after the former, with the “primal scene” of the plantation, a “spectacle of suffering that solicits the spectator’s sympathy”; and it imitates the latter by tracking “the emergence of the sovereign self from given relations based on status, custom, or tradition and its right to make its own destiny, albeit within a framework of incorporation into an emerging capitalist world order.”Footnote ²⁴ The novel’s opening account of the plantation’s visceral violence recalls the affective opening of the sentimental novel, while our narrator’s bildungsroman—which is also the story of his search for freedom from slavery and prejudice—is always already displaced by the initial account of dehumanizing violence. The effect is to unsettle the bildungsroman’s prescriptive humanism by pointing to what Debjani Ganguly calls “the surplus of humanness” contained within novelistic worlds.Footnote ²⁵ Against the “interiorisation of contradiction” that, as Moretti reminds us, is both revealed and foreclosed by the bildungsroman, Washington’s visibility as a Black man and an escaped slave repeatedly forces the genre’s contradictions to the surface.Footnote ²⁶ His “socialization” as a “free man” is only ever partial and precarious, contingent on the boundaries that still vigorously marshal racial difference, regardless of abolition. However, the novel does not concede these racialized limits of the “human,” reaching instead for the humanness that spills over from the straitjacket of “human rights inc.” in order to recuperate a different kind of humanism instead.Footnote ²⁷

Washington Black’s troubling of the bildungsroman occurs not only structurally, but also geographically, wherein its different spaces are contrapuntally unsettled in the manner of Gikandi’s own reevaluation of Enlightenment modernity.Footnote ²⁸ The novel’s plot follows Washington’s “voyage in,” so to speak, as he skirts geographically around the edges of the “Black Atlantic.”Footnote ²⁹ His journey begins in Barbados before moving to Virginia in the United States, then on to Nova Scotia in eastern Canada, and finally (with the exception of a last trip to the Moroccan desert), to England and the heart of the empire. It is in Nova Scotia, midway through the plot, that Titch, having enabled Washington’s escape from the plantation, suddenly disappears into the “obliterating whiteness” of an Arctic storm—a moment written by Edugyan as a conspicuous “white void” at the center of the novel (216–17).Footnote ³⁰ Titch’s disappearance leaves Washington feeling “as though the world had vanished” (216), and for the remainder of the novel Washington becomes obsessed with knowing what became of him. The novel is therefore structured as a “’double-flight’ narrative,” a geographic motion of escape and return that is typical of nineteenth-century colonial and adventure writing.Footnote ³¹ The first half of the plot is propelled forward (or upward) by Washington’s escape, or “flight,” from a condition of chattel slavery; the second half documents his search for Titch, which results in his eventual return to a grounded location on the African continent that is geographically proximate to his ancestral home.

This narrative and geographic motion is epitomized in the two locations that (almost) bookend the novel. We begin in the plantation, owned and run by Erasmus Wilde, while near to the novel’s end, Washington—now desperately in search of the lost Titch—visits the Wilde’s childhood home, or that other “great estate”: the English country house. Within the novel, these two spaces are geographically as far apart as it is possible to be: first, they are the most relatively distant locations included in the novel’s diegetic world; and second, they constitute two ends of an economic process, one the site of extracted labor and capital, the other of its eventual concretization. Despite this, Edugyan plays with gothic tropes—which Gikandi argues were an expression of the cultural traffic between plantation and estateFootnote ³²—to reveal how the two locations are contrapuntally folded together:

The estate is written here as an aftermath of the novel’s opening scenes, which detail the horrific punishments metered out by Erasmus Wilde, the master of Faith Plantation. In those early pages (the novel’s “primal scene”), Erasmus gruesomely decapitates the bodies of enslaved people who have taken their own lives, with the aim of discouraging further suicides: “No man can be reborn without his own head,” he threatens, displaying the dismembered body parts around the plantation on spikes (12). Beginning with this attempt to extend white ownership of Black bodies into the afterlife, the novel centers the plantation as a necropolitical heart of darkness engaged in the production of “absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death”: it is both a dehumanized and dehumanizing space.Footnote ³³ Meanwhile, at the end of the novel, with the debris of “broken axles” (signifying lost motion and movement) resembling human remains (“burnt bones”), Edugyan writes the estate into a narrative continuum that begins with the plantation.Footnote ³⁴ It is as though the two spaces are one and the same, separated not geographically, but temporally: we know that Washington has traveled thousands of miles from the Barbadian plantation, but Edugyan describes the scene not as one of arrival, but return.

The effect is to reveal the visceral human consequences that are folded into imperialism’s contrapuntal territories. The English estate is reconstructed by Edugyan in the terms of Katherine McKittrick’s “demonic grounds”: “places and spaces of blackness and black femininity” that “uncover otherwise concealed or expendable human geographies.”Footnote ³⁵ Drawing on influences shared with Edugyan (Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Dionne Brand, among others), McKittrick intends her concept not simply to identify spatial categories of difference or absence, but “to outline the ways in which this place”—and she repeats an earthly insistence on physical ground throughout her study—“is an unfinished and therefore transformative human geography story.”Footnote ³⁶ Although Washington is a young man, not himself subject to the doubled violence wielded against women of color, Washington Black’s narrative pushes for the territorial possibilities of “demonic grounds” as simultaneously contrapuntal and reparative geographic spaces.Footnote ³⁷ It is this combined movement that suggests a terrestrial humanism: a humanism rooted in and against, rather than built upon, the historical violence of slavery’s contrapuntal geographies.Footnote ³⁸

Edugyan’s novel therefore pursues Aimé Césaire’s well-known critique of Europe’s “pseudo-humanism” and its dependency on the production of spaces of death.Footnote ³⁹ In the fraught central relationship between Washington and Titch, in particular, Edugyan allegorizes the reliance of Enlightenment-era organizations such as the Royal Society—responsible for many late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century imperialist maneuvers made in the name of scientific expeditionsFootnote ⁴⁰—on the transatlantic connections and stockpiles of wealth accumulated from the Caribbean plantation economy, with the aim of embodying their human cost. Indeed, Edugyan breathes frightening biopolitical volume into this allegory through metaphors of (im)mobility, burden, and weight: it is, after all, and as we shall now see, Washington’s weight, his physical body mass, that makes Titch’s scientific innovations possible—Washington is, quite literally, “human cargo.”Footnote ⁴¹ As Césaire comments, extending this evocative metaphor: with every brutal act of colonial violence, so-called “civilisation acquires another dead weight.”Footnote ⁴²

The Weight of the World

Metaphoric couplets of heaviness and lightness, flight and flightlessness, and mobility and immobility dance together throughout Washington Black, clustering especially around the novel’s centrally conjoined question of Washington’s humanity and freedom. They are expressed most explicitly in Titch’s hot air balloon, “the Cloud-cutter,” “a fantastical boat, with two fronts, and oars hanging out,” suspended beneath “an enormous smooth ball [caught] in a kind of webbing” (45). Illustrated on the book’s cover, this is the bizarre contraption that Titch and Washington use to escape from the plantation at the end of the novel’s first book (there are four parts in total). “Your real task,” says Titch to Washington, “will be to assist in my scientific endeavours,” which include in particular his experiments with “lighter-than-air craft,” and he chooses Washington as his assistant because he is “precisely the size that I need … The weight, you see, that is the key to the Cloud-cutter” (36).

In his book, Living Cargo (2016), Steven Blevins explores a recent historiographic turn to the slave trade and slavery in contemporary Black British literature, art, and performance. Blevins notes the emphasis placed by this work on Black life as “human bio-cargo,” a concept-metaphor that Blevins appropriates from the dehumanizing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expression “human cargo.”Footnote ⁴³ The concept’s historicized origins are designed to work against the theoretical tendency to abstract away from the real human bodies and lives eradicated by material and structural processes. Although acknowledging his indebtedness to postcolonial studies and recommitting himself to materialist critique, the concept of “human bio-cargo” allows Blevins to reconsider and thus to remember what the materials of materialism have been. The result is an emphasis on an affective materialism that captures “the embodied experience of ‘feeling historical’ through aesthetic and synaesthetic sensation” (a technique clearly used by Edugyan herself to construe Washington Black as an historical document).Footnote ⁴⁴ Blevins’s point is not to dematerialize the violence of global capitalism or plantation slavery, but rather to help “us think about matters of ethical responsibility often abandoned in older Marxist analysis” and to confront “the challenges of comprehending the violent consequences of global capital dispersed across transnational space.”Footnote ⁴⁵

This endeavor steps cautiously toward a critically humanist project that interrogates the ways in which “a society comes to regard a life as human,” as well as “the consequences … for both those forms of life brought within this conceptual enclosure and those forms of life relegated to some conceptual outside.”Footnote ⁴⁶ What Blevins identifies as the coterminous turn to histories of slavery and an affective materialism in Black British literature is, I think, expressive of the same “uncanny homologies” that Ganguly identifies “between the conditions that gave rise to the novel in eighteenth-century England and those that have produced the contemporary world novel.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Although Goethe is now almost ubiquitously credited with the coinage of “world literature” (with Marx and Engels coming in a close second), Ganguly helpfully points to a third early use of the term: it was at the inaugural World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 that Henry B. Stanton, then president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, called for the assistance of “the enlightened sentiments of the civilised world,” naming specifically one “influence which we desire to bring to bear for this purpose [as] the literature of the world.”Footnote ⁴⁸ There are therefore homological similarities, quite intentionally summoned by Edugyan, between Washington Black as a historiographic project and the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century abolitionist narratives that were similarly designed to make readers “see and hence feel the horrific violence of the transatlantic slave trade.”Footnote ⁴⁹ As Blevins might argue, they both share the aim of reinserting the embodied and affective experience of the “human” into the otherwise abstracted processes of capital accumulation and biopolitical control.Footnote ⁵⁰

Importantly, these themes of embodiment and their affective weight not only frame the generic contours of Washington Black, but are also woven into its diegetic world: after all, Titch literally uses Washington’s physical weight for his scientific ends. Edugyan thus presents a kind of contrapuntal allegory in which the embodied relationships between individual human characters echo the novel’s larger contrapuntal geo-temporalities. With Ganguly’s emphasis on “the contemporary world novel” in mind, I will now track this interest in physical and metaphoric weight as it evolves through Washington Black’s first book, for so doing reveals that it is clustered with two other related keywords: world, yes, but also earth. The relationship between these words is important for the rest of the novel and, as I will show, can help us to understand the full weight of Edugyan’s grounded, humanist work.

In the novel’s second chapter, Big Kit, Washington’s enslaved mother, is described in her heavy labor as “tearing up the wretched earth” (7), whereas two pages later she explains freedom from slavery to her son as “nothing in this world” (9). Reflecting on the successful trips he has already made in “the Cloud-cutter,” Titch describes being “ten, twenty thousand feet” up in the air as “truly spectacular. The world from up there is, well—it is God’s earth, man” (20). Titch initially explains his “aeronautical” experiments to Washington, who “must be wondering what on earth” he has been called into help Titch with, by showing him the moon through a telescope, “another world” hanging weightless in the sky (33–34). Climbing to the top of Corvus Peak, the fictional mountain overlooking the plantation, Washington remarks on “how different the world did look from that height,” before noting the boundaries of the plantation marked into the “earth” below (59).Footnote ⁵¹ When Titch reveals to Washington his real identity as an undercover abolitionist gathering evidence from Faith, he describes slavery as “a moral stain,” a heavy weight “that will keep white men from their heaven” (105). And finally, when Titch and Washington escape from the plantation at the end of this first book by flying away in the Cloud-cutter, they stare from their airborne perspective “out onto the boundlessness of the world” (131).

In Edugyan’s symbolic economy, earth and world are set up as oppositional—though not entirely separate—terrains. That first coupling of “earth” with “wretched” should alert us to the influence of Frantz Fanon on the novel, a closer analysis of which I will turn to in the next section of this article. Edugyan connects earth to material labor and to the violence of the plantation economy; the earth is the ground, and the relationship of Edugyan’s characters—both Black and white—to that ground is mediated by both the literal weight of their bodies and the “lightness” of their skin color. Weight is therefore a racialized category in Washington Black, with lightness functioning doubly to signify a synonymy between skin pigmentation and the weightless mobility of freedom. Edugyan’s “worlds,” meanwhile, are less material and more abstract, functioning a little like Moretti’s “abstract” concepts to allow Titch a “God’s eye” view of the earth. For those stuck on the ground, worlds are potentially freeing, though it is an idea of freedom that can be precisely historicized to the fictional world of the novel itself:

For Immanuel Kant, writing in the first paragraph of his much-discussed 1784 essay, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” Enlightenment freedom is not so much the freedom to move physically through the world, which would be better described as the freedom to move over or across the surface of the earth: as Kelly Oliver comments, in her study Earth and World (2015), for Kant, “earth” refers precisely to the “limited surface of the earth” and is thus implicated in property rights, territorial wars, and at best, the notion of “earth as a common possession.”Footnote ⁵³ Against earthliness, Kantian freedom is the freedom to make worlds; unlike earth, the “world” is an essentially temporal rather than spatial concept.Footnote ⁵⁴ Crucially, it is the ability to engage freely in such processes of world-making that constituted, in Enlightenment terms, “the production of a unique and self-reflective human subject”: “humanity” and “freedom” here become tautological concepts, the one implying and necessitating the other.Footnote ⁵⁵

This is the epistemological crucible in which an enduring model of European humanism was forged, and which, from the outset, did not simply ignore its contradictory dependence on transatlantic slavery, but wove that contradiction into its DNA: Black exclusion marked the limit of the Kantian human, and therefore made humanism possible. As Gikandi argues, “alterity … assumed a structural function: the designator of what enabled Europe, or whatever geographical area took that name, to assume a position of cultural superiority and supremacy.”Footnote ⁵⁶ To make his point, Gikandi cites an especially unpleasant excerpt from Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime:

Kant’s racism is riddled with contradiction: even within the already self-contradictory terms of his own discourse, Kant’s initial assertion—“not a single one”—quickly runs up against his own qualification—“some continually rise aloft” and “earn respect in the world.” Especially relevant to Washington Black are Kant’s vertical metaphors: in order to be “in the world” one must “arise above the trifling,” or “rise aloft from the lowest rabble”—lift away, that is, from the earth’s solid, material ground. Kant’s philosophy operates on a racialized metaphor of weight and burden as a mediating category between the terrestrial surface of the earth and a higher, celestial world. Moreover, implicit within this metaphor is a veiled promise that this weight can be “lightened” by the production of something “great in art or science”—a portrait, perhaps, or indeed, a prize-winning historical novel.

In Washington Black, Edugyan uses the central trope of air flight to concretize these metaphysical concepts into the material physics of her novel’s diegetic world. In the architecture of Kant’s thought, worlds are made only when the earth as a grounded space of physical labor is sufficiently distant; hence Titch’s obsession with elevation. Titch is, after all, the son of a Royal Society fellow, engaged in scientific “experiments” that might enable airborne flight (140), and recognition from his father and from the Society—that is, his recognition as a “Man”—is contingent on the success of these experiments. Yet as an abolitionist, he is convinced that by attaining height—that is, by becoming lighter—he can enable Washington’s freedom, too, an act that will in turn confirm his own “humanity.” Titch’s words again: “Negroes are God’s creatures also, with all due rights and freedoms. Slavery is a moral stain against us. If anything will keep white men from their heaven, it is this” (105). Finally, these metaphysics solidify into the “double-flight” structure of the novel itself: with Titch’s obsessive pursuit of human flight (which structures the first half of the novel) and Washington’s subsequent and similarly obsessive pursuit of Titch (which structures its second half), the novel’s narrative follows a philosophically significant trajectory of escape and return—or perhaps more accurately, ascent and descent—with a “white void” at its central peak.

Despite (or because of) his abolitionist commitments, both Titch’s humanism and—until the novel’s final pages—Washington’s humanity remain conditioned by the ontological Kantian splitting of world from earth. Even after they have escaped the plantation, Titch justifies Washington’s presence to other white characters by referencing his skill as an artist:

Washington buys into this idea that his humanity—tautologically synonymous with freedom—might be attained through artistic and scientific achievement, and the plot goes some way to confirming his assumption.Footnote ⁵⁸ When he first sees Titch drawing the Cloud-cutter, Washington stares “at the paper in amazement,” convinced “that I wanted—desperately wanted—to do it too: I wanted to create a world with my hands” (45); later, he reflects that, at “the easel, I was a man in full, his hours his own, his preoccupations his own” (240). It is because of his sketching that he meets Tanna Goff, the woman who will eventually become his lover (244–45), and his trip to England (and thus his eventual freedom) is secured because Mr. Goff, Tanna’s father, employs Washington to provide sketches for his new book (280).Footnote ⁵⁹

In Washington Black, the act of drawing therefore becomes more than a way to make mere representations; it is also a way to make worlds. Throughout the novel, Washington’s drawings seem “to lift from the page” (45), to become “less a drawing than a haunting, a vision of the specimen’s afterlife, set down in a ghostly lustre of ink” (209). Thus equating artistic production with freedom from slavery, the novel also insists on these world-making endeavors as fundamentally human and humanist projects. For although Washington draws numerous “scientific specimens,” he harbors a secretive preference for drawing people’s portraits, particularly—and significantly—from memory. He draws portraits of several other characters throughout the novel (81, 148), and in his climactic encounter with Titch at the end of the book, he entreaties Titch to focus on making representations of “human faces” rather “than astral features” (401)—a scene to which I will return below.

In this thematic preoccupation of drawing-humans-as-world-making, Edugyan appropriates Kantian metaphysics to align the surface of the earth with the material surface of her page. Her implied suggestion is that her own novel is itself a world-making project with both terrestrial and humanist ends. Washington Black is, after all, Edugyan’s own historical “portrait” of Washington, one that sets “down in a ghostly lustre of ink” the human life-worlds of the Black Atlantic. Against the weight of the methodologies devised to decide what counts as world literature (or world-literature), Washington’s physical weight instead encodes a meta-textual dimension: the burden assumed by Edugyan herself, as she attempts to re-create the world of an escaped slave from collective memory and to rewrite it as history.Footnote ⁶⁰ Washington Black carries the Black artist’s “burden of representation,” as Kobena Mercer has influentially described it: the weight of “the role of making present what had been rendered absent in the official version of modern art history” and to which we might add literary and global histories as well.Footnote ⁶¹

Washington Black’s White Masks

If Washington Black’s humanism so far appears to conform uncritically to the architecture of Enlightenment thought, that is because we have not yet accounted for the other bodily price that, beyond the utility of his physical mass and his skills as an artist, Washington pays for aiding Titch in his “aeronautical” experiments. The first time they attempt to launch the Cloud-cutter from the summit of Corvus Peak, Titch and Washington ascend the mountain accompanied by Titch’s cousin, Philip. A member of the English aristocracy from Hampshire, Philip is a man with “an unending hunger,” his weighty “bulk” and “brooding presence” frequently remarked upon (82). Disengaged from their experiment, Philip demands Washington fetch him “the sandwiches” at the very same moment that Titch turns on the canisters of “hydrogen gas” to inflate the Cloud-cutter’s balloon (85). Still a slave, Washington is forced to oblige, lunging forward within range of the Cloud-cutter to grab the satchel containing their picnic just as the canister explodes. He is blasted off his feet, “lifted and thrown back”—momentarily weightless—“in the shuddering milk-white flash of light, my head striking the ground” (85).

The nature of Washington’s wound alerts us to another of the novel’s sustained interests—not weight, but images of human faces (though the two are closely related).Footnote ⁶² Washington awakes to “a weight on my neck, a strange blunt numbness,” and when Titch eventually fetches him a mirror, he sees “a grotesque creature [peering] back at me”:

There is so much to be said about this description that I can only draw out some general points here: the intimation of the Lacanian mirror-stage, conjoined to the reduction of Washington’s face to “meat,” makes this a moment of self-canceling self-recognition, in which Washington sees himself as “human cargo”; the description of the “lunar” pupil invokes a “world” that has been erased, the vantage-point of a “heightened” perspective, now lost; there is the comparison with the “duppy,” a spirit in Caribbean folklore with avowedly anticolonial designs; and finally, there is the evocative similarity of the overall description with the “loathsome yet appalling hideousness” of the face of Frankenstein’s monster (Washington will be described as a “monster” on several occasions throughout the rest of the novel).Footnote ⁶³ Suffice it to say that, taken together, these multiple references construct the deformed face as an image of a broken humanist project, a symbolically loaded “wrecked visage” that Washington is “forced to carry like an unwanted warning” (244)—a burden—for the rest of his life.

Importantly, it is not only Washington’s face that is deformed in this novel: Titch has “a fine white scar cutting up from either corner of his mouth and across his cheeks to his ears” (40), “caused in boyhood” by “a very thick wire, of tempered iron … pressed into [his] mouth and yanked back” (172). In a pivotal moment for the novel’s plot, the overweight Philip commits suicide in front of Washington (thus implicating him in Philip’s death and forcing him to flee the plantation with Titch). Significantly, Philip begins by apologizing for causing the wound to Washington’s face, before then shooting himself through the mouth. Edugyan’s description of this episode echoes Washington’s earlier trauma: Philip’s profile, “black and blunt against the failing sun,” is suddenly replaced with a “white … explosion” and a “reek of fresh meat”; remnants of his “teeth, or pieces of bone, [and] other parts of his shattered face” spray over Washington, leaving “the flesh of his face … folded viciously away from the skull, like leather freshly cut” (118–21). Third and finally, in an eventual confrontation with a slave hunter, Willard, who tracks Washington for much of the novel, Edugyan’s protagonist defends himself by “driving the tip” of an “ivory-handled kitchen knife” deep into the slave hunter’s eye (299–300).Footnote ⁶⁴

In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler reads the Levinasian face as “not precisely or exclusively a human face,” but more specifically a face that communicates “what is human, what is precarious, what is injurable.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Edugyan’s conspicuous preoccupation with injured faces is closely related to the novel’s larger thematic interest in the limitations of Enlightenment humanism, wherein Black people are dehumanized and reduced to “cargo” or “ballast,” measured only in their physical weight. However, these faces alert us more particularly to the redemptive thread of Edugyan’s novel, signaling her effort to search out and reconceive a new kind of humanism that circumvents the vertically constrained limitations of Kant’s exclusionary model. As Butler continues in her later work on precarious life, “the human” is constituted through conditions or “frames” of “recognizability”; the conditions, that is, that make a person’s life grievable, and thus recognizable as human.Footnote ⁶⁶ Written in the style of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century slave narratives, Edugyan’s novel imitates a genre designed historically to create those conditions and to make the humanity of enslaved people recognizable to white readers. But in addition to this historical imitation, the novel is also doing similar recuperative work in its own present, asking its contemporary readers to rethink the “frames” of recognizability through which they view histories of slavery and the slave trade.

This is how Washington Black, even as it struggles with Enlightenment humanism, is—like key figures in mid-twentieth-century decolonizing movements—reluctant to let go of the concept entirely, instead reworking it toward anticolonial ends. The prevalence of cracked and scarred faces, especially among the white men of Edugyan’s novel, suggests they are little more than masks, and as I have noted, this is not the only reference to Fanon: Washington’s mother, Big Kit, works the “wretched earth,” and the “hothouse” in which they both live before Washington escapes bears “Latin script upon it: Not Unmindful of the Sick and Wretched” (323). The need for “face to face” encounters of various kinds is scattered throughout Fanon’s fiery prose, and in answer to the question “Why write this book?,” Fanon writes the following in Black Skin, White Masks:

With this analysis, Fanon reconstructs a Kantian model of Enlightenment humanism (which it is his purpose to dismantle) around a vertical metaphor of height, wherein humanity, or the “human level,” is attained by moving upward from a terrestrial to celestial plane.Footnote ⁶⁸ Fanon recognizes that this territorial distribution of “humanity” descends vertically from the heavens, and that it is racialized according to the relative burden of earthly slave labor and the lightness of white supremacy.Footnote ⁶⁹ Fanon’s question—“How do we extricate ourselves?”—drives the plot of Washington Black forward. For Fanon, this is achieved by a reorientation “toward a new humanism,” one that is redefined not as some celestial or idealist plane reached through “aeronautical methodologies,” but as earthly and terrestrial, grounded to a specific historical and political geography. As he writes:

In his argument for “postcolonial literature as world literature,” Pheng Cheah reads Fanon’s philosophy of “revolutionary decolonization” as a process of reworlding: “an opening of the existing world to colonised peoples by the inauguration of a new temporality.”Footnote ⁷¹ Cheah’s welcome deviation from existing models of world literature is predicated on precisely this understanding of “world” as a temporal rather than spatial concept. In his emphasis on temporality, however, Cheah risks losing sight of the still very terrestrial reference points of Fanon’s model, which are crucially what differentiate it from Kant’s. Kantian worlds, as we have seen, are situated on unearthly, idealist planes. By contrast, Fanon’s world-making project is “temporal,” but it is also geographically “rooted” in “my country” and “my existence,” opposed explicitly against some abstract, more-than-earthly “cosmos”; for Fanon, if decolonial world-making is to be more than a metaphoric project, it must be fundamentally territorial and terrestrial as well.Footnote ⁷²

In addition, and though engaging with philosophers from Heidegger to Arendt, humanism is rarely on Cheah’s agenda. Fanon’s temporality, by contrast, is explicitly couched in a human-centered scale and perspective, even if his “humanism” is positioned radically against the exclusionary limits of its European namesake. For Kant, new temporal worlds are split away from the spatial surface of the earth; for Fanon, it is the earth that is worldly. For Kant, man must make worlds, and their humanity, by creating something “great in art or science”; for Fanon, he is already:

The worldly cosmos at the summit of Kantian metaphysics is, for Fanon, infused into the Black body itself, “world” and “earth” coming together through the figure of the human to create an earthly world, or a terrestrial humanism.

Apter develops the phrase “terrestrial humanism” through a reading of the “earthly and worldly valences” of Edward Said’s later writings. In particular, she shows how Said’s humanism was forged through the hotly contested territorial histories of Palestine/Israel: as Said reflects in an influential 1979 article, which Apter cites in support of her argument, he writes from the territorial “standpoint”—Said uses Fanon’s word—of the victims of Zionism.Footnote ⁷⁴ I take the territorial underpinnings of Said’s humanism to be productively comparable to Fanon’s: where Said’s humanism, for Apter, is rooted in his notion of a “worldly world,” Fanon’s is rooted in an earthly world.Footnote ⁷⁵

This is not the universalizing liberal humanism that the WReC imply when they worry about Apter’s “close reading with a worldview.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Rather, Said’s humanism, like Fanon’s, was “earthly” and “world-making,” open “to ‘concrete ways of being human’ that are not foretold in the conventional humanist programme.”Footnote ⁷⁷ For Said, the critique of humanism enables humanism’s earthly beginning rather than bringing it to a deadening end. Here, critique itself is a productive rather than a prescriptive project, a politicized mode of attentive close reading that tries to open up and generate contrapuntal worlds within and from texts rather than measuring what they do or do not say against a preexisting—and necessarily abstract—system or checklist.Footnote ⁷⁸ Washington Black may indeed “critique or inflect capitalism’s development,” but as Blevins might observe, it also weighs the human cost of those processes and seeks to run their riskily abstract conceptualizations aground. In this way, the novel constructs a critique of ways of reading that are either limited in their analysis by their self-proclaimed anti-humanism or overly abstracted into the masked “pseudo-humanism” of the liberal Enlightenment tradition. With this work in place, it reaches in its final pages for a terrestrial humanism instead.

Conclusion: Reading for a Terrestrial Humanism

I want to close this article by turning to the final chapters of Washington Black, where these ideas take on their clearest expression. What I’ve called Washington Black’s second “flight” narrative—Washington’s restless pursuit of Titch—is predicated on the former’s need for the latter’s recognition of his humanity. Washington demands this recognition when he finally catches up with Titch, who has set up camp in the Moroccan desert. Why is he in the desert? For better visibility of celestial worlds: “Above the low roof the heavens were vast, filled with bright stars” (400).Footnote ⁷⁹ Edugyan lays the metaphoric weight on thick in these closing pages: “Dozens of scientific instruments had been piled here … . It was as if a single obsessive thought had been made manifest in these tools; each steel piece seemed an idea cast aside, each glass scope a possible answer” (400–01). Somewhat manically, Titch has developed a process of image capture—something like the daguerreotype—to make exact replications of the moon on “sheets of silver-plated copper”: he is trying (and failing) to make worlds by reducing them to abstract representations. Tellingly, however, his method is not yet technologically capable of capturing the moon in sufficient detail. Instead, it is only his experiments with human faces that have so far yielded satisfactory results:

It is difficult not to read this exchange as an implicit commentary on the “trouble” with world literature. Titch’s “problem” is eerily reminiscent of Moretti’s, which they both try to resolve with “distant reading” and comparably totalizing methodologies. Yet in this quest for totality, these methodologies risk what Oliver calls “the dangerous attitude of supercilious mastery and control over both earth and world”, a proto-colonial way of looking characterized here by Edugyan as “aeronautical methodologies” and that efface the human content of her own literary text.Footnote ⁸⁰

With her words now carrying this metaphoric weight, we can intuit Edugyan’s “standpoint” in this debate. Washington reminds Titch:

Washington’s confrontational insistence on Titch’s failure to recognize his humanity pits a grounded, terrestrial humanism and earthly world against the abstracted concept world of both world literature and world-literature. At the same time, the novel preempts and critiques a reading of itself as world literature by refuting its own subjection to “distant,” overly prescriptive, or decontextualized analysis. For although the text insists on a humanism, it is far from a “liberal” or “transnational” one in which material and social determinants are effaced. Rather, it is a humanism attuned to the terrestrial histories and evolving territorial politics of this earth.

Bringing this point to conclusion, in the following chapter and the book’s climactic scene, Titch reveals to Washington that he has rebuilt the Cloud-cutter and plans “to cross the Atlantic in it. I had been thinking, actually, of Barbados as a destination” (407). The horror of this final and most ridiculous “scientific” plan is that Titch has unthinkingly plotted to repeat the Middle Passage, the journey from Northwest Africa to the Caribbean, “conveniently forgetting”—in Washington’s words—“all that had been bad and wrong about it” (407–08). Suddenly, Edugyan’s depiction of the Cloud-cutter as “a fantastical boat, with two fronts, and oars hanging out” (45), takes on its heavy historical meaning, signifying here the slaving ships that carried enslaved people across the Atlantic.Footnote ⁸¹ What is more, this image takes on a meta-critical significance too: the balloon—“an enormous smooth ball [caught] in a kind of webbing”—reads as the “world,” or the object of world literature, caught in the netting of methodologies that, in seeking to harness its potential, inadvertently weigh it down. At its most critical, world(-)literature’s totalizing and overly abstracted gaze might be read here as a secondary dehumanization of the human and historical portrait that it has been Edugyan’s burden to produce through her writing. This is why, in the novel’s conclusion, Titch and his “aeronautical methodologies” are not absolved, but abandoned: as Fanon quips in the early pages of Black Skin, White Masks, there comes “a point at which methods devour themselves.”Footnote ⁸²

In the novel’s final scene, Washington leaves Titch’s house and walks out into the desert, where he fixes his gaze on “the orange blur of the horizon” (417). Washington looks upon a world—the rising sun and the beginning of a new day—not through the perspective-altering tools of a telescope or daguerreotype, but with his naked human eye; from an earthly “standpoint,” to use Fanon’s and Said’s terrestrial word.Footnote ⁸³ “We must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light,” writes Fanon in the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth: “The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Conjuring with this image Fanon’s call for a world “whose communications must be humanised,” Washington Black characterizes the erasure of an open and attentive close reading by world literary studies as a risky repetition of the Enlightenment’s exclusionary, dehumanizing, and unearthly worlds.Footnote ⁸⁵ In its place, Edugyan suggests a terrestrial humanism built on demonic grounds: as McKittrick might observe, by insisting on “blackness and black humanity in the world,” both Washington and Fanon insinuate “a different geographic language into the landscape, a language not always predicated on ownership and conquest.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Herein, perhaps, lies a model for reading world literary texts, not as data points or prescribed critiques or as harbingers of liberal humanist values, but as terrestrial standpoints that alert us to the historical worldliness of the earth and the possibilities of the human, radically redefined.