A new book suggests now the necessity of reexamining the historical materialist project of Walter Benjamin recognizing those moments of historical contact as acts of recognizing the constructed historical object. “Historicism tends to be hermeneutic because it values cautious, rigorous, and contextualized interpretation of information; or relativist, because it rejects notions of universal, fundamental and immutable interpretations.[3]”
Here’s an example of history understood as counterfactual conjecture of “fiction” and “non-fiction”. We are very much past the Foucauldian position on biopolitics and the carceral body, even as there is both spectacle and bodily consumption as interpretive contestants for the lessons of lynchings. This is about the pre-modern barbarism inherent in American capitalism’s cannibalism events, beyond necessary survival.
Chris Tomlins is Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law, UC Berkeley; his book is In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. (Princeton University Press, 2020). He does a speculative history of Nat Turner in order to further engage the historical text of Nat Turner, allowing us to ask further questions about slave rebellions from Turner’s in 1831 to John Brown’s actions prior to the Civil War.
While not within Tomlins’s remit, a lingering semiotic question could be the fate of the purse made from his skin as a matter of commodity fetishism. Phrenological research in the 19th Century led to some deeply racist junk science, but didn’t stop the continued collection of remains as was the academic trend in 19th Century scientific study, however veering into eugenic science.
Shortly after his death, wild rumors circulated about Nat Turner's remains. The truthfulness of these rumors is very much in doubt.
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"His body was given over to the surgeons for dissection. He was skinned to supply such souvenirs as purses, his flesh made into grease, and his bones divided as trophies to be handed down as heirlooms. It is said that there still lives a Virginian who has a piece of his skin which was tanned, that another Virginian possesses one of his ears and that the skull graces the collection of a physician in the city of Norfolk.”
- John W. Cromwell, “The Aftermath of Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” 1920
- The Norfolk Herald, November 14, 1831
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"For a rumor which arose after the execution, that he was compelled to sell his body in advance, for purposes of dissection, in exchange for food... Nat Turner would hardly have gone, through the formality of selling his body for food to those who claimed its control at any rate."
- Atlantic Monthly, August, 1861
www.natturnerproject.org/…
“This purse...was unique in that it was divided into sections of different colored skin, one of which came from a black person...The purse had been passed down through the male heirs in his family...”
In 2017, Daina Berry published the book The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. In The Price for their Pound of Flesh, Berry studies the economic history of slavery in the United States, examining how a price was assigned to the bodies of enslaved people in America from before they were born until after they died.[5] Berry proposes four types of value that an enslaved person could hold: their assessed value, as determined by others for the purposes of accounting and sale; their market value, which was a function of local demand; their soul value, derived from inherent spiritual self-worth and reinforced by familial and communal connections; and their ghost value, evaluated by body brokers who engaged in the sale of human cadavers.[6] Through this categorisation scheme, Berry is able to produce an economic history which is not completely centered around the market. Rather, by including the inherent self-value that many enslaved people held through the idea of soul value, Berry also produces an intellectual history of the thoughts, emotions, and ideas of enslaved people when considering their own value.[7][8] Berry's focus on the factors that produced assigned value, as well as the value of unborn slaves, also makes a contribution to the historical literature on the violent role of gender and reproduction in the systems of American slavery.[8]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Skittles and Iced tea.
Local physicians took possession of Turner’s skull after his execution, and it was most likely studied at medical schools in Virginia, and as far north as Ohio and perhaps Indiana.
In 2002, Mr. Hatcher, the former mayor, who had been attempting to found a civil rights museum, received the skull from activists who had gotten it from a family of physicians who had owned it for three generations. Filmmakers who had made a documentary about Nat Turner later connected him to Shanna Batten Aguirre and Shelly Lucas Wood, Turner’s descendants.
We will never know all of the deceased who experienced such “post-mortem consumption,” as I call it. But the phenomenon continues today, even in the form of images of black death that do not involve dismemberment. What else to call the photo of Trayvon Martin’s body that George Zimmerman retweeted after shooting him? Twitter took it down, knowing it was an act of utter disrespect, but not before it had been shared many times.
Such consumption is part of American history. If I can teach a class and have one student with a relic in his family’s possession, I know there are others. Will you not come forward and admit to collecting ghostly relics of the past? I recognize that, at one point, these “trophies” served as evidence that justice had been served, but now it’s time to bring justice to those who were desecrated. Returning these body parts to descendants, or at least granting them a respectful burial, will help our nation heal from the sin of slavery and its ugly afterlife.
www.nytimes.com/...
Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other.
As a form of reification, commodity fetishism perceives economic value as something that arises from and resides within the commodity goods themselves, and not from the series of interpersonal relations that produce the commodity and evolve its value.[1][2]
Hence did Karl Marx apply the concepts of fetish and fetishism, derived from economic and ethnologic studies, to the development of the theory of commodity fetishism, wherein an economic abstraction (value) is psychologically transformed (reified) into an object, which people choose to believe has an intrinsic value, in and of itself.[18]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Trayvon Benjamin Martin (February 5, 1995 – February 26, 2012) was a 17-year-old African American from Miami Gardens, Florida, who was fatally shot in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic American. Martin had gone with his father on a visit to his father's fiancée at her townhouse at The Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford. On the evening of February 26, Martin was walking back to the fiancée's house from a nearby convenience store. Zimmerman, a member of the community watch, saw Martin and reported him to the Sanford Police as suspicious. Several minutes later, there was an altercation and Zimmerman fatally shot Martin in the chest.
en.wikipedia.org/...
Cultural reproduction and the critical realism of anatomy as elements of reception theory. Much like an autopsy being the act of seeing with one’s own eyes..
Initially, I give a potted history of it, showing that it’s mainly strange medical cases. The doctor or the surgeon who performs the autopsy keeps a sliver of the skin of the subject to record unusual cases. Then there are criminal accounts, like the famous Massachusetts highwayman James Allen, from the 19th century, whose last wish before his execution was that a copy of his autobiography bound in his own skin should be presented to his one victim who fought back as a token of his admiration.
With criminals, it was about being both a deterrent and a more symbolic punishment, to encase the outlaw with the very symbol of civilization: the book. But in the late-19th century, the practice became more associated with the idea that a human skin binding could encase great writing like the body encases a soul.
One of the most striking stories was that of the French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion, who was at a party when he complimented a passing young countess on the charm of her skin. It turned out that she was dying of a terminal illness and was a great fan of his. A few weeks later, after her death, there was a knock on his door. It was a Paris surgeon with a bundle under his arm, saying he’d been instructed to flay the “most marvelously attractive young woman,” and here was her skin, which she’d asked to be delivered to Flammarion for him to bind a copy of his latest work.
www.smithsonianmag.com/...
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Latin for "On the fabric of the human body in seven books") is a set of books on human anatomy written by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and published in 1543. It was a major advance in the history of anatomy over the long-dominant work of Galen, and presented itself as such.
The collection of books is based on his Paduan lectures, during which he deviated from common practice by dissecting a corpse to illustrate what he was discussing. Dissections had previously been performed by a barber surgeon under the direction of a doctor of medicine, who was not expected to perform manual labour. Vesalius's magnum opus presents a careful examination of the organs and the complete structure of the human body. This would not have been possible without the many advances that had been made during the Renaissance, including artistic developments in literal visual representation and the technical development of printing with refined woodcut engravings. Because of these developments and his careful, immediate involvement, Vesalius was able to produce illustrations superior to any produced previously.
[...]
During the 16th century, the dissection of human bodies was highly prohibited by the Church.[7] Therefore, in order to combat this opposition, Vesalius had to secretly take the bodies of executed criminals, a process which he explains in De Humani Corporis Fabrica. This process of stealing the dead bodies of criminals was a key way for anatomists and artists to study the human body. For example in the 1700s the case of Burke and Hare, whereby the bodies were delivered to anatomists for dissection, were murdered specifically for financial gain.[8]
en.wikipedia.org/...
current commodity forms and family resemblance
In this year’s (2016) Central St Martins degree show, Tina Gorjanc is showcasing a proposal to create handbags and other designer accessories from the skin of the celebrated couture designer Alexander McQueen, who died in 2010. Gorjanc has filed a patent for the method that would grow cell cultures from his DNA, extract skin cells, and tan the resulting remake of McQueen’s skin into leather for luxury goods.
Wow. And yet this is not the first attempt to grow celebrity flesh in the name of art. Italian artist Diemut Strebe has already regrown a living “clone” of Van Gogh’s ear with DNA obtained from a member of the Van Gogh family.
It is natural for artists to be fascinated by the human body because that’s where we live – in this fleshy machine. Yet Leonardo and Rembrandt offer imaginative, and above all humane, visions of our bodily existence. Art is drawn to the flesh but does not possess it. That’s why Damien Hirst never did pickle his granny. A shark in a tank is an image, but a human body in a tank is a crime, or should be, even if it has been grown in a lab.
I suspect Tina Gorjanc knows this. Her proposal to grow McQueen’s skin and make it into leather sounds like, you know, a joke. A joke about fashion and the macabre.
Still, she really has taken out a patent. We live on the edge of science fiction. Who knows, in 10 years’ time there may be skin art everywhere. Instead of Titian’s painting of the Flaying of Marsyas, imagine vast abstract works made from human skin. Old man Hirst will be grumping about it, saying it isn’t right. And every oligarch in Russia will be waiting to get his skin on the wall.
www.theguardian.com/...
"The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation's first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
Located in Montgomery, Alabama, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is the first monument to commemorate the over 4,000 African Americans who were lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950.
segd.org/...
Nat Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an African-American enslaved preacher who led the four-day rebellion of enslaved and free black people in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.
In 2002, a skull said to have been Turner's was given to Richard G. Hatcher, the former mayor of Gary, Indiana, for the collection of a civil rights museum he planned to build there. In 2016, Hatcher returned the skull to two of Turner's descendants. Since receiving the skull, the family has temporarily placed it with the Smithsonian Institution, where DNA testing will be done to determine whether it is the authentic remains of Nat Turner. If the test renders positive results, the family plans to bury his remains next to his descendants.[21]
Beginning in February 1831, Turner claimed certain atmospheric conditions as a sign to begin preparations for a rebellion against enslavers. On February 12, 1831, an annular solar eclipse was visible in Virginia. He believed the eclipse to be a sign that it was time to revolt. Turner envisioned this as a black man's hand reaching over the sun.[25]
Turner originally planned to begin the rebellion on July 4, Independence Day, 1831, but he had fallen ill and used the delay for additional planning with his co-conspirators.[26] An atmospheric disturbance on August 13 made the sun appear bluish-green, possibly the result of lingering atmospheric debris from an eruption of Mount St. Helens in present-day Washington state; he took it as the final signal and began the rebellion a week later, on August 21. He started with several trusted fellow enslaved individuals and ultimately gathered more than 70 enslaved and free blacks, some of whom were on horseback.[27][28] The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing enslaved people and killing many of the white people whom they encountered.[citation needed]
Muskets and firearms were too difficult to collect and would gather unwanted attention, so the rebels used knives, hatchets, axes, and blunt instruments.[29][page needed] The rebellion did not discriminate by age or sex and members killed white men, women, and children.[30] Nat Turner confessed to killing only one person, Margaret Whitehead, whom he killed with a blow from a fence post.[29]
en.wikipedia.org/...
"Forced labour," Marx wrote, "can never create general industriousness." 62 The resistance of slaves evident in all of their actions, extending at times to slave revolts, and the fear this engendered in their masters, were the primary reasons that it was prohibited to educate slaves, particularly in the South, which meant that they remained almost entirely unskilled labor.
monthlyreview.org/...
– Marxism is founded on the idea of the intelligibility of history: the meaning of history designates, in Marxism, this notion of a global, oriented and intelligible whole.
– Nuancing these themes, Merleau-Ponty deepens, in an inseparable dialectic, meaning and nonsense, referring to a core of meanings from man, and nonsense, to this (inhuman) background on which all our historic businesses. historical….
But how can we go beyond traditional oppositions and conceive, in their unity, meaning and nonsense, freedom and necessity?
– Merleau-Ponty has often remained faithful to the work of dialectical thought, conceived as a reunification of opposites, as a negation that does not exhaust itself in excluding the positive, as a thought of the contradictory.
– This Merleau-Ponty dialectic is undoubtedly less systematic and more open than those of Hegel and Marx.
Thus Merleau-Ponty brilliantly questioned the lived universe of perception and concrete existence and, on the other hand, historical and political life. He was a lucid analyst of our time and a major figure in phenomenology in Continental Europe.
www.the-philosophy.com/...
"Strange Fruit" is a song written by Abel Meeropol, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, while the poem the lyrics were drawn from was published in 1937. It protests the lynching of Black Americans, with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century, and the great majority of victims were black.[2] The song has been called "a declaration" and "the beginning of the civil rights movement".[3]
en.wikipedia.org/...