At nights, when doctors and attendants hear the zoo animals roaring and howling as they approach the asylum, they know that the patients will be agitated and that it is "going to be a bad long night."
Adameve n. an individual who refuses to ascribe to one gender or another from the very beginning.
An institution that "touches" would operate under the rubric put forth by Jean-Luc Nancy when he writes about sex: "There is no such thing as penetration, only touching." The institution without penetration would carefully and slowly determine how the surface of its intentions moved against the surface of their participants/clients/citizens' vulnerabilities. It would not override the emotional structure of a tentative and weird singular being.
A number of instances exist in which institutions combine or rise within the remains of the former. In Los Angeles, for example, the country jail includes a wing for mental patients. The asylum and the prison fuse.
West Helena is the town where future novelist in a rented room after his Uncle Silas was murdered by white men in the middle of the night. Living in West Helena in 1918 "under the threat of violence," Wright saw himself as the "victim of a thousand lynchings." Passing was not an option. He headed norh, and eventually east to Paris.
These institutional possibilities include suffrage, and protection from the police. The poll tax of 1892 effectively dispatched with the brief window of enfranchisement after the Civil War. In the summer of 1919, after black sharecroppers had gathered in a church to discuss unionization, whites murdered over a hundred black sharecroppers from Elaine and West Helena. In 1921, the Ku Klux Klan was aggressively recruiting in Phillips County as well as nationwide. In Phillips County, lynching rates were "comparatively" low, but some claim this was not so much progressive as it reflected the manner in which local blacks had adapted survival strategies in response to reported extreme police brutality.
The family retells the story for seventy more years, decades after migration from West Helena to the West Coast, because it's their creation myth. They left Helena long before the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) attempted to integrate Habib's Cafeteria, opened in 1888 by Syrian immigrant Habib Etoch, long before Robert Miller became Helena's first black mayor in the 1990s. The site of their peonage fused to the notion that to be raced is to be powerless remains static for them because they have not returned. And yet, the return might not shift any sense of whiteness as indemnity. Helena is situated in Phillips County, the poorest county in Arkansas, and over 60 percent of its inhabitants are black. In November 1963, at Habib's, the demonstrators were arrested and their leaders were charged with "inciting to riot." "Across the street, Habib ran a (whites only) private zoo, which housed deer, a pelican, wildcats, and monkeys." Whenever the latter escaped, the animal were suddenly visible to all citizens, who touched them in the process of handling them. The deer is held by black hands, this once... See Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Random House, 1999), 68.
See →.
It is actually the second.
Here the infinite instability of race tangles with a longer philosophical tension between the optical and the oracular; in other words, believing in what is self-evident to the eye versus the abstract contextualization generated in and through speech.
An object, not institution, that describes passing fluently, clearly, and carefully is Courtney Smith's Psiche Complexo (2003), a sculpture constituted of early twentieth-century Brazilian bedroom furniture. Here, the materialization of how passing is psychologically structured unfurls – the armoire, vanity table, stool with cushion, and two side table cabinets were initially crafted after European models by Brazilian furniture makers – they substitute tropical woods. Now, severed and then hinged together again, the pieces sometimes form one central body, able to hold each element, folded and collapsed within. Passing feels like this, at its best. Oswalde de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto (1928) and Smith's source furniture come into being at roughly the same time, yet their metabolization of colonization are at odds. De Andrade's ribald text, clearly a precursor to post-colonial critical theory, suggests a path where things pass through a body rather than constitute one. "I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him." Here, eating Galli Mathias translates as consuming "the nonsense of scholastic reason." It cannot become him or cling to him. De Andrade's refusal of the internalization of Western institutions – psychological, penal divine, or literary, includes the mental bulwarks of passing. He ends: "Against social reality we are complex, we are crazy, we are prostitutes and without prisons..." De Andrade cast his bets with the imaginary and he wishes for a future without institution, of our own making and our own design. Although Smith chronologically follows de Andrade, her piece embodies a rather indexical form of art making. She points backward, toward what existed, when your body was institution. The indexical versus the imaginary. The object that documents an institution versus the object (relational or otherwise) that believes it can be an institution and be liberated. Versus the object that is liberated because it abandons the institution and, last but not least, the object that believes it can liberate the institution.