The Death of Things, Part 2

This is the second part of my consideration of Sarah Wasserman’s book The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel. (Minnesota 2020). Her book offers some useful perspectives for archaeologists (but the literary and the dirty kind) and is part of my sort of random reading associated with an ill-formed new project that is simmering in the back of my head which I’ve tentative titled Recent Research in Pseudoarchaeology. 

In yesterdays post, I discussed Wasserman’s reading of Philip K. Dick and the role that objects played in producing “counterhistories.” Today, I thought I’d look at a couple of other aspects of Wasserman’s book that could be useful for archaeologists (starting with the second point since point one appeared yesterday!). I’ve already blogged about my reading of Chester Himes before, but I feel like this post expands and enriches what I’ve already said.

Second, Wasserman’s book offers a salient critique of the complicated landscapes of post-war Black urbanism which like the ephemeral pasts brought to light in the novels of Dick and Roth demonstrate the ephemeral state of past futures. In particular, Wasserman is attentive the materiality of Harlem in Himes and Ellison. Instead of seeing the objects and buildings that populate the depictions of Black Harlem as gestures toward realism designed to fulfill generic expectations, she sees both writers offering complicated critiques of the progressive ideals of urban renewal and the romanticized visions of the vibrant Black culture associated with Harlem’s past. Wasserman’s presented a particularly incisive example from Cotton Comes to Harlem. She points out that the preacher (and con-man) Deke O’Malley pitches shares for his (spurious) back to Africa scheme to assembled Black residents across the street from a proposed new housing project. Amid a scene of soul food, revival style preaching, and convivial spirits, O’Malley contrasts the promised opportunities, prosperity, and autonomy of life in Africa with cramped, expensive, and racially segregated life in the proposed housing project. The housing project is delayed and as seemingly impossible as the scam O’Malley was running to return Black people to Africa. Elsewhere Wasserman shows how the juxtaposition of past lives and the contemporary situation in Harlem never quite obscures the history of the place, while at the same time, which in many cases reveals the failures of past futures.

She might have teased this a bit further and hinted at both the failure of experience of Himes’s two protagonists, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, in WWII. Both men allude to their past in the service and use the language of military drill to attempt to bring order to riots in Harlem. They’re calls to “Straighten up!” And “Count off!” rarely worked without the more visible and dramatic discharge of their weapons. Moreover, their regular call likewise echoes the language of prison which similarly has failed in its (spurious) promise to rehabilitate the incarcerated. In fact, Himes produces a Harlem that is both firmly bounded on all sides by the limits of Johnson’s and Jones’s jurisdiction and populated by a cast of recidivists who cycle in and out of prison seemingly without reforming their ways. Thus, the regular cycle of recidivism, the failed promise of military service, and the continuous cycles of violence in carceral Harlem parallel the stalled careers of Jones and Johnson who return endlessly to their beats with only the growing number of disfiguring scars to show for it. In this context, Himes regular appeal to the comedic forms of emplotment tempers the fundamentally tragic character of the world that he produces by offering resolutions that nevertheless rarely manifest real change to the larger social, economic, or political circumstances. 

In these conditions, the ephemeral materiality of Harlem (at least in Himes’s novels) produces a back drop that is less real in terms of places and objects and more real in terms of his reading of contemporary social conditions. In such circumstances, the furtive social critique offered by Himes requires a more disruptive trajectory to escape the cycle of comedic resolution. Here William Sites’s recent reading of the urban environment of Sun Ra offer a useful point of departure. The trajectories proposed by Sun Ra trace flights of Astro Black futurism that conspicuously departs from the restrictive landscape of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Sun Ra sought to take Black people to new planets and new futures that were fortified with new pasts constructed from the intellectual and academic detritus of the present (e.g. pseudoarchaeology) and outside of the false optimism inherent in recurrent cycles of progressive critique.  

Finally, toward the end of the book Wasserman offers a useful argument for why archaeologists (and historians) should read and cite more fiction. Novels represent an archive for ephemera that often leave only faint or irregular traces in the modern and contemporary material record.

More than that, the work done by ephemeral objects in ephemera such as novels, literary magazines, and other forms of popular culture provides a fleeting glimpse into how our society treats the detritus of the present as it fades from view and takes on new meanings. Reading popular fiction with an eye toward both their place within the recent past and their ability to inform contemporary questions about how objects produce meaning across multiple relations within and outside of texts. 

It seems to me that archaeology of the contemporary world could easily become a form of archaeology as invested in the careful and critical reading of post-war literature as in approaches designed to interrogate the material remains of the recent past.