Power Relations in Black Lives

Front matter

Christa Buschendorf (ed.)

POWER RELATIONS IN BLACK LIVES

Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias

Contents

Preface | 9

Introduction: Key Concepts of Relational Sociology as Tools of Hermeneutics Christa Buschendorf | 11

Satin-Legs Smith and a Mississippi Mother: Dissections of Habitus in Gwendolyn Brooks Astrid Franke | 35

Preface

This book is the result of “communicative enthusiasm,” to borrow an expression that Pierre Bourdieu used in a rare statement of professional exuberance to characterize the cohesive interaction within his research group. Except for two guests — Dennis Biischer-Ulbrich and Timo Müller — all contributors to this volume were at some point members of a long-standing study group. Its research program has focused on the methodological question addressed in the essays collected in the current volume, namely how to make use of the concepts of relational sociology, represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, in the field of literary and cultural studies in general and in (African) American Studies in particular. The question emerged, as so often happens in our field, out of serendipitous reading — suggested, in this case, by my husband, Bernhard Buschendorf.

The “communicative enthusiasm” developed above all during the compact courses my husband and I would over many years jointly devise and teach, for instance, on “Key Concepts of Relational Thinking,” “Symbol Theories,” “Sociological Theories of Power,” or “Theories of Ideology.” Students, doctoral students, and young faculty members from the Department of Comparative Literature at Universität Duisburg-Essen and from the American Studies Department of Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt would meet at Haus Bergkranz, a university-owned house located in the picturesque Alpine village of Riezlern, Kleinwalsertal. There we would enter into very intense and, as it were, never-ending discussions, hardly interrupted even when we took a break hiking in the mountains or when in the evening we would sit at the bar — “playing one of the most extraordinary games that one can play, that of research” (Bourdieu, In Other Words 26).

In grateful memory of the best of experiences academic life has to offer, I would like to thank all the participants of the seminars and reading groups who by entering the playfield and engaging in the exciting game of intellectual work have enlivened and enriched it.

Introduction Key Concepts of Relational Sociology as Tools of Hermeneutics

More than one hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the history of slavery still looms large in the United States. The notion of a post-racial society that prospered under the nation’s first black president mistook the admittedly significant advancement embodied by a political icon for a substantial decline of discrimination against African Americans. Quite to the contrary, under the Obama presidency systemic racism returned with a vengeance, most obviously in the substantial increase of police brutality — from targeting black youth with stop-and-frisk practices to the notorious cases of the killing of unarmed black men by police officers. The idea that a black family in the White House would lead to the colorblindness of the nation may have been nourished by wishful thinking. To hold on to the illusion of colorblindness has become more difficult under the Trump presidency, as white supremacist groups increasingly feel encouraged to come to the fore. Ultimately, however, the widespread denial of a deeply ingrained racism rests on the powerful ideology of individualism that constructs the individual as essentially free and thus fully responsible for his or her fate. What on the one hand forms the core of the staunch American belief in upward mobility, known as the American Dream, on the other hand leads to the prevalent conviction that poverty, poor education, and bad housing must be mainly the responsibility of those who did not try hard enough to escape the unfavorable living conditions into which they were born. Thus, black inequality — today manifested most obviously by what Loic Wacquant has defined as the “hyperghetto” (cf. “Deadly Symbiosis”) — has frequently been blamed on African American culture rather than on structural conditions. In his discussion of the controversy between American liberals who commonly lean toward structural factors and conservatives who rather focus on aspects of culture, William Julius Wilson maintains:

It is an unavoidable fact that Americans tend to deemphasize the structural origins and social significance of poverty and welfare. In other words, the popular view is that people are poor or on welfare because of their own personal shortcomings. Perhaps this tendency is rooted in our tradition of “rugged individualism.” (Wilson 43)

It is undoubtedly for this very belief in individualistic explanations that, notwithstanding the fact that “the majority of poor people in the United States are white, [...] the public face of American poverty is Black” (Taylor 49). As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes, “ideologies do not work when they are only imposed from above. The key is widespread acceptance, even by the oppressed themselves” (25). Taylor does not address the question why the oppressed would accept an ideology that not only enhances discrimination against themselves but also contributes to the reproduction of the inequalities of the given social order. Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias, the sociologists on whose concepts the authors of this collection draw, do pose this question, and both formulate their answers on the basis of relational theories of power.

In Bourdieu’s oeuvre it is the concept of “symbolic violence” that — interrelated with the concepts of “habitus,” “field,” and “capital” — serves to explain why “the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately perpetuates itself so easily, apart from a few historical accidents, and that the most intolerable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natural” (Masculine Domination 1). As “a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims” (1), it contributes to the misrecognition of domination and thus to the reproduction of the established order.

The normalization of unequal power relations is also a concern of Elias. In his essay “Towards a Theory of Established-Outsider Relations,” a conceptualization of the field study The Established and the Outsiders he had earlier undertaken together with John L. Scotson, he explicates various mechanisms meant to ensure that the uneven balance of power between two interdependent groups remains stable so that the group with a higher power ratio (called the “established”) manages to preserve its power superiority over the group with a lower power ratio (called the “outsiders”). According to Elias, an important means of the established to maintain their dominance is the application of “mechanics of stigmatisation” (9) that in the long run lead to the outsiders’ resignation, their acceptance of their allegedly lesser human worth. The effect of what Elias defines as “group disgrace” — complementary to the self-assigned “group charisma” of the established — resembles Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and its consequences, namely naturalization: “Give a group a bad name and it is likely to live up to it.” (13) Like Bourdieu, Elias insists, then, on the longevity and rigidity of relations of domination. The “emotional barrier” that the established erect vis-d-vis outsiders, which defines closer contact with them as a taboo, “accounts for the often extreme rigidity in the attitude of established groups towards outsider groups — for the perpetuation of this taboo [...] for generation after generation, even if their social superiority, or, in other words, their power surplus diminishes” (8).

One of the examples Elias gives for the effectiveness of such an emotional barrier is the relation between the established in the United States, especially the descendants of slave-masters, and “the formerly enslaved group” (8), which causes the continuation of “a very uneven balance of power” (6) that notoriously lags behind all efforts on part of the state of providing institutional equality by legislation. It is not by accident that Elias avoids terms referring to ‘race’ or ethnicity to designate the outsiders of this figuration. “By using them,” he claims, “one singles out for attention what is peripheral to these relations (for example, differences of skin colour) and turns the eye away from what is central (for instance, differences in power ratio and the exclusion of a power-inferior group from positions with a higher power potential).” (16) Accepting Elias’s understanding of so-called

“race relations’” (16) as established-outsider relations and regarding ‘racial’ conflicts as “at the core [...] always balance-of-power struggles” (22) makes us comprehend that the assessment of the relation of groups with an uneven power balance depends on considering the long-term development of their social dynamics as well as the longevity of power imbalances. This insight will prevent us from overestimating the effect that the social rise of certain segments of the outsiders (such as the black bourgeoisie) or the rise of individuals to positions of power has on the situation of the great majority of outsiders.

It is not by coincidence, then, that both sociologists would refer to the situation of Blacks in the United States in order to exemplify the long-term effects of domination. Just as Elias used Harper Lee’s best-selling novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) — set in segregated Alabama in the 1930s — to further develop his theory of established-outsider relations and to discuss the difference between the European and the American civilizing processes (“Further Aspects of Established-Outsider Relations: The Maycomb Model”),' Bourdieu drew on a passage in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) to show the traumatic consequences that the exertion of symbolic violence has on the black family and how it shapes the habitus of African Americans (Pascalian Meditations 170; cf. Kopp in this volume, p. 229). What Bourdieu and Elias also have in common, as these examples illustrate, and what is of special interest to literary scholars, is that in their sociological analyses they quite frequently make use of literary texts.” Elias claimed that “used critically, novels can help to reconstruct a past society and its power structure for us” (The Germans 47). And Bourdieu, in one of

1 In comparison with Elias’s main work, The Civilizing Process, which traces the European development toward the formation of unified nation states with firmly established monopolies of physical force and the correlating long-term transformation of modes of behavior toward an increasing self-control, his theory of established-outsider relations is a much neglected part of his oeuvre. The more important it is to understand what Cas Wouters points out in the editorial note to his edition of The Established and the Outsiders, i.e., that both theories “complement each other,” the former focusing on “developments in the balance of controls” (external and internal), the latter concentrating on “developments in power balances” (“Note” xiii, my emphasis). Furthermore, Wouters states that from the essay “Towards a Theory” “it is obvious that Elias had the ambition of formulating a general theory of power relations” (xiv). On Elias’s sociological reading of Harper Lee’s novel, see Franke and Hirschfelder.

2 Fora record of Bourdieu’s writings on writers and literature, see Bourdieu and Wacquant 206n167; see Kuzmics for a survey and discussion of Elias’s references to fiction.

his reflections on the “translation” of the social world into the literary work, comments as follows:

The sensitive translation conceals the structure, in the very form in which it presents it, and thanks to which it succeeds in producing a belief effect (more than a reality effect). And it is probably this which means that the literary work can sometimes say more, even about the social realm, than many writings with scientific pretensions [...]. But it says it only in a mode such that it does not truly say it. (Rules of Art 32, original emphasis)?

From the point of view of the literary scholar, Stefanie Mueller suggests that “it is the relevance he grants the acting agent’s perspective from which the usefulness of Bourdieu’s theory for literary studies stems” (16).

While the affinity of Bourdieu and Elias to literary texts is of special interest to the discipline of the sociology of literature, the more important question for the current project is what, in turn, must be considered the methodological function of concepts of relational sociology for African American studies in general and, as is the case in this collection, for the interpretation of (literary) texts by black authors, in particular. As this volume focuses on issues of power, the above-mentioned concepts of Bourdieu’s and Elias’s theories of power are pivotal to our approach.* What do they have to offer in comparison, for example, with the more widely known and, certainly in the discipline of cultural studies, more frequently applied

3 Cf. also “Understanding,” an essay on sociological hermeneutics, wherein Bourdieu points out similarities between transcribed interviews and literary texts: “By virtue of the exemplification, concretization and symbolization which they effect, and which at times give them a dramatic intensity and an emotional force close to those of a literary text, the transcribed interviews can have the effect of a revelation [...]. Like parables of prophetic speech, [...] they render tangible the objective structures which scientific work strives to expose, doing so even by way of the most individual characteristics of enunciation.” What Bourdieu asserts of transcribed qualitative interviews, literary scholars also claim of literary texts: “Being able to touch and move the reader, to reach the emotions, without giving in to sensationalism, they can produce the shifts in thinking and seeing that are often the precondition for comprehension.” (Weight 623)

4 See Fowler for a differentiated comparison of the two theories of power.

Foucauldian power theory? As useful as Michel Foucault’s theorizing of the disciplinary power exerted by institutions is for an understanding of the coercion of the modern subject, he does neglect in his influential Discipline and Punish “forms of social constraint much more subtle than those that operate through the drilling (dressage) of bodies” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 196). Those concepts of subtle forms of violence direct the attention to the necessity of “revealing the wellsprings of power,” hidden to the extent that they are not recognized by social agents who tend to take the order of things for granted and thus, without being aware of it, become complicit in their own domination (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant 167). Bourdieu’s and Elias’s power theories offer concepts that draw our attention to forms of domination that — in literature as well as in life — are often overlooked or misrecognized and that with our perspective sharpened by the theoretical tools of relational sociology we are then capable of discovering and dissecting (cf. Buschendorf and Franke 101).

However, the most fundamental principle of relational or figurational sociology’ is relational thinking itself. In its attempt to transcend the false antinomy of objectivism and subjectivism (cf. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations 188-89), the relational mode of thought breaks with “all forms of methodological monism that purport to assert the ontological priority of structure or agent, system or actor, the collective or the individual,” against which both Bourdieu and Elias insist on the “primacy of relations”

5 In his eponymous essay, Bourdieu maintains a structural resemblance between sociology and comedy: “Sociology has an affinity with comedy, in that it reveals the wellsprings of authority. Through disguise [...], parody [...] or caricature, Moliére unmasks the hidden machinery that makes possible the production of the symbolic effects of imposition and intimidation, the tricks and dodges that make up the powerful and important of all ages ...” (135; cf. Buschendorf and Franke 80)

6 Elias introduced the term “figuration” as a simple tool that would allow conceptualizing “individual” and “society” not as two different or even antagonistic objects, but relationally. As a term supposed to characterize his theory, Elias preferred “process sociology” to “figurational sociology” (Mennell 20). For a comparison between “fields” (Bourdieu) and “figurations,” see Dépelteau 278-79, 285-88.

(Wacquant, “Social Praxeology” 15).’ Both these “resolute advocate[s] of the relational conception of the social” (15) see in ordinary language with its structural preference for expressing things rather than relations, states rather than processes, a major obstacle for the systematic development of relational thinking (cf. 15). Thus, Elias expounds, “we always feel impelled to make quite senseless conceptual distinctions, like ‘the individual and society,’ which makes it seem that ‘the individual’ and ‘society’ were two separate things, like tables and chairs, or pots and pans” (What is Sociology? 113). Elias’s study, The Society of Individuals, condenses in its title a statement that another radical relational thinker, Karl Marx, expressed in Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie as follows: “Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves.” (qtd. in Wacquant, “Social Praxeology” 16)

According to Bourdieu, the challenge of the social scientist becomes to “hold together, so as to integrate them, both the point of view of the agents who are caught up in the object and the point of view on this point of view which the work of analysis enables one to reach by relating position-takings to the positions from which they are taken” (Pascalian Meditations 189). Consequently, the object of sociology is neither the ‘individual,’ “naively crowned as the paramount, rock-bottom reality by all ‘methodological individualists’” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 126), nor ‘society,’ but rather the relation between “a socialized subjectivity” that Bourdieu calls “habitus” and the social space divided into “fields,” “defined as a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions” (97). There is a historical

7 For comparative analyses of the two relational thinkers, see Paulle, van Heerikhuizen, and Emirbayer; Dépelteau (with further references).

8 The integration of the “subjectivist” and the “objectivist vision” (Pascalian Meditations 188) takes a conscious effort of methodological reflection on the part of the sociologist. Thus, Bourdieu demands “epistemic reflexivity” (Wacquant, “Social Praxeology” 36-46) and insists on an epistemological break or rupture with commonsense perceptions. Elias shares this concern, to which attest the numerous methodological reflections throughout his work; on the special problem of social scientists who in contrast to natural scientists are simultaneously objects and subjects of the investigation, see especially the title essay in

Involvement and Detachment.

dimension in these two interrelated key concepts; both are “realizations of historical action” (126, original emphasis). As Bourdieu writes, “[t]he habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices — more history — in accordance with the schemes generated by history.” (Logic 54) Understood as incorporated history and embodied social structure, habitus can account for the fundamental factor in the lives of African Americans: the continuity of the past in the present.

As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, applied to African American literature and culture, the conceptual tools of relational sociology heighten our awareness of the power dynamics that have dominated the lives of Blacks in the United States for centuries. What Bourdieu finds with regard to gender power relations in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, i.e., “an incomparably lucid evocation of the female gaze” (Masculine Domination 69), the contributors to this essay collection reveal in African American texts. Black Americans are also disposed to evoke the lucid gaze of the oppressed and, like Woolf, they of course do so with the help of aesthetic devices, so that the artwork, to repeat Bourdieu’s comment, “says it only in a mode such that it does not truly say it.’

Thus, in addition to drawing on the concepts of relational sociology, it takes the tools of hermeneutics to bring to light what the texts “truly say.” This collection’s purpose is twofold. On the one hand, its articles contribute to the ongoing debate about relations of domination in the experience of Blacks in the United States; on the other hand, the essays are — in part implicit — theoretical explorations of the approach of relational sociology to African American studies. While Elias and Bourdieu are among the most highly renowned sociologists of the 20th century and while they have

9 The narrative instrument Bourdieu finds particularly efficient in Woolf’s novel is indirect free speech with its “‘fade-in, fade-out’ technique” (Masculine Domination 72, 74); cf. Mueller’s narratological discussion of this type of focalization in Morrison’s Paradise (50-53). As I pointed out elsewhere, “the fusion of outer with inner reality which is an essential feature of the third-person narrated monologue, is the ideal point of view for rendering the interrelation of a character’s position in social space and the person’s habitus” (“Narrated Power Relations” 236). Interestingly, in her contribution to this volume Astrid Franke demonstrates that the use of narrated monologue is not limited to fiction, but may occur in poetry as well (47 ff.).

figured prominently in the sociology of literature, they have so far not inspired many scholars to use their conceptual tools of relational sociology in literary and cultural studies.'° It is for this reason that the following summaries emphasize the articles’ methodological aspects and, by quoting extensively especially from Bourdieu’s writings, provide the opportunity to become further acquainted not only with the various instruments of relational-sociological thinking, but also with modifications of their meaning. Although many contributors refer to Elias’s established-outsider theory, he figures less prominently than Bourdieu. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that one of the basic principles of the approach is the assumption that the two theories are complementary and that in the practice of interpretation their conceptual tools have proven compatible.

Most articles trace and interpret power dynamics in literary texts by such classic black writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as two contemporary authors, Colson Whitehead and Percival Everett. Then there is a series of three articles dealing with diverse power struggles under the conditions of neoliberalism: from the role of self-commodification in position-takings in the field of rap and the fabrication of an idealized type of black homeless man to the demonization of a victim of police brutality. The penultimate contribution defines the outsider position of Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin. The volume ends with a theoretical and political intervention, a discussion of the critique of Bourdieu from the perspective of Jacques Ranciére.

The first article addresses a desideratum of the approach, namely the evidence of its applicability beyond the genre of realist fiction. Astrid Franke pursues the introductory reflections on method further by voicing major challenges the lyrical genre presents to the literary critic who interprets African American poetry on the basis of concepts of relational sociology. In Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field, Franke states, poetry marks the most autonomous of literary genres; however, African American poets used to be highly dependent on a literary market dominated by whites, from patrons to publishers. Furthermore, the question arises whether the

10 In the United States, the fragmentary reception of Elias and the ambiguous reception of Bourdieu have certainly hindered any substantial transdisciplinary efforts. For reasons responsible for reservations in the American academy, see

Wacquant, “Bourdieu in America”; Buschendorf, Franke, and Voelz 3-5.

homology between the world of fiction and the world of the author which Bourdieu posits in The Field of Cultural Production can be detected in a genre known for its scarcity of references to reality. In a similar vein, Franke claims, we may ask whether poetry “with its traditionally more limited scope of the social, may yet contribute to a detailed analysis of it” (35). Finally, and more generally, she wonders what influence the author’s position-taking in the literary field may have on the acuity of the vision of the social laid out in the text, and she asks whether it is possible to keep apart what Bourdieu considers interdependent, namely “a sociology of the literary (field) and a literary (text) sociology’?

Franke starts out by localizing Gwendolyn Brooks’s position in the field of African American poetry. It is characterized by a propensity for the reigning style of modernism and simultaneously a marginal position with regard to the male writers (represented by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) dominating the field. This position, Franke maintains, correlates with Brooks’s highly ironic style which prevents the reader from defining the poet’s moral and political stance in the dilemmas exposed in the two selected poems, “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” from her first volume of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), and “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” (1960), a daring juxtaposition of the mother of Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant, the woman at whom the black teenager had allegedly whistled and whose husband and brother-in-law thereupon lynched him. While both lyrical texts have been objects of highly controversial (political) debates, Franke opts for going beyond the existing alternative interpretations — on the basis of relational sociology. “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” she claims, “might be called a sociological dissection of the habitus of a lower-class black man from Chicago in the 1940s” (36). As she shows in her close reading, Brooks’s portrait of Satin-Legs Smith offers not only a very detailed depiction of his taste, but also conveys the origin of that taste in the collective history of African Americans and his social environment.

“Brooks,” Franke states, “anticipates a number of central claims Bourdieu formulates in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979): Taste is ‘the product of upbringing and education’ (xxiv) and ‘art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences’ (xxx).” (39) Yet the precision of Brooks’s definition of Smith’s taste is juxtaposed with utter indeterminacy in the question of the evaluation of this taste, when the poet introduces a counter-voice in the form of an addressed “you,” an audience that represents a more conservative taste, yet remains ultimately indistinct with regard to race and class. Brooks keeps a distance by ironizing both Smith and “you” in a similar way that she seems to stay aloof from both women in her poem on Emmett Till’s murder. She has the political courage to offer a very detailed and complex “socio-psychological portrait of a white woman” (46) the sheer ambiguity of which makes it impossible for the reader to decide to what extent Brooks sympathizes with this “victim of a racist patriarchal order” (47). As Franke argues by drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence and habitus, Brooks confronts us with a carefully documented case of masculine domination, with a protagonist misrecognizing the very power structures that lead to the racial physical violence as well as the interdependent symbolic gender violence.

Stephan Kuhl’s reconstruction of Richard Wright’s literary practice, which combines Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of “sublimation” with Bourdieu’s relational-sociological theory of practice and its core concept of “bodily knowledge,” addresses a question raised by both: How is the sexual instinct transformed into a social libido? (cf. Bourdieu, Practical Reason 78-79; 57-58) Kuhl’s focus is on the constituting factors that went into the writing of the key scene of Wright’s Native Son, wherein — based on a childhood memory recovered by the psychoanalyst Frederic Wertham — Bigger Thomas unintentionally kills Mary Dalton. His analysis not only unearths information of interest about the author, but, more generally, proposes a theory of creativity. In great detail, Kuhl examines the social and psychological conditions responsible for producing what in modification of Bourdieu’s concept of split habitus he defines as Wright’s “oppositional habitus” (65). The oppositional structure of Wright’s dispositions derives from the two contradictory forces shaping his early life. There was the intellectual encouragement he received from his mother, a schoolteacher, and there was the experience of poverty and Jim Crow oppression in the 1930s South. As Kuhl explains, the former led to Wright’s intellectual disposition and the acquisition of incorporated cultural capital, whereas the latter severely limited his access to institutional cultural capital and furthermore subjected him to the effects of symbolic violence exerted in the name of racial segregation.

Based on Bourdieu’s methodological assumptions in The Rules of Art, i.e., that “the practices of writers [...] are the product of the meeting of two histories, the history of the production of the position occupied [in the literary and artistic field] and the history of the production of the dispositions of its occupants” (256; cf. 59), Kuhl then examines Wright’s position in the literary field of the Harlem Renaissance and finds him suspended between the two rival positions represented by the “proletarian intellectualism” of Langston Hughes and the “academic intellectualism” of W. E. B. Du Bois (66). Corresponding to his opposition to the major positions of the literary field, his oppositional habitus was “the structuring principle of Wright’s literary practice in 1940 — and thus the structuring principle of Native Son,” (68) which Kuhl — by combining relational-sociological and psychoanalytic arguments — defines as “dispositional sublimation” (71). It suggests that Wright’s oppositional habitus allows for the integration of both his intellectual and his bodily knowledge into the creative process and its product. “Wright’s bodily writing,” Kuhl argues, “allows for an equally bodily reading of his text, a reading that, however, has as its necessary condition the reader’s own incorporated disposition to undergo the effects of symbolic violence, in particular as they relate to the ongoing histories of racism and capitalism, the two major forces in the structuring of the bodily disposition that Wright inscribed into his text.” (73) Nicole Lindenberg’s interpretation of Ralph Ellison’s unfinished novel focuses on the prominent theme of father-son-relations and their significance for (African) American history.

In addition to the work’s edited version, published under the title Three Days Before the Shooting... in 2010, Lindenberg draws on drafts and notes from the author’s extensive papers in the Ellison Archive. On the basis of her selection of published and unpublished material Lindenberg develops her central thesis: In his narrative of three generations of fathers and sons, Ellison creates on a psychological level a repetition of typical generational conflicts; at the same time he suggests that on a historical level this repetitive pattern reproduces the existing social order. With the aid of the tools of relational sociology — focusing on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and his habitus-field theory — Lindenberg highlights the interrelation between family history and national history. On the level of familial relations, she concentrates on the symbolic violence exerted by the father upon the son in the form of charisma. As her analysis of numerous father-son encounters shows, they follow what Bourdieu defines as an effect of symbolic violence, namely, “the transfiguration of relations of domination and submission into affective relations, the transformation of power into charisma or into the charm suited to evoke affective enchantment,” which, he adds, “can be seen particularly well in relations between generations” (Practical Reason 102; cf. 80). In contrast to Bourdieu, who due to his interest in the reproduction of domination emphasizes the force of symbolic power rather than the potential of resistance, Ellison stresses the struggles of the sons against the strong emotions evoked by the fathers’ charisma.