This essay examines how the project of national security was beset by the affective intensities of “Jeffersonian trembling.” While white nationalists today see themselves as threatened with dispossession and the loss of historical entitlement, mainstream supporters of the movement to colonize US blacks leveraged their fear to export insecurity and precarity onto African Americans. The claim of “white genocide” dates back to biopolitical anxieties that drove the colonization movement to control and manage the chimera of black population excess. Such efforts required the conversion of blacks into data so that they could be brought under a regime of “algorithmic governmentality.” Instead of targeting individual black bodies, white nationalism read the latest data about black people in toto as a threat. Different in scale from the surveillance techniques that overseers, patrollers, and other agents of slaveholding society employed, colonization represented a security algorithm for tackling a data problem that was the size of the African American population itself. In this history, we can detect how the logic of security is always a racialized formation that is intimately connected to feelings of insecurity.

Temporal concerns are baked into the matter of facts. From an etymological point of view, facts are moments of making and doing that are no longer alive and kicking. Coming into English and other modern Western languages by means of both the past participle of the Latin word facere (“to make or to do”) and the Latin noun factum, whose senses include the “result of doing” and “something done,” fact denotes an action that has happened and is now preserved like a fossil in the accumulated sediments of history (“Fact”). Etymologically speaking, facts are safely removed from the vicissitudes of the present and the whims of our leaders. So it makes sense that there should be some hand-wringing over facts that have become so thoroughly destabilized that they no longer seem to be based on anything. The defining moment in this distressing development occurred when the Trump administration, not content merely to put a spin on facts, dismissed quantifiable facts by summoning “alternative facts” to deny that the low attendance at the 2017 presidential inauguration was real. A dictionary, not the renowned one from Oxford but Urban Dictionary, offers the following definition of alternative facts: “an attempt to gaslight the population in an effort to control the media and create propaganda” (Mozzy-o). If only we could take refuge in etymology and remind ourselves and anyone else who will listen that facts are veritable faits accomplis, over and done with, past participles that stand as linguistic monuments to a bygone event beyond alteration.

“What have we who are slaves and blacks to do with Art?” asked DuBois in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” In an era of lynching, art hardly seemed appropriate for political struggle. Nevertheless, DuBois and his colleagues at the Crisis risked making connections between lynching and art by putting aesthetics to democratic use even as the theatricality of ritualized violence gave lynching an aesthetic dimension. Starting with DuBois's manifesto and reading in reverse chronological order every issue of the Crisis to its first issue in 1910, this article re-creates a critical narrative that traces the development of aesthetic theory among African American writers associated with the NAACP's national magazine. Contextualizing DuBois's work in the Crisis with fiction by Jessie Fauset and Walter White, I examine an alternative aesthetics that relies on propaganda to assail the ugliness of race relations. (RC)

As white men surrendered to carnal impulses and lost control of their bodily flows, they became slaves. Such sensational conclusions were standard fare in a 19th-century rhetorical universe where self-reliance as a corporeal principle was also an issue of political gravity. Far from signaling a breakdown of the body's potential to analogize the body politic, the representational slide from Southern bondage to white corporeality is of tremendous national use. The “natural” body – especially in “aberrant” manifestations that violate ethical, hygienic, and democratic codes broadly classed under the dictum of self-reliance – is an enabling construction that allows white men to concentrate on disruptions in their own bodies while overlooking disruption in the body politic. The linguistic inequality that reads the white male's private body as the public's collective body acts in tandem with political inequality by misrepresenting the scope and character of African-American servitude. American liberal reformers participated in a political distortion by talking about the body as though it had the same valence as the body politic. Equipped with a catachrestic sensibility that (mis)understood the citizen's sexuality via national policies on race, a wide range of cultural critics including medical crusaders, abolitionists, educators, and transcendentalists reconceived of the abstract body politic in fairly specific, highly personal, and ultimately privatizing terms. But what happened when that abstract body became culturally particular, when, for instance, the transparency of white males became li bidinally bound to castigated representations of blackness? As an analogy for certain sexual behaviors, slavery plainly suggested the dire consequences of improper corporeal conduct.