Zero Image
I first encountered Carolyn F. Gerald’s article “The Black Writer and His Role” in Addison Gayle’s The Black Aesthetic anthology (1971). Gerald’s article had first appeared in The Negro Digest in 1969. The short biography at the end of Gayle’s anthology reads, “Carolyn F. Gerald, the perceptive critic and writer of ‘The Black Writer and His Role,’ lives and works in Philadelphia, Pa.” I am a fan of short biographies, of the details people choose to disclose and withhold. I did not know much else about Gerald until I read Howard Rambsy II in “Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics and Public Bibliography,” (The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America volume 116, Number 2, June 2022). From Rambsy, I learned that Fowler (née Gerald) “earned her BA and MA in French at UC Berkeley and her PhD in Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. She was a specialist in French literature and the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain.”
Given the date she earned her PhD, it’s quite likely that she wrote “The Black Writer and His Role” as a graduate student. The only hint we get that she studied Romance languages is in one sentence: “Even the word black is a translation from the Portuguese slave term negro, gone into the English language as Negro.”
Perhaps this is a lot of throat clearing. Or. My sense that I should have been more curious about the person who authored a concept that captured my attention when I was an undergraduate. Also, as I learn from Rambsy’s article, how to think with and about the many Black thinkers who are disappeared from dominant critical view and bibliographies because of where they work—Fowler worked at Atlanta University, a HBCU—and the kind of work they pursue—Fowler is best known, and perhaps not known well enough, for her book The Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1981). Bibliographic work is not considered skilled or noteworthy or theoretical or difficult or useful. We lose so much when we dismiss such work. I must confess that until I read Rambsy’s article, I was unfamiliar with Fowler’s bibliography. I add only one more thing from Rambsy.
It is significant that Fowler thought it worthwhile to produce her lengthy bibliography of commentary on Black art and culture in order to pass that list on to students in English classes at an HBCU—a prompt for us to consider not only the intrinsic value of studying and organizing writings about Black art and artists, but then actively sharing the materials with students and colleagues. That the origins of Black Arts and Black Aesthetics began with Fowler’s focus on Black students suggests that she found purpose in doing bibliographic work for folks in her local environment. Imagine that: producing a scholarly project first and foremost for the direct benefit of Black students, and then for others. (my emphasis)
Imagine that!
The concept that captured my imagination when I read “The Black Writer and His Role” is zero image.
Gerald writes, “Image-making is part of all human experience.” And continues,
We've said that man projects his image upon the universe. But man does not exist in isolation. It is far more accurate to say that man projects his cultural and racial images upon the universe and he derives a sense of personal worth from the reflection he sees gazing back at him. For he defines himself and the world in terms of others like him. He discovers his identity within a group.
And now we come to the heart of the matter, for we cannot judge ourselves unless we see a continuity of ourselves in other people and in things and concepts. We question our very right to exist without other existences like our own.
And:
When we consider that the black man sees white cultural and racial images projected upon the whole extent of his universe, we cannot help but realize that a very great deal of the time the black man sees a zero image of himself. The black child growing into adulthood through a series of week-end movies, seeing white protagonists constantly before him projecting the whole gamut of human experience, is, in extreme cases, persuaded that he too must be white, or (what is more likely), he experiences manhood by proxy and in someone else’s image. He sees, in other words, a zero image of himself. If there are black people on the screen, they are subservient to, uncomfortably different from, or busy emulating the larger, all-inclusive white culture. In that case, our young person sees a negative image of himself. (my emphasis)
Zero image. What a fascinating concept. A zero image is not an absence of images, nor is it, primarily, the dominance of negative images. I am trying to think about it away from those two frames: the absence and the negation. And, I must confess, those are the primary ways I thought about the idea of the zero image, as injurious lack.
I return to it now because I am thinking about negating images, which are not simply negative images, but images that actively strip something away. Something? For Gerald, image making is central to how humans practice “peoplehood”: “For to manipulate an image is to control a peoplehood. Zero image has for a long time meant the repression of our peoplehood.” There is much to linger with here, and I would love to see Gerald’s thinking taken more seriously, not simply as an adjunct to the contemporary and later Black men we now center in discussions of representation.
Also, I would love to stay with image, to see what it does that representation might not. A negating image strips away peoplehood. We get the isolated Black character in a predominantly white world, and, whether sidekick or main character, we get no sense of Black sociality. I have often watched something—and this is primarily audiovisual—and wondered why the Black characters had no Black friends or relations, people who would have provided some ballast for their actions.
I am also thinking about zero image as something like what are euphemistically called empty calories: images that might be abundant, but do little to generate or sustain peoplehood. And, sure, peoplehood is a difficult idea: I am routing it through Audre Lorde and the importance of difference as a key part of helping each other survive and thrive. I also want to be expansive, to include deeply moving and politically astute tv and films (Julie Dash, Ousmane Sembene, Abbott Elementary) and those awful Tyler Perry films that produce so much shared laughter. Yes, I cringe adding Tyler Perry’s oeuvre to this, but it does some cultural work.
Peoplehood might be something like how users on Twitter gathered around Scandal, making something possible out of a show uninterested in peoplehood. So, peoplehood, loosely used, can emerge from even negating and empty images. (As entertaining as many tv shows are, their conservative, neoliberal shit being sold as Black Excellence, or whatever, is simply unbearable to think with. If I’m to root myself in Gerald’s frames, whatever props up U.S. imperialism is hostile to the peoplehood of Black people everywhere.)
Peoplehood is hard to think with—I am not very good at it, though a good friend from many years ago tried to teach me. In conversation with other friends, we find that across continents and languages, the general translation for Indigenous and African ethnic groups is “people.” That’s all. Sometimes, “the people who do this” or “the people who live here,” or “the people who move like this,” but many of the names for what we term “tribes” or “ethnic groups” simply translate as people. Sometimes “the people.” It is a reminder. A useful one. And, perhaps, peoplehood is one way to think around fraught terms—subject, nation, community, human—that are built around certain frames that are inimical to difference. Perhaps that is a thought for another day.
It might be that to recognize peoplehood is to recognize the sets of attachments and belongings and allegiances and commitments that imbue difference with energy. The differences between us can be a source of energy, Audre Lorde insisted more than once. I am still trying to learn that lesson.
I return to zero image now, at a time when we are saturated with images, to think about the relation between abundance and sustenance, about what is made with and despite the feast and famine, about what is sustained and what nurtures freedom dreams and practices.