#and i'm reminded of the whole idea of structures of feeling that he invoked in Incognegro

[letters-to-rosie]

so I feel like I'll be wrestling with this forever

This pageantry of strike/counterstrike that ensues throughout Nancy Jane Smith’s interrogation betrays a proclivity to imagine political conflict, which is to say “affilial” (meaning, political and institutional) struggles, through filial (meaning, family) frames. Questions of citizenship and state power that would ordinarily be categorized as affilial dilemmas, questions of institutional power, are displaced onto questions that would ordinarily be categorized as filial, questions of family loyalty. The interrogation weaves a tapestry of articulations, “connections, transfers and displacements,” between affilial frames of reference and filial frames of reference in which the stability of the White family becomes hegemonic throughout the interrogation, while questions of political power (Nixon’s war machine and the scourge of capitalism) become secondary, at best. What this framing mobilizes is a deep unconscious saturation and naturalization of White family authority as state authority, wherein “characteristics of the family are projected onto the social environment” in such a way as to allow for “no disproportion between the life of the [White] family and the life of the [state].” (Frank Wilderson, Afropessimism)