Jim Crow and the Modern American Subject

Abstract In Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, the Afro-Puerto Rican narrator experiences his blackness as an uncanny marker that distorts his life. This essay focuses on Piri’s descent into the Jim Crow South where he comes face to face with a haunting genealogy of race. What he finds is an almost gothic social order that racially divides, polices, and prohibits the Black subject, relegating him to an inscrutable foreignness. He converts this knowledge into what modernist scholar Gerald Bruns calls an anarchic sensibility from which Piri refashions an emancipated mode of Afro-Latinx subjectivity. In contradistinction to the closed form of Jim Crow, Piri develops a theory of form premised on a radical openness by re-presenting race as a dynamic potentiality rather than a limit. Ultimately, Piri’s trip allows him to reimagine race and Modern American subjectivity beyond the enforced order of Jim Crow.