Amadi Ozier

At one point late in Ulysses, while referencing the fictionalized account of a graphic, gruesome American lynching of a black man, a character in "Cyclops” refers to the ill-fated mob victim as a "Sambo.” Sambo is a plantation-era racial term that, by the early twentieth century, had become an enduring American stage archetype, often performed in blackface, that spun entertainment from stereotypes about black Americans as provincial and lazy. By naming his lynching victim "Sambo,” Joyce marks the lynching as a theatrical phenomenon, spectacularly American. Joyce draws a link between blackface minstrelsy and anti-black mob violence as parallel art forms, as two American cultural performances that get similarly staged, transmitted, and consumed globally. In that sense, Joyce thematizes the ways that non-American global writers leverage and export narratives of American racial violence in order to mark themselves as modern, cosmopolitan actors, situating themselves within a global discursive network by commentating on spectacular American racism. Joyce performs modernness, in part, by engaging with American cultural iconography, and, in particular, by revising upon American conceptualizations of race. Though, late in his career, Joyce claimed to know "nothing of” the United States, Joyce’s modern aesthetic was at times informed by his own imaginings of American life, which in turn borrowed from popular transatlantic approximations of American culture generally and of black life specifically. The characters in Ulysses, for example, walk past advertisements for American-style minstrel performances at Queen’s Theatre, perform minstrelized stump speeches dedicated to "Mr President,” twist their hair into "golliwog curls,” read graphic newspaper articles about American lynchings, parody American evangelical preaching styles, embrace American slang like "bully,” fetishize the "negress” as a devilish sexual curiosity, sing American renditions of English songs, idolize the Rockefellers, and memorialize those Irish immigrants who have "smuggled off to America,” that "greater Ireland beyond the Sea” (Joyce, Ulysses, 183, 414, 290, 269, 159, 301, 591, 70, 270, 267). Though Joyce worked to distance himself from the United States, he leveraged an intimate fascination with the artifacts of American popular culture as one source text for constructing his own globalized grammar of the modern. Joyce used engagements with and references to American culture as one strategy for signaling his access to global modernity. What’s more, Joyce’s chosen conceptualization of "American” modern culture is filtered partially through spectacular, racialist performances of blackness. His early career correspondences with American literary peers like Ezra Pound demonstrate that Joyce long wielded a crystallized understanding of how a so-called "n—” spoke and behaved, based upon American imaginings of black Southern servility. In this sense, Joyce’s configurations of American modernity depend upon and are rooted through—imported and approximated—conceptualizations of the black body. Ultimately, like Joyce’s other representations of the Sambo in Ulysses, the spectacle of lynching functions as an American art form that can be harnessed, disengaged from, and revised upon for creative potential.