CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 333
been castrated and shot in the head; his tongue had been cut out; and a
blowfromanaxhadpracticallyseveredhisnosefromhisface"(Dewan
qtd.inGiroux172).
Here,deconstruction'sfavoriteassertion,thateverythingisculturally
constructed, attains the status of an uncanny truth: the culture of racism
did indeed make this body into what it is but (and contrary to
deconstruction's cherished beliefs) not only through textual but through
very material means, physical violence run wild. Meanwhile, it is
necessary to emphasize here that Till's victimized body was not simply
themute,passiveobjectonwhichthephysicalandaffectiveviolenceof
racism was written. In a bitter but highly suggestive reading, Henry
Girouxhasshownhow "Till'sbodyallowedtheracism thatdestroyedit
tobemadevisible"(174),aracismwhich,asrecenteventshaveshown,
continues to haunt the United States even today.^15 In this way, I would
argue, Till's remains attained an agency and a significance of their own
eventhoughhiskillershadsoughttodeprivehimofboth.
Meanwhile,thereisaseriesofparadoxeswhichgovernthedialectics
ofbodyandtextinthisparticularconstellation.Violentlysilenced,Till's
body speaks out loud, meant by racists to terrify, it actually gave
courage, it "fuelled massive public anger, especially among blacks, and
helped to launch the Civil Rights Movement" (Giroux 174). Emmett
Till's body did in fact "bear meaning," as Butler suggests a body would
do, but not passively as object of inscription and semiosis. Its
fragmented and mutilated somatics actively produced a semantics, a
(^15) Giroux'sperspectiveismoreencompassingmyown.HelinkstheEmmettTill
case to the events surrounding hurricane Katrina fifty years later: "the decaying
blackbodiesfloatinginthewatersoftheGulfCoastrepresentedareturnofrace
against the media and public insistence that this disaster was more about class
than race, more about the shameful and growing presence of poverty" (174),
"'the abject failure to provide aid to the most vulnerable'" (Foner qtd. in Giroux
174)."Till'sbodyallowedtheracismthatdestroyedittobemadevisible...The
bodies of the Katrina victims laid bare the racial and class fault lines that mark
an increasingly damaged and withering democracy and revealed the emergence
of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered
disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for
themselves" (174). – Much of his argument has a bearing also on the recent
killingsofAfricanAmericansbypolice.