THE REPEATING BODY
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Te Repeating Body
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Kimberly Juanita Brown
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© 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States o� America on acid- free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan ypeset in Quadraat by seng Information Systems, Inc. Library o� Congress Cataloging-inCataloging- in-Publication Publication Data Brown, Kimberly Juanita, [date] Te repeating body : slavery’s visual resonance in the contemporary / Kimberly Juanita Brown. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ���� 978-0-8223-5909-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ���� �� �� 978-0-8223-5929 978-0-8223-5929-6 -6 (pbk. ( pbk. : alk. paper) ���� �� �� 978-0-8223-7541 978-0-8223-7541-8 -8 (e-book) 1. African American American women. 2. African American women in literature. 3. African American women in art. 4. Human body. 5. Human body in literature. 6. Human figure in art. 7. Slavery. 8. Collective memory. I. itle. itle. �185.86.�69745 2015 305.48′89607—dc23 2015008878 Tis publication was made possible [in part] by financial assistance from the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, a program o� the Reed Foundation. Cover art: When When I Am Not Here/Estoy Here/Estoy Alla, María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Courtesy o� the artist.
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Contents
�� ���� �� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ix ������������: Visualizing Visualizing the Body o� the Black Atlantic 1
1.
Black Rapture 18 Corporeal Afterimage and ransnational Desire
2.
Fragmented Figurations o� the Maternal 57
3.
Te Boundaries o� Excess 96
4.
Te Return 138 Conjuring the Figure, Following the Form
����������: Photographic Photographic Incantations Incantat ions o� the Visual 177 ����� 195 ������������ 229 ����� 245
Acknowledgments Acknowledgments
I came to this project from several different angles and avenues, different mediums, genres, and theoretical points o� view. All have had their human guideposts and beacons. All have brought me to this thi s place. Te Repeating Body began in the African American Studies Department and the American Studies Program at Yale University. My dissertation committee had much to contend with as I moved closer and closer to the end o� the project. Teir grace and consistency made a difficult task that much easier. My dissertation chair, Robert Burns Stepto, is the epitome o� exceptional humanity: a wonderful scholar, scholar, a probing and exacting adviser, an exuberant teacher, and a flawless writer. He gave me poetry at Yale, and I am not soon to forget what that means. Te scope o� this project is a testament to his interest, patience, and dedication. Laura Wexler’s insight and attention to detail allowed the project to reach its fullness. Matthew Frye Jacobson provided the steady pace and encouragement I needed and will always remember. I thank you all for your patience and hope this book is a small token o� my appreciation. My time at Yale brought me many gifts, most in the form o� friendship and collaboration. Brandi Hughes, Kaysha Corinealdi, Lyneise Williams, Nicole N. Ivy, Robin Bernstein, Qiana Robinson-Whitted, Robinson-Whitted, Heather Andrea Williams, Sarah Haley, Courtney J. Martin, isha Hooks, Laura Grappo, Dara Orenstein, Megan Glick, Erin D. Chapman, Lara Langer Cohen, Shana L. Redmond, and G. Melíssa Garcia—I want to thank you for your individual and collective brilliance, the multiple times you have each saved me from myself, and the future we have before us. My conversations with Erin D. Chapman consist o� both laughter and intense concern for the future o� black feminism in the academy ac ademy.. I want to thank t hank her
for an unrelenting code o� honor, which I hope to one day emulate. Lara Langer Cohen has had my full and complete admiration since we shared a booth on a train from Durham, England, to London. I thank her for those important moments we contemplate our academic lives in an offthe-beatenthe-beaten-path path café. I have G. Melíssa Garcia to thank for our continued (and continuing) conversations about our interlocking interests in gender studies and visual culture, and Kaysha Corinealdi for the import o� thinking diasporically at all times. At Rice University I was given the opportunity to pursue research and writing at my own pace, supported by a humanities postdoctoral fellowship at the Center Cent er for the Study o� Women, Gender, Gender, and Sexuality Sexualit y. Rosemary Hennessy and Lora Wildenthal made my time there an intellectual joy. I will be eternally eternall y grateful for the time ti me I spent there and the work it has produced. My sincere thanks to Helena Michie, Betty Joseph, José Aranda, and Kirsten Osther. I was especially luck y to be a part o� a group o� humanities postdoctoral fellows invested in the preservation o� both research and sanity. Mary Helen Dupree, Voichita Nachescu, Gordon Hughes, and Jeanne Scheper were my entrée to both Houston and a writing group that rotated from café to café throughout the city and created a camaraderie I can only hope will find a way to continue. I have had the great fortune to be mentored by Carla Kaplan, who leads by exuberant example. Her dedication has enriched this project, and I am fortunate to have her encouragement and advice. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Nicole N. Aljoe share my concern for all things transatlantic, literary, and visual. I hope our conversations continue and become ever more expansive. Elizabeth Dillon introduced this project to Duke University Press, and for this she has my enduring thanks. I thank Marina Leslie L eslie for craft-influenced craft-influenced kindness, laughter, and wit. I want to acknowledge the many people whose work, time, and mentoring have been instrumental to my scholarship and the way I am thinking about my work in its present manifestation. Ann duCille, Junia Ferreira Furtado, Tadious Davis, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Shawn Michelle Smith, Vera Wells, Wai Chee Dimock, Jennifer Jennifer L. Morgan, Paul Gilroy, Gilroy, O. Hugo Benavides, Lloyd Pratt, and Christina Sharpe—thank you for the many gifts I have received recei ved from you. Lisa Cartwright Cart wright has made mentoring a mission statement, full o� genuine interest and enthusiasm. For Saidiya Hartman in particular, I want you to x
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know that I have taken t aken your words and your deeds as a cartography cart ography o� the life o� the mind that I am still mapping out, slowly. My research has been supported by the Mellon-Mays Mellon- Mays Foundation; the Center for the Study o� Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice Uni versity; the Woodrow Wilson Foundation; the Pembroke Center Cent er for Research and eaching on Women at Brown University; the Ruth Landes Memorial Grant (the Reed Foundation); and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study o� Slavery, Resistance Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. I have appreciated the time, the resources, and the conversations afforded me by the generosity I found at each o� these institutions. A portion o� the first chapter o� this book was published as an essay in the fall 2007 issue o� �� �. I thank the t he Feminist Press for allowing me the opportunity to deepen my engagement with the essay in this book. Elizabeth Ault, Sara Leone, and Ken Wissoker Wissoker at Duke University Press have my profound appreciation and thanks for a process that was efficient, smooth, and utterly civilized. I thank the readers at Duke (both known and unknown) for their interventions and thoughtful comments on the book. Tis is a stronger project because o� your serious engagement with it. In Boston I was exceptionally fortunate to be a part o� the New England Black Studies Collective. I am humbled by the friendships that began there—with Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Abdur-Rahman, Alisa Braithwaite, Monica White Ndounou, Sam Vasquez, Stéphanie Larrieux, and Sandy Alexandre (“dance, dance”)—and am blessed to continue to know you. Marcia Chatelain, Samantha A. Noel, and Shirley Carrie Hartman are the gifts that keep on giving, and I thank them for that. I have known Shirley Carrie since we were both undergraduates at Queens College, and our fifteen- year-old year-old friendship is still blossoming. blossoming. Caroline Light is a trooper, a guidepost, and a friend. Tis work is enriched by the members o� Te Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar, a group o� scholars who have elegantly altered the trajectory o� my thinking. For this I am forever in your debt. My graduate students teach me every day how to imagine my work through their engagement with it, and I remain impressed by the stunning intellectual projects they produce as they move through the program. In Providence (the city, that is) my good fortune has been good company. anya Sheehan and Daniel Danie l Harkett, oby Sisson, Françoise Hamlin, Esther Jones, Patricia A. Lott, Karida Brown, Rebecca Louise Carter, Carte r, Lara ���� �� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ����
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Stein Pardo, and Courtney J. Martin make an already creative and vibrant city so much more than that. May we continue to find pleasure and solace in this space o� boundless energy. energ y. My success as a scholar is a testament t estament to my family and their collective dedication to me. My father is the man I most admire, and in more ways than I can count he makes me proud to do this work. My sister Yolanda is my best friend and the mother o� three o� my favorite people in the world. Tank you for always reminding me that there is a larger purpose to this work. I have Vanessa M. Liles and Nadine Adjoa Smith to thank for my continued attempts at rooted activism, rimiko Melancon for unreasonable laughter and bawdy behavior, and Sarah Haley (sahaley) for determined and consistent humanistic endeavors (to think o� others more often than I think o� mysel� mysel� ). I thank Adebola Asekun for decades-long decades-long care and affection. And for patience. Finally, this book was written to music. From the first few scrambled thoughts on slips o� paper to the crazed final moments o� revision, we have formed a rhythmic synthesis—a melodious understanding carved out o� easy isolation and submersion: the music, the book, and me. I want to thank t hank the gifted artists art ists who have made this t his journey image-rich, image-rich, provocative, and eclectic. My appreciation goes out to Roberta Flack, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Marisa Monte, John Coltrane, Africando, the Roots, Amy Winehouse, Alice Smith, Anthony Hamilton (dap, Vanessa), Concha Buika, Maxwell, Janelle Monàe (turn thanks, Shana), Zap Mama, Rokia raoré, Leela James, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Mos Def, Meshell Ndegeocello, Lila Downs and Susana Baca (gracias, Melissa), Phyllis Hyman, Marvin Gaye and Beres Hammond (always, daddy), Fela Kuti, Damien Rice, Lhasa de Sela (obrigada, Kaysha), Sade, and Cassandra Wilson. I absolutely could not have done it without you.
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Introduction
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What did they do to your memory Tat makes my quiet walk unknown to you. —Cristina Cabral
Audre Lorde’s poem “Afterimages” “Afterimages” takes the murder o� Emmett ill and its famous photographic representation as a key moment o� black memory and makes the poem take the place o� the photograph, creating a lasting image o� history and engaging the power o� the eye in the word, in the body. “However the image enters,” the poem begins, “its force remains within.”� within.”� Te speaker attempts a ttempts to contain and release the tremendous burden o� black subjectivity when that subjectivity is tethered to sight. o think o� the afterimage in its plurality, in the collectivity o� vision it renders, is to engender a discourse o� the visual in the service o� violated black bodies—both past and present. “My eyes are always hungry,” the speaker continues, “and remembering.”� remembering.”� Memory here measures the distance o� “the length o� gash across the dead boy’s loins / his grieving mother’s lamentation / the severed lips, how many burns / his gouged out eyes.”� Te import o� collective visibility cannot be separated from the gendered nature o� the speaker’s witnessing. Her eye absorbs the imprint o� the event, and it haunts her, filling her eyes with images both violent and lingering. li ngering. Words drip from the poem, slowly paced but with precision, and imbued with the range o� racial violations set against black people and over black flesh. Lorde’s racialized and gendered subjectivity enters the frame and invests the image with a totality o� vision. In this
way she orients the eye o� the viewer so that there is no way for the viewer to remain outside the framework o� vision when that vision is gendered— no way not to see i� that field o� vision includes black women. Fred Moten hears in the visualization o� the ill photograph an auditory impulse that propels the urgency o� the image it hopes to frame. “Te fear o� another castration,” castration,” Moten writes, “is all bound up in this aversion o� the eye.”� In the “dissonant, polyphonic affectivity o� the ghost,” he declares, “there is the trace o� what remains to be discovered.”� Lorde is invested in this trace as well. Te afterimage as familiar distortion, as at once different and familiar—“dissonant” and “polyphonic”—is a space o� imagery unfolding. Te time-elapsed time- elapsed significance o� this unfolding is also a part o� its force. aking the shape o� the image before it, only altered, the afterimage requires the work o� the viewer in order to be decipherable. o be known. But “however the image enters” the black imaginary, “its force remains.”� For Lorde it is a moving carousel o� violated black flesh that the poet encounters when she walks “through a northern summer,” her eyes “averted / from each corner’s photographies.” Her particular “aversion” has a sound that matches Moten’s. And for her it is “louder than life” and circular, leading from “pictures o� black broken flesh / used, crumpled, and discarded / lying amid the sidewalk refuse / like a raped woman’s woman’s face,” face,” to the “flickering afterimages o� a nightmare rain.” rain.” � “I wade through summer ghosts, ghosts,”” she she writes, “betrayed by vision / hers and my own.” Tis betrayal o� vision is one o� severe iteration, as “summer ghosts” populate the speaker’s ocular canvas, vying for her attention. Mamie ill, Emmett ill’s mother, is the other “her” who forces a photographic engagement with the murder o� her only child, and in Lorde’s poem Mamie ill is also the “her” who “wrings her hands / beneath the weight wei ght o� agonies remembered, re membered,”” and her son’s son’s famous photographic imprint lingers over and through Lorde’s articulation.� In the doubling properties o� her use o� “refuse” (“lying amid the sidewalk refuse”), Lorde locates an urban iteration o� a southern horror steeped in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife o� slavery slaver y.”� “Te site o� memory is also the sight o� memory,” memory,” Katherine McKittrick contends, invoking the oni Morrison essay that places blackness in the landscape o� the racial formation o� the United States.�� For McKittrick, then, “imagination requires a return to and engagement with painful 2
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places, worlds where black people were denied humanity, humanity, belonging, and formal citizenship.”�� o enter this engagement and its “painful places” requires an examination o� transatlantic slavery and black women’s necessary positioning within it. It requires a totality o� vision—the image and the afterimage—in order to grapple with all o� the ways in which black women fail to be seen with any an y clarity or insight. What Mary Ann Doane refers to as the “persistence o� vision,” the photographic afterimage, is embodied in the literature o� the African diaspora with its insistence on visually rendering the potency and force o� the transnational imaginary.�� Tis afterimage is also present within the visual culture o� the black Atlantic and forms a layering o� contingent imagery therein. It is the place where black women’s endurances have been used against them, and their bare survival is reconfigured as a strength that cannot c annot be altered, damaged, or destroyed. Te force o� representation enters a collective consciousness and remains within—seen, though distorted—and ttherefore herefore remaining unknown.�� unknown.�� Part o� the purpose o� this project is to follow the trace o� slavery’s memory in black women’s women’s literary liter ary and visual representations. represent ations. I am specifically specific ally interested in the realm o� the visual and the proliferation o� imagery seeking to address the impossible duality between black women’s representations and slavery’s memory. I turn to John Edgar Wideman’s novel Te Cattle Killing (1996) to consider the import o� the afterimage in this work o� fiction. Early on in the novel, the unnamed narrator speaks briefly with Rowe, a former slave physically and emotionally scarred sc arred by the oppressive system he endured, “his whole dark body bod y a map o� torture. tortur e.”�� ”�� Te narrator narr ator wonders how Rowe still manages to possess a smile that “positively glows” against the reality o� his present existence.�� When Rowe is asked to share “the vision that beams” in his gaze o� subtle satisfaction, the former slave happily agrees. “Sometime I looks at the sky and close my eyes and I see the t he whole world world startin over again,” Rowe begins.�� In this space o� internal visual creation, the ex-slave ex-slave observes “a black man and a black woman and a white man and a white woman laid side by side fresh out o� the oven and theys the only people God done made. Black man he wake up first this time. Remember everything. Quick. Grab ax. Chop white man head.”�� Rowe continues his reimagining o� the biblical story o� creation by next figuring the black man and the white woman in a narrow lock where he sexu������������
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ally possesses her but ensures that she will bear no children—that, in the future, “ain’t gone be no more white peoples cept this one woman.”�� Rowe spends the majority o� this monologue concerned with “ramming” and “fixing” the white woman and ends by turning to the narrator, saying, “And that, scuse me Reverend, what I see sometimes when you see me smiling up at Heaven, Amen.”�� Amen.”�� In this unsettling and violent liberation liberat ion narrative, the phrase “remember everything” is key. It is at once a rhetorical statement (“I remember everything”) and a command, delivered in the imperative (“remember everything!”). ever ything!”). Embedded within an imagined momentar momentaryy yielding, Rowe Rowe fantasizes about trading places with his white patriarchal counterpart and severing his competition in one fell swoop. Remember everything. Within the phrase, buried silently beneath the dichotomous repulsion/ desire left lingering and barren inside the body o� the white woman, is the assumed acceptance and collusion o� the black woman, who, we are to imagine, shares her memory with Rowe and understands his inclination toward violence. Is the former slave truly working within the process o� memory? He moves seamlessly between an act o� physical liberation to “chop white man head” and shifts immediately onto his next concern, the white woman, lying prostrate, eager to t o receive him. h im. She is envisioned as a version o� evil e vil he must destroy destro y by giving “a good ramming.” ramming.” For a man musing over his ability to “remember everything,” the passage is con veniently forgetful o� the black woman who is integral to the narrative but ignored within it. She is a visual necessity, but a logistical inconvenience. Te black woman in this example is an afterimage o� all she has witnessed and experienced—a experie nced—a ghost o� representation. represent ation. She is both “betrayed by vision,” in Lorde’s imagination, and “lying amid the sidewalk refuse,” refuse,” awaiting her articulation. Te passage situates her within Rowe’s Rowe’s narrative and tangential to her body: a visual vessel for Rowe’s imagination and an apt illustration o� his need to return to the origin o� man’s creation and begin again. If, as Doane asserts, the afterimage proves that “vision was subject to delay,” and that “the theory o� the afterimage presupposes a temporal aberration, an incessant invasion o� the present moment by the past,” past,” what is to be made o� the black Atlantic body bod y forgotten?�� Doane’s useful articulation, “the idea that temporality temporalit y invades vision,” vision,” is one that lends itsel� to the machinations o� the afterimage o� slavery, and the 4
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interactions that locate themselves between the hyperpresence o� black women within the slave system and the particular experiences that continue to present them as “marked women,” to borrow from Hortense Spillers, that “render a kind o� hieroglyphics o� the flesh” and “whose disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color.”�� color.”�� In order to “remember everything,” Rowe would have to acknowledge the black woman who emerged emerged with him “fresh out o� the oven” as an entity entit y imbued with a history o� infliction and capable o� considering hersel� deserving o� a recognized history—a “remember everything” o� her very own. In this recognition, her story would be told from her specific vantage point; her concerns, her desires, and her observations would rise to the forefront. Te negotiated trajectory o� tortured flesh is explored most fully in oni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), which depicts three generations o� women related r elated through blood, slavery, and death. For Sethe, a woman with bodily scars ever e ver present but not easily seen, her obsessive attempt to control memory frames her engagement with the world. Negotiating multiple traumatic violations against her body (physical, sexual, psychological, generational, scopic, maternal), she retreats into i nto a world o� word, sound, and image, vacillating between the material and the ethereal as her long-dead long-dead daughter returns to her in the flesh. Te generational lineage o� black pain, literally “written on the back” o� black female subjectivity, is a repetition o� imagistic concern in the novel. In Sethe’s world, there is the scarred back that she cannot see and the killed daughter made flesh again (and this she can see). Slavery’s violent proximities, its aggressive intimacy is mapped out in Morrison’s novel with a particular attention to the world o� the visual. Tis is an intimacy and proximity that provides breast milk to other people’s offspring, features a negotiation o� sex within violence, and conflates and elongates temporality temporalit y, and therefore pain.�� o remember everything in fragments and pieces . Te marking o� Sethe’s flesh happens against her will, and the physical scars, the keloids she possesses on her back, rise out o� the physical and sexual violence she has sustained and thicken instead o� disappearing. Te residue o� this slave experience is a part o� Sethe’s “rememory,” a reframing o� the particular and the general that she utilizes in order to hold firm to her subjectivity and to get other people to see it as she does. ������������
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Sethe’s witnessing is thus communal and interactive, and though her pain is her own, she articulates it outward as a less evolved part o� her subconscious that she must nevertheless appease. Sethe attempts to curtail illegible torture at the point o� the narrative visual. Beloved offers us a “rememory” for Rowe’s “remember everything” and, in doing so, a unique way o� seeing the force thatremains within. Sethe reorganizes temporal order as she remembers events and emphasizes the intimate contingencies others may miss when, for instance, they focus on one aspect o� her physical presentation (the tree t ree on her back) as opposed to others that are less visible (her stolen milk, her missing husband, her dead child). In Beloved there are unique and expected corporeal repetitions: two Denvers (Sethe’s daughter and Amy Denver, the white woman who helps Sethe give birth to her last child); three Beloveds (the baby, “crawling “crawling already alread y,” the ghost in the home, and the woman who returns to 124 Bluestone Road to take the baby’s fleshed-out fleshed-out and grown adult female form); and several Pauls (the brothers: Paul D, Paul A, Paul F). Bodies repeat in the narrative in an attempt to grasp the enormous weight o� slavery on black Atlantic subjects. Te repeated bodies, narratives, and names make clear that it takes many generations to grasp the horrendous event o� slavery. And in order to “remember everything,” black women, alive, dead, and in-between, in-between, linger and loiter, waiting to have their stories told. t old. My interest in this project is to ttrace race out these repetitions as they move across particular genres o� representation and to think through these renderings that have so encapsulated the black imaginary within a narrow containment o� black women’s women’s visibility. visibilit y. In his introduction to Te Repeating Island: Te Caribbean and the Postmodern Benítez-Rojo graphically utilizes the symbolic power Perspective, Antonio Benítez-Rojo o� imperial violation through the rhetoric o� birth-through-conquest. through- conquest. “Te Atlantic is the Atlantic,” he writes, “because it was the painfully delivered child o� the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps.” During this process o� violation, Benítez-Rojo Benítez- Rojo asserts, “after the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming o� a scar.”�� Here gendered hyperpresence, indeed, the gendered hyperavailability o� particular bodies, is treated to both a violent birth and a kind o� postmortem examination, with all o� the clinical c linical investigation the t he event necessitates. In this space 6
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o� birth without female subjectivity, the gendered body is one o� total and complete physical (and violent) utility. o think o� the “painfully delivered child” as having a birth mother would necessitate a consideration that was both observant and inclusive. “Te integrity o� the race is thus made interchangeable with the integrity o� black masculinity,” Paul Gilroy writes, “which must be regenerated at all costs.”�� Again we see what it looks like when women are a visual and corporeal necessity but a logistical inconvenience. Like Rowe’s silent black woman, they are mostly objects o� articulation for men to write through.�� While I share with Benítez-Rojo Benítez-Rojo an interest in what happens when the ruptures o� empire and slavery form the threading material o� culture and identity, my purpose here is to stay with the symbolic figure o� this impact when she is no longer just symbol, but subject. Mine, then, is an emphasis that employs the photographic trace to retrieve women from the margins o� slavery’s framing mechanisms.�� As James Elkins argues in Te Object Stares Back , “We prefer to have bodies in front o� us or in our hands, and i� we cannot have them, we continue to see them, as afterimages or ghosts.”�� Terein lies the difficulty in attempting atte mpting to wrest black women from from the trace o� the corporeal. corporeal . Where could they go without bringing the past along with them? Where would we let them go without our perception o� their bodies’ utility ut ility in an ocular world? Part o� the work o� this book is to make legible the multiple enactments o� hypervisibility black women cannot escape, and to highlight artistic artisti c attempts at using opacity opacit y, framing, fragmentation, and repetitions o� the visual to illustrate a desire for black black subjectivity subjectivit y that includes black women within it. Tis project gathers at the intersection o� literature and visual culture studies, building on the work o� Saidiya Hartman in Scenes o� Subjection: error, Slavery, and Self-Making Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century Nineteenth-Century America, Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination , and Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Post- Slavery Subjects. Sharpe’s inter vention in particular brings into int o focus many o� the contemporary traces remaining after slavery’s demise that I also interrogate. Hartman and Gordon measure the meaning o� embodiment: how, in the words o� Hartman, its very “fungibility” is the key to envisioning black subjectivit subjectivityy through its requisite deployments and representational iconographies. Te Repeating Body is a book informed by black feminist theory, visual ������������
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culture studies, literary criticism, and critical race theory. It is with this determinedly interdisciplinary lens l ens that I endeavor to investigate the phenomenon o� black women’s representational late contemporary restructuring. I am interested in Jennifer DeVere DeVere Brody’s attendant portrayals o� grammatical structure and the traces o� violence located in fictional narratives; Katherine McKittrick’s engagement with black women, bodies, and the geographic resonance o� space; Jenny Sharpe’s diasporic diasporic interrointerro gation o� narratives o� resistance; and Jennifer L. Morgan’s analysis o� slavery’s reproductive and reproducing mechanisms. Within this wellestablished rubric o� black feminism, I want to privilege the centrality o� the visual as a prevailing feature o� black Atlantic literature, using contemporary visual culture as another way to engage this discourse.�� When Sethe allows others to see the scars on her back, she conceals and reveals all at once. As she exposes her previous physical pain and makes hersel� vulnerable and open to t o reading, she also obscures a visual reading o� her face. Te corporeal refusal she enacts here engages in the vernacular discourse discourse o� black black Atlantic metaphoric communicating (“I (“I got a tree on my back . . . I’ve never seen it and never will”).�� It is a call-andcall-andresponse interaction that reads (or allows others to read) the body and its narrative.�� o refuse (by turning your back to someone) is to move outside the realm o� racial and corporeal familiarity and “knowing.” It is to turn your back (refusing a full entrance into the frame) on those who would propose to know you, to put mystery in the place o� that knowing. An emphasis o� black feminist articulation gives us a totality totalit y o� vision, attuned to the visual properties properti es o� slavery’s slaver y’s memory. memory. Te Te resonant echoes o� slavery’s memory have a genealogy that is repetitive, and rituals and gestures that are cadent c adent and fluid. Tey allow us to see how black women must occupy the center o� the frame o� a system that literally gave birth to modernity. modernit y. “Slavery “Slavery has ended,” ended,” Avery Gordon writes, “but something o� it continues to live on in the social geography o� where people reside . . . in the veins o� the contradictory contradictor y formation we call New World modernity.”�� nity.”�� Tis “contradictory formation” masks the import o� the very ver y centrality (o� black women and their bodies) organizing transatlantic slavery and its resonant imprint. o give birth to modernity is no small order, particularly i� that very act is considered a masculine feat, devoid o� women. In one o� Carrie Mae Weems’s more provocative examinations o� creation, subjugation, and 8
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the continuing conundrum o� ���, she engages in a genealogical trace that is historical, imagistic, and national. Te fifth panel o� the six-panel six-panel series called Te Jefferson Suite is the only one that includes a representation o� both Tomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings as the foci o� the frame (figure I.1). Jefferson’s quill pen draws the viewer’s eye to the center o� the frame, as it appears that he creates Hemings out o� the recesses o� some previous declaration—over certain bodies, out o� others. While both subjects have their backs back s to the viewer, Jefferson Jefferson is visualized as someone who is free and open, intimated by the position o� his arm and the quill, the apparatus o� his legibility. Weems-asWeems- as-Hemings Hemings represents self-portraiture’s self-portraiture’s resurrecting possibilities within a black Atlantic self-reflective self-reflective imperative. She is a figure o� both mystery and mastery. Arms crossed in front and with her head facing the direction o� a window the viewer cannot see, the faint appearance o� light the only indication o� a reprieve from total enclosure, Weems offers the slight inference o� a failure o� communication between the two. Not just quill against gesture, Jefferson is illustrated as fully clothed while Hemings’s shoulders and arms are bare, an errant shoulder strap either absentmindedly or purposely drawn down, illustrating illustrat ing the framing mechanism’s mechanism’s perspective o� choice. If, as Saidiya Hartman claims, “the discourse o� seduction obfuscates the primacy primac y and extremity o� violence in master-slave relations,” relations,” Weems-asWeems-as-Hemings Hemings delineates this concept as a failure o� the archive, or an available archive that others refused to see.�� r acial ambiguity, merging it to the slave sysTe Jefferson Suite illustrates Suite illustrates racial tem Tomas Jefferson symbolized through rhetorical inconsistency, in consistency, lust, and lineage. Here, “suite” connotes an interior, private space where lovers come together (hotel suite), a connected set o� musical notes or chords, or, as in its auditory configuration, a pleasing smell or taste (sweet). I� we think o� Te Jefferson Suite and the bodies presented as “types” “t ypes” collected and cataloged like the human and animal possessions marked in Jefferson’s famous Farm Book , the suite becomes an ironic play on words, the sweetness dissipates. What remains, though, is the question o� affect and attac hments o� the visual and the familial and their effect, the sentimental attachments lingering imaginaries. Severing the viewer’s ocular comportment while making malleable the corporeal dimensions o� slavery’s legacy, Te Jefferson Suite contains the delineations o� the evidentiary photograph, linking it to past presidents and plantations, science, possession, and lineage. ������������
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Re-enactment o the Jefferson-Hemings Jefferson-Hemings Affair, Affair, Carrie Mae Weems, 2003. I.1. Re-enactment Courtesy o the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.
Tat Hemings’s body is the text upon which democracy stands and modernity forms allows Weems the ability to perform a postemancipation declaration o� slave visibility. With her back turned to the viewer, Jefferson’s Jefferson’s articulation, and the mismanagement o� history, WeemsWeems-asasHemings seeks to interrogate the place o� the known historical narrative and its always-embattled always-embattled counterconstruction. Using Hemings and her famous master as symbolic precursors to photography’s duplicating prerogatives, prerogat ives, Weems’s Weems’s self-portrait self-portrait underscores the contemporary obsession with ��� as biological proo� along with its concomitant imagery, prephotographic temporally, but inferred with a force o� visuality all its own. o envision, then, slave subjectivity within the structure o� slave agency and limited mobility is to splice the narrative and reorganize it. For this, a negotiation o� word and image brings the body into focus, brings history into the frame, and whether the work is literary or visual, the pattern o� repetition remains the same. A repetition o� corporeal refusal within the photographic frame sets the visual trajectory in opposite motion—controlled and taut, slowly releasing the narrative deployments o� the visual and corporeal that are often neglected. Weems fashions an archive out o� the visibility o� her skin. She brings to the center cent er o� the frame a woman who would have been relegated to the footnote o� history had it not been for the insistence o� her archival embodiment. Her descendants ultimately provided the archive that now registers her legibility. Before that she was a ghost like the fictional Beloved—a haunting that marred the t he good name o� the third president o� the United States. In the sheer repetition o� imagery associated with this one figure (from William Wells Brown to Natasha rethewey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Robbie McCauley), there has been a refusal to forget, a refusal to bend to the will o� nearly two hundred years o� fierce rhetorical denial.�� Sethe describes events like this t his to her daughter Denver as “a “a thought picture” that both is and is not. Instead, it is more like a collective collect ive event, like “when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.”�� I� we think o� the afterimage as a violation violat ion o� the gaze, the “force that remains within,” the repetition o� this force creates a visual circle that can seem unyielding. Te afterimage as temporal motif, then, is the organizing mechanism suturing black women to the cultural narratives narrat ives that have been used to placate black Atlantic subjectivities in flux. ������������
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Symbolic o� the corporeal register o� subjectivities in flux, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Campos-Pons’s When When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla (plate Alla (plate 1) envisions a diaspora that is bilingual, black, female, and the end product o� the transatlantic slave trade. It is a representation representat ion o� the riverain goddess YeYemayá, the traveling deity o� reproduction, resurrection, and reckoning. In the anonymity o� the fragment there is also the imprint o� a diasporic return. Tis return is a frontal assault o� corporeality and visuality, engaging the viewer in a layered construction o� all that the image cannot contain, and that which flows out from the body. Sea waves envelop a woman’s body, fragmenting her form. From the neckline through her waist she embodies the Atlantic Ocean, its organic properties, and the mechanized reproduction (via the bottles o� milk draped around her neck) facilitated by and through slavery’s birth and rebirth. She occupies the bifocality o� the black diaspora, the left and right hemispheric alignment that locates itsel� on black women’s women’s bodies. In the self-portrait self-portrait other bodies enter the frame with CamposCampos-Pons. Pons. Tey slip in under the rubric o� black Atlantic haunting. Since the image also invokes the Middle Passage deity Yemayá, there is an otherworldly element here that conflates the temporal demarcation o� slavery’s slaver y’s transmission. In the circular logic surrounding slavery’s “eternal return,” oceans meet bodies in flux and alter the trajectory, the sway, and the movement o� the transatlantic slave trade. I am interested in the rhythm and the extension o� this movement, in the many disparate locations that allow it i t to glide through cartographies cart ographies o� violence that “though they were unspeakable . . . were not inexpressible.”�� In the multiple temporal possibilities engendered by the production o� slavery slaver y in the New World, I focus on those that hover as they t hey drift, a skulking metaphor for the past that is, according to Christina Sharpe, “not yet past.”�� In doing so, I offer not a definitive and linear trajectory o� cultural production producti on in the Americas but instead inste ad a gathering o� archival intent, that which places all o� the conflations and displacements o� the visual at the center o� contemporary engagements.�� I do this because studies o� the black Atlantic and its subjectivities have always been studies o� visual culture(s), whether or not they have been received as such.��
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What can encompass this haunted house o� empires and nations, this transnational narrative o� silence and strength hovering over representations o� slavery in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil? Repetition. I have structured as a thematic production the repetitive qualities o� the black Atlantic Atlanti c that hover somewhere between the past and the present.�� Each chapter o� Te Repeating Body is informed by an aspect o� repetition that provides insight into the visual, material, and gendered iterations o� slavery’s indelible memory.�� Whether it functions as afterimage, double exposure, hyperembodiment, or the ocular and auditory meditation o� a diasporic riff, repetition brings the figuration o� slavery into being with the force o� modernity. Tis Tis is a phenomenon o� the contemporary and is particularly suited to explore and expand on slavery’s gendered modulations. For this reason I have incorporated multiple geographic locations, multiple genres o� representation, and multiple repetitions o� the ocular. I have also employed some textual repetitions and duplicating extensions so that it is possible in this text that a novel like oni Morrison’s Beloved, with its uncanny mutating abilities, will occupy space in multiple chapters. In Te Repeating Body, Morrison’s novel becomes the threading text, a novel that painfully lays bare the reiterative qualities o� slavery’s slaver y’s burdens. burdens. Te first chapter o� the book positions repetition as afterimage—as the figurative register o� what gets left over when the eye no longer has the image before it. it . I begin by considering articulations o� slave women’s sexual agency, particularly when these women are the mothers o� both slavery and freedom, giving birth to the children o� slave masters. Specifically, I examine the place o� whiteness moving through t hrough slave women’s women’s bodies and the postmodern inversion o� this phenomenon. In chapter 1, “Black Rapture: Corporeal Afterimage and ransnational Desire,” I use Mary Ann Doane’s theory o� the photographic afterimage and Saidiya Hartman’s Hartman’s critical critic al engagement with the performative space o� the plantation as a way wa y to situate slave women’s women’s bodies as corporeal “sites o� memory” wherein white men visit their patriarchal predecessors’ handiwork in the bodies o� their own slaves and yearn to make a mark o� their own. Te afterimage is an ocular residue, a visual duplication as well as an alteration. One could call it a burning image that eventually fades. And ������������
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that image is based on another, the one before the after o� the image. Te myth o� black women’s sexual supremacy furthers this cause, as it is precisely the marking o� their flesh that serves as the racial coding to the planter class, while making the intense violence o� the system difficult to discern. As visual phenomena, afterimages represent slavery’s profound ability to linger throughout the diaspora. Tey linger in the architectural structures built for the system to self-proliferate: self-proliferate: landscapes o� myriad mechanical testaments to enslavement, the racial fetish o� a bygone era, and family portraits illustrating the height and depth o� property relations—inanimate and human—that perpetuate the visuality o� hegemony. Visual imagery becomes particularly particularl y useful here, solidifying representation and directing the trajectory o� the discourse. Tis chapter juxtaposes contemporary artistic representations o� Sally Hemings, Margaret Garner, and Brazil’s Chica da Silva and concerns the visual positionality these women enter. Te imagistic lens o� slavery confronts the space whiteness occupies within repetitive sexualized violence. I examine narratives o� nonbiological, familial connectivity crafted by artists who see little space between the violations o� the past and their present diasporic bodies. Robbie McCauley’s play Sally’s Rape links the corporeal legacy o� her great-greatgreat-great-grandmother grandmother Sally with that o� hersel� as well as the “Sally” o� Jefferson folklore. Faith Ringgold, in her thangka print Slave Rape Series, challenges the anonymity o� sexually exploited slave women by marking the canvas with her own image as a pregnant slave woman fleeing a lascivious overseer. In the after o� these images, there is the temporal instability that weaves the past onto the present, visually representing a conflation o� imagery writ across time. In this book I attend to the contemporary contemporar y negotiation o� slavery slaver y that tethers itsel� to the t he world o� the visual.�� visual.�� It is within the realm o� repetition, its looping and determined return, that black Atlantic subjectivities are able, in all o� their profound and disparate in vectives, to be seen. o be seen. Double vision and sight conspire here, in this space o� insistent recognition, the ocular comportment o� engagement. Rendered as simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, black women function within the register o� externally imposed enclosures. What is it that brings the event o� slavery slaver y out o� the archive and into the plain sight o� the late con14
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temporary? What tethers its import, its tendency to reverberate into the twentieth and twenty-first twenty-first centuries? In slavery’s heightened visible register, gender delineates the force and future repetition o� the usable corpus, a double marking that has reverberations throughout and beyond the Americas. Tey tell us how to see the beneath and beyond o� the system o� slavery, the “visions and revisions” fueling poetry, fiction, and visual art practices. Te afterimage here occupies the space o� stubborn insistence and transcultural haunting, the pathos o� diaspora. Chapter 2, “Fragmented Figurations o� the Maternal,” presents repetition as the double exposure o� the black diaspora, as the suture between production, reproduction, and counterproduction. Te concept o� double exposure (as I am articulating it here) structures violent and discordant interactions within the contemporary as continually fraught with the tonal t onal frequencies o� slavery’s slaver y’s remains. Repetition functions as and through this bifocality, a layering o� contingent imagery embodying both sight and sound. In this chapter I argue that processes o� black maternal longing limit the ability o� black women to self-possess; self-possess; this is a disjuncture that artists highlight through fragmentation, fragmentat ion, sectioning off parts o� black women’s women’s bodies (and often their own) imagistically to mark the collective “parsing” out o� black maternal capacities. Tis is always negotiated through a cultural reinforcement o� surrogate mothering or, to use Patricia Hill Collins’s term, “othermothering.” Along with the collective request that black women participate in repetitions o� maternal sacrifice, there are representations that challenge the siphoning o� black women’s power through the maternal, literally marking the place o� maternal dependence and visual impossibility impossibilit y. In the synesthetic quality o� this productive deployment, visual and auditory impulses converge, performing through the matter and the mode o� the black Atlantic. “Te question o� racial terror,” writes Paul Gilroy, “always remains in view when these modernisms are discussed because imaginative proximity to terror is their inaugural experience.”�� Within this “inaugural experience” are the pace and proximity o� the black maternal, the mode and manner o� its diasporic iteration. Bound to this iteration o� the diaspora, repetition as reproduction offers us improvisation and agitation, movement within the visuality o� maternal retrieval and within a constant state o� loss. Utilizing a flood o� imagery ������������
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associated with black women’s women’s conflicted maternity, mater nity, I emphasize the role o� fragmentation in illuminating the ruptured nature o� postslavery maternal processes. Chapter 3, “Te Boundaries o� Excess,” deploys the visual register o� hyperembodiment and disembodiment in order to investigate the everexpansive corporeal tether that binds black women to the framework o� slavery’s making. Here I use visual shielding and the gender transference o� slave women’s bodies as a way to read the corporeal trajectory o� diasporic movement and loss as a narrative o� excess. Tis chapter looks at artistic representations o� physical prowess in American abolitionist Harriet ubman and Brazilian slave deity Blessed Anastácia. I argue that certain historical figures o� the black Atlantic are symbolic body armor and are portrayed as such; their representations are created to serve as virtual/visual protection to t o black masses. For ubman, ubman, this is done through rhetoric and rifle, as literary and visual images reinforce a hypermasculine performance o� collective protection. Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding sur vivor o� the throwing overboard the Ghosts imagines the male historical survivor from the slave ship Zong as a woman who climbs back onto the ship after being tossed off and subsequently plans an insurrection. Hyperembodiment and disembodiment extend the visuality o� the boundary between utility and excessive use, delineating the t he marker o� black women’s women’s corporeal availability as continually shifting beyond and beneath the horizon o� the grand spectacle that is slavery’s contemporary representation. Te final chapter, “Te Return: Conjuring the Figure, Following the Form,” Form,” concerns the materiality o� the event e vent o� slavery that t hat seeps through cultural productions o� the black diaspora with force. In the tumultuous rendering o� both subject and object, slavery creates/anticipates the Du Boisian structure o� double-consciousness double-consciousness that, had it a visual register, would always be photographic. photographic. Te stereograph, a photographic photographic image popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intimates this doubling with slant repetition. It is the mechanism that mimics both the eye and the ear, pairs o� visual and auditory encompassing that function as a methodology for survival. Tis survival engenders a future fraught with slavery’ slavery ’s duplication: formerly enslaved people who are not yet free, free, and whose “freedom” bears the violence, marginality, marginality, and hyper visibility o� slavery’s tether. o o step out o� the shadow o� slavery in the t he contemporary means gazing back onto the haunting o� its varied past. 16
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It is an event that is always invoking, always evoking. And like any other haunting, it has the desire to be seen. In this final chapter I prioritize the matter o� diaspora, the dependent methodology o� the black Atlantic that taps into int o the bare survival o� others in order to highlight the liminal status o� both the enslaved and the marginally free. Tis bare survival deepens the discourse o� the ocular that slavery manipulated; it is a large part o� the reason black women still exist under a rubric o� repeated and excessive use. Here, I focus on iterations o� ethereal haunting in literature, imbued with a hyperdependence on black women’s women’s “resurrecting” qualities. Mystics, preachers, and god figures maintain the black diasporic space between the living and the dead and drift in out o� the black Atlantic imaginary as purposeful martyrs negotiating their place within a structured narrative o� what Avery Gordon calls “ghostly matters.” Standing between Western productions o� stasis and movement, slavery ruptures a linear trajectory t rajectory in favor o� flux: the flux o� subjectivity, o� permeability, permeability, and the flux o� protection and possession. Literal movement places the body in a position o� external whim, coercion, force, and self-theft. self-theft. If, as many critical race and slavery studies scholars assert, black Atlantic subjectivities force an engagement with death that is repetitive and unrelenting, these engagements engagements survive off o� the riff and the moti� o� New World slavery.�� In the contemporary there can be no accounting for the total enclosure o� slavery and its aftermath without being attuned to the aural and imagistic mandates that locate themselves at the site o� the event. Tere Tere can be no telling o� this story stor y without making black women central, no no way to see see the indexical force force o� the the horrendous event o� transnational slavery unless the way o� seeing, the sight and the sound o� it, is rearticulated re articulated and black women are at the center o� the frame. Sethe’s created recollecting, her “rememory,” mirrors Rowe’s internal mandate (from Te Cattle Killing) to “remember everything,” placing the event that is slavery and its afterlife at the center o� a visual and corporeal retrieval. For this retrieval to reach its fullest invocation we must pay close attention to what black female artists are showing us, how, in the words o� Anne Cheng, “we do not master by seeing; we are ourselves altered when we look.”�� I hope Te Repeating Body works within the vein o� the camera lucida, allowing allo wing multiple vantage points through which to layer slavery’s recurring and repeating visions. ������������
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Notes
Introduction. Visualizing the Body o� the Black Atlantic 1. Audre Lorde, “Afterimages,” in Collected Poems (New York: Norton, 2000), 339. 2. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339. 3. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339. 4. Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin,’ Mo’nin,’ ” in Loss: Te Politics o� Mourning (Berkeley: University o� California Press, 2003), 64. 5. Moten, “Black Mo’nin,’ Mo’nin,’ ” 62–63. 6. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339. 7. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339–41. 8. Mamie ill-Mobley (1921–2003), after the murder o� her son, Emmett ill, insisted upon publishing postmortem photographs (most famously in Jet maga Jet magazine) and having an open- casket funeral for ill, stating, “I want the world to see what they did to my boy.” boy.” Tis insistence upon the indexical e vidence o� her son’s son’s mutilated body bod y contributed to the already- present outrage concerning concer ning the gruegrue some, racially motivated murder. ill-Mobley’s ill-Mobley’s inability to receive rec eive justice j ustice in the space o� the law is illustrated in the title o� Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “A Brownes ville Mother Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Mississippi. Meanwhile, Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.” Bacon.” 9. “I, too, t oo, am the afterlife o� slavery, slavery,” Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6. Tis afterlife has a past and a past tense, a forward haunting and a resurrection. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339–41. 10. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies o� Struggle Struggle (Minneapolis: University o� Minnesota Press, 2006), 33; oni Morrison, “Te Site o� Memory,” in Inventing the ruth, ed. William Zinsser (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 91. 11. Kat herine herine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 33. 12. Mary Ann Doane, Te Emergence o� Cinematic ime: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 71.
13. In her poem “Memory and Resistance,” the Afro-Uruguayan Afro-Uruguayan poet Cristina Cabral writes, “Sometimes legend reminds me / But never history.” Cristina Cabral, “Memory and Resistance,” in Daughters o� the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Afra- Hispanic Writers, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis DeCosta-Willis (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), 396. 14. John Edgar Wideman, Te Cattle Killing (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 63. 15. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 16. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 17. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 18. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 19. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66. 20. Doane, Emergence o� Cinematic ime , 74, 76. 21. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (summer 1987): 65, 67. 22. “Te patient cannot remember the whole o� what is repressed in him,” Sigmund Freud writes in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” stating, “What he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part o� it.” In Morrison’s Beloved, the improvisational space o� re-created re- created memories, or “rememory,” “rememory,” privileges a collec tive accounting and rearticulating rather than a clinical or individual remembering. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Te Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 602. 23. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Benitez-Rojo, Te Repeating Island: Te Caribbean and the Postmodern Per spective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 5. Double- Consciousness (Cambridge, 24. Paul Gilroy, Te Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 194. 25. Tese men writing through include Gabriel García Márquez, Nicholas Guillen, Fernando Ortiz, and Alejo Carpentier. 26. Mitochondrial ��� is almost exclusively inherited through the maternal line in mammals. Tou Tough gh my study is not scientific, it is purposely invoking a genealogical trace (that I read photographically) in order to bring black women into the center o� the framework o� slavery’s memory. I am also interested here in what happens to the offspring o� this “violation” when the offspring is also female. Te Repeating Island follows Island follows the forceful reproduction o� a Caribbean subjectivity, one that is curiously imagined as a female vessel producing male subjectivities in flux. 27. James Elkins, Te Object Stares Back: On the Nature o� Seeing (New York: Harcourt, 1996), 132. 28. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, “Te deployment o� visuality and visual technologies as a Western social technique for ordering was decisively shaped by the experience o� plantation slavery in the Americas, forming the plantation plantation complex o� visuality.” visuality.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, Te Right to Look: A Counterhistory o� Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 48. 29. oni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 15–16. 196 196
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30. “From our very first introduction to the scar on Sethe’s back,” Sandy Alexandre asserts, “we already begin to hear how conversations surrounding the scar suggest that it does not belong so much to Sethe alone as it does to everyone else who has better viewing access to it. Because Bec ause the scar is on Sethe’s back, she never actually gets to see it herself; she alone experiences the pain associated with having acquired the scar, but after that ‘scene o� subjection,’ she neither has the authority nor the ability to t o describe how that scar has exactly exactl y ensconced itsel� on her back.” back.” Sandy Alexandre, Te Properties o� Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations o� Lynching (Jackson: ( Jackson: University Press o� Mississippi, 2012), 131. 31. “Such endings that are not over is what haunting is about,” she writes. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: Uni versity o� Minnesota Press, Press, 1997), 139. 139. 32. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes o� Subjection: error, Slavery, and Self-Making Self- Making in Nineteenth-Century Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81. 33. Tese artistic repetitions take t ake on multiple genres: a novel, a poem, a photograph, and a play, respectively. 34. Morrison, Beloved, 36. 35. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 73. 36. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Post- Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 26. 37. My readings will investigate the absence o� slavery as a traumatic event in the transnational imaginary. As it has developed in the United States and Europe since the 1980s, trauma theory (see: Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Marianne Hirsch) has had a necessary connection to the event o� the Holocaust. Tis emphasis has moved the discourse o� slavery even further out o� the framework o� possible trauma theory applications, and made it more difficult to imagine (despite all o� the evidence provided by critical race theorists) t heorists) slavery as a traumatic event. 38. I take as an example o� this Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes o� Subjection (1997). Subjection (1997). Tese “scenes” that she lays out in the text are multimodal and heavily performative. Tey locate an ocular investment at the critical crux between subjectivity and subjection. 39. Articulating a move that both imbibes Sigmund Freud’s “repetition compulsion” and and creates a sonic space o� black Atlantic performative splicing, splicing, James A. Snead argues that “repetition in black culture finds its most characteristic shape in performance: rhythm in music, dance, and language.” I would add visual culture to this demarcation as well, as artists art ists (literary, visual) continue to riff on disparate moments and events from the black diaspora that they cannot or will not forget. James A. Snead, “Repetition “Repetition as a Figure o� Black Culture, Culture,”” in Black Literature and LitHenr y Louis Gates Jr. (New York: York: Methuen, 1987), 68. erary Teory, ed. Henry 40. I register these “repetitions” as containing the trace o� the photographic that allows for a multigenred articulation o� slavery’s residual markings.
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41. Te “world o� the visual” as I delineate it for this project, is one that has sensorial properties that though they move beyond the realm o� visuality (that which can be seen), still conform to an ocular comportment, placing race and gender (that which must be discerned) at the center. center. 42. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 73. 43. See Vincent Brown’s book Te Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World o� Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jennifer L. Morgan’s L aboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: Uni versity o� Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Mary Francis Berry and John Blassingame’s Long Memory: Te Black Experience in America ; Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter: Te Impact o� Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: York: William Willi am Morrow, 1984); Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory: Visual Representations o� Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000); David Blight’s Race and Reunion: Te Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Stephanie Smallwood’s Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Hilary Beckles’s Natural Rebels: A Social History o� Enslaved Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Barbara Bush’s Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Jacqueline Jones’s Labor o� Love, Labor o� Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and David Brion Davis’s Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: Te Rise and Fall o� Slavery in the New World. 44. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21.
1. Black Rapture: Corporeal Afterimage and ransnational Desire 1. Zahid Chaudhary argues that “there is something deeply directive . . . about certain juxtapositions juxt apositions o� images.” images.” Tese “juxtapositions” “juxt apositions” formulate the suture be Afterimage tween the empire and the bodies it hopes to conquer. conquer. Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage o� Empire: Photography in Nineteenth- Century India (Minneapolis: University o� Minnesota Press, 2012), 54. 2. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 60. 3. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 60. 4. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , “Ursa” refers to the northern constellation o� stars called the “Great Bear,” Bear,” as well as “one whose whose sign or symbol sy mbol is a bear.” Corrige is an Old English word for “correct” or “chastise.” 5. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 31.
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