Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture

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10.1057/9780230115477 - Imagining the Black Female Body, Edited by Carol E. Henderson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Imagining the Black Female Body

Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays America and the Black Body



Also by Carol E. Henderson

Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture Edited by Carol E. Henderson



Imagining the Black Female Body

imagining the black female body Copyright © Carol E. Henderson, 2010.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-10705-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Imagining the Black female body : reconciling image in print and visual culture / edited by Carol E. Henderson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-10705-2 (alk. paper) 1. African American women in popular culture. 2. African American women—Social conditions. 3. Self-perception in women—United States. 4. Women—United States—Identity. I. Henderson, Carol E., 1964– E185.86.I49 2010 305.48’896073–dc22

2010017572

Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.

For my nieces, Lelycia, Tatyana, and Kiara.


May you always imagine yourselves as beautiful as you are.




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List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments Introduction: Public Property: On Black Women, Bodies, and First Lady Michelle Obama Carol E. Henderson

xi 1

∞

1

2

3

Racing Sex—Sexing Race: The Invention of the Black Feminine Body Kaila Adia Story Disembodiments: Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Metamorphoses Ana Nunes Stigmata: Embodying the Scars of Slavery Venetria K. Patton

23

45 59

∞∞

4

5

6

“Pull Up to the Bumper”: Fashion and Queerness in Grace Jones’s One Man Show Maria J. Guzman Images That Sell: The Black Female Body Imag(in)ed in 1960s and 1970s Magazine Ads Michelle L. Filling Four Women, For Women: Black Women—All Grown Up Debra A. Powell-Wright

79

95 109

∞∞∞

7

The Lower Stratum of History: The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker Julie Burrell


123


Contents

viii Contents

9

Navel-Erasing: Androgyny and Self-Making in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother Stacie Selmon McCormick “If Rigor Is Our Dream”: The Re-Membering of Violence by Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance Zetta Elliott

145

163

Afterword: “You . . . You Remind Me of . . .”: A Black Feminist’s Rejection of the White Imagination Maria del Guadalupe Davidson

191

Contributors

207

Index

211



8

4.1

Grace Jones dressed in a “power suit” (1981).

83

4.2

Grace Jones performing “Trust in Me” at Meltdown Festival.

87

7.1

Kara Walker, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, 1995.

130

7.2

Kara Walker, Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life).” See the Peculiar Institution as never before!

138



Figures




A project of this magnitude has roots in many places. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank those women whose ancestral wisdom has been my grounding, my saving grace: to my grandmothers Mrs. Mable Marbley and Mrs. Bertha Henderson who, during their lifetimes, prayed for me when I didn’t know who a “me” was—I love you. May this academic exercise reflect the wealth of your vision for me and honor your legacy. To my mom, Barbara Marbley Henderson, my sister, LaTonya Johnson, and my nieces, Lelycia, Tatyana, and Kiara—thanks for being my grounding, my inspiration, and my biggest fans! Your faith and love is where I draw my energy from. To my colleagues in the struggle, women whose intellectual prowess has engaged this scholar on so many levels in the fields of feminist and womanist studies, of African American and Africana studies, of film, literary, and popular culture—to Trudier Harris, Mary Helen Washington, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, Karla Holloway, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Charlotte PierceBaker, Kimberle Crenshaw, Deborah Willis, Carla Williams, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Rita Dove, Ann Petry, T. Sharpley-Whiting, Maggie Anderson, and others too numerous to name here—thank you for moving me and countless others to embody the spirit of sankofa as we look to the past for guidance in order to imagine a world where all women can be who they really are regardless of race, status, creed, or color. To my colleagues in the English department and in Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware—your belief in my academic pursuits is greatly appreciated. To my mentor and friend, Emory Elliott, whose absence in this world leaves a huge hole in the hearts of many—may this project honor your magnanimous spirit of goodwill toward humanity and its ability to be and do better. To my colleagues in Black American Studies and to my kindred spirits in the Center for Black Culture—thanks for being my home away from home, and a place for intellectual renewal and redirection. Grateful acknowledgment is given to Drs. Alvina Quintana and Ed Guerrero, who graciously shared the artistic vision of their lovely angel,



Acknowledgments

Nanù Paloma Guerrero, with this editor. Her artwork graces the cover of this book, letting me know that the spirit lives on past the flesh. To the wonderful staff in the Office of Communication and Marketing at the University of Delaware, particularly Cheryl Cunningham, and seniorphotographer Kathy Atkinson and her assistant Amber Alexander, for making Nanù’s artwork come alive through digital image. Thank you for your sensitivity to the matter. To the departments of English and Black American Studies, specifically Matt Kinservik and James Jones, and to Deans Ann Ardis and George Watson in the College of Arts and Sciences—thank you, thank you, thank you for providing key financial support at a crucial moment in this project. To the wonderful photographers and art establishments who allowed us to use their images in this volume: to Richard of UrbanImage Media Limited in London, England; to photographers Jennifer Beeston, Gene Pittman, Dave Sweeney, and Sikkema Jenkins & Company; and especially artist Kara Walker—your collegiality is a breath of fresh air! And a special thank you is extended to the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, particularly editor Brigitte Shull who shared my vision and shepherded this book to print. Thank you for providing a welcome space for the sister voices contained herein. I would like to thank, as well, her administrative assistant, Lee Norton, who handled my technical concerns with humility and grace. My appreciation is also given to the outside reviewers who, with a keen eye, mapped an amendable plan for all concerned with this project. Thank you for respecting the unique voices of the essayists presented here. To the contributors of this volume, thank you for taking this journey with me, for digging deep into the recesses of your minds and spirits to find that common voice that speaks to the humanity in all of us. This collection is a testament to our collective chorus—unique and multifaceted voices on one accord—and what a song we sing! To the undergraduate and graduate students who took my black women’s writers courses at the University of Delaware—thank you for inspirited conversations! Your passion for black women—your interest in their lives and their well-being—gives me a hope that the future of women’s studies rests in good hands. For the men in my life, Leroy and Kels, I love you. Thank you for providing a wonderful space for me to spread my intellectual wings. Your love is my safe haven. For my brother Bobby, I miss you terribly. For my cohorts in SOS (Saving Our Sisters—Saving Ourselves!) at Beautiful Gate Outreach Center, and my sistahgirls in Bethel’s Women Bible Study in Wilmington, Delaware—I love and cherish you for your sincerity, encouragement, hugs, and spiritual strength—and for reminding me of my divine purpose.



xii Acknowledgments

And finally to the sistahs I meet every day, and especially to those sistahs I stood in welfare lines with back in the day in South Central, Los Angeles—imagining a better day for ourselves and our children—to those of us struggling with ghosts that seem stronger and bigger than us, and to those sistahs still in the captive cycle of poverty, disillusionment, despair, and frustration—we hope one day the load will get lighter, the road a little brighter, and we pray for you a better day.



Acknowledgments xiii




Public Property On Black Women, Bodies, and First Lady Michelle Obama Carol E. Henderson

Identity often comes down to the meanings that are attached to bodies when they are rendered as objects of vision . . . Vision and the visual are western tools of social ordering. —Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

B

y now, the image has been firmly lodged in the cultural lexicon of international politics and in the minds of countless individuals here in the United States and abroad. The illustration is startling: Michelle Obama is depicted being tortured and branded by the Ku Klux Klan in a disturbing artistic rendition posted on the “progressive” liberal blog site The Daily Kos. For fear of giving too much room for the devil to play, I will not reproduce the visual image here, but I will provide the props for you to stage an image of this picture in your own mind’s eye: Michelle Obama is shown tied to a tree by her hands in a scarlet dress unzipped (or torn) to the tailbone, just below the small of her back. Her face is tilted toward the viewer in fear as she feels the heat from a branding iron that will soon be applied to her scarless back. The red dress she is wearing is form fitting, and the Klansmen appear in the same frame in typical attire—white hoods and robes—only their lustful eyes and hands are visible. The top of the poster reads “Fear Mongering



Introduction

and Race Baiting.” The next line, “Our New Hi Tech Southern Strategy” appears in bold yellow and red lettering, as if emerging from a smoldering flame. The phrase “To Burn the Middle Class” appears above a burning cross. The poster states that this advertisement is “sponsored by the David Duke Fan Club.” The name of the artist of this photoplay, One Citizen, also appears in the bottom left-hand corner of the poster. Although the colors of yellow and red dominate the lettering of the poster, the narrative of black and white relations (Michelle Obama’s exposed black skin and the Klan’s nameless and faceless white robed members) sends a chilling message of just how far we have not progressed in our social interactions. The fact that Michelle Obama was imagined in this way is not surprising. When then junior Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidential race in February 2007, attention swiftly turned to the woman who could become America’s next First Lady. And that, in and of itself, was an oxymoron. As op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd speculates, some Republicans, Democrats, and other unseemly constituents in our free America were so unnerved by the thought of a black woman becoming First Lady that they dedicated themselves to “painting Michelle as a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman, the disgruntled, lecturing ‘Mrs. Grievance,’ depicted on the cover of the National Review” (Dowd). These characteristic nods to the controlling images1 of a hate-filled b——h or an emasculating Sapphire—images meant to fuel America’s paranoia and pathological obsession with bodies that are not in their “proper place”—foreshadows the now infamous July 2008 cover of The New Yorker that paints Obama as a flag-burning Muslim and his wife as a gun-toting, Afrowearing militant. Although alleged to be satirical in nature, this cover had the same effect as the One Citizen portrait—both reframed the image of Michelle Obama as either hypervulnerable or hyperaggressive. Such opposing yet similar views of America’s current First Lady place her squarely in a hundreds old cultural legacy that has the images of black women grotesquely caricatured in America’s Grammar Book.2 Unable to touch her actual body, individuals resort to a racial and gendered politics that mutilates and disfigures her public persona. These tactics, reminiscent of the politics of old, reveal the ways in which the black female body has been inscribed with an array of social meanings that amplify “the racially xenophobic tendencies that are redistributed and recycled in mass-mediated cultural practices” (Jackson 9). These “tendencies” permit commentators, television analysts, news



2 Carol E. Henderson

journalists, and others to write provocative and troubling assessments of Michelle Obama’s hair, her butt, her arms, her legs, her hips, and her intellectual acuities.3 As cultural historian Arica Coleman reiterates, America’s anxiety with Michelle Obama is located not only in the fact that she is “undeniably, and to some, unforgivably black” (Coleman), but also in the fact that, as a black woman, her blackness places her outside the “acceptable” conceptualizations of womanhood that have historically made black women the monstrous Other, and white women the worthier emblems of virtue and beauty. As one racist commentator scowls, “Absolutely pathetic . . . to make any comparison between this near-illiterate, anti-White Negress and a realfirst-lady, Jackie Kennedy, shows how classless, illiterate, and frighteningly delusional her supporters are” (Holland). The visceral nature of these portrayals in print and visual media speaks for itself. Detached from her myriad of accomplishments as a successful attorney and businesswoman, wife, and mother, Michelle Obama is reduced to flesh—a recoded conglomerate of signs and symbols that re-present to the American public an embodied figure in language it is familiar with. Carla Peterson has stated elsewhere that the black woman’s body in the nineteenth century “coheres around notions of the self-effacing body” (20). That is, the black woman’s body is always public, always exposed. In contrast, her white female counterparts of the nineteenth century, those women deemed worthy to define notions of femininity, purity, and morality—were hidden away, their bodies situated in the privacy of the domestic sphere. This tension between white cultural constructions of the black female body as overexposed, abject, and grotesque, and black female public speakers like Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sojourner Truth, whose public speeches made them vulnerable to the distorted gazes of a sanctimonious listening audience, leads Peterson to conclude, “The black female body might well have functioned as what Elaine Scarry has called the ‘body in pain,’ whereby the powerless become voiceless bodies subject to pain and dominated by the bodiless voices of those in power” (21). One can certainly extend Peterson’s theoretical reach to the twenty-first century as depictions of black women along this historical path—from Harriet Jacobs to Oprah Winfrey—signal a stubborn unwillingness on the public’s part to move beyond the extreme binaries of Madonna/whore or Sapphire/mammy when framing the black female body. Analogously, notions of nationhood and womanhood coalesce around the tall and assured personage of Michelle Obama as she assumes an iconic role in our national (and



Public Property 3

indeed) global communities as the First Lady. Her very presence challenges the brutal and racist stereotypes of our nation’s history that say black women can serve but not be the First Lady. Michelle Obama is certainly not the first (nor will she be the last) black woman placed on the dissecting table of America’s salacious and troubling racial experience. Examples abound in our national and international archives of the sinister ways in which the black female body is probed and catalogued, watched and desired, named and misnamed. One cannot help but recall, at this moment, the troubling legacy of South African Sarah Baartman, whose unmoving image, the “Hottentot Venus,” set the stage for Western constructions of the black female body. Her life reminds us of the egregious license taken with her body during her life and upon her death, and how the scientific “inquiries” of French naturalist Georges Cuvier—who preserved Baartman’s skeleton, and placed her brain and her genitalia in a jar and then presented them to the Musée de l’Homme for public display in Paris, France, as evidence that African women were the missing link between animals and humans—provided the material for sociopolitical scripts of race, gender, and sexuality. These cultural strongholds continue to place black women like Michelle Obama in linguistic and social fetters to the extent that the sexual and gendered implications of such interplays between public and private ways of “knowing” the intimate areas of black women’s femininity unveils the social industry built on the erotic and spiritual vulnerabilities of these same black female subjects. bell hooks calls it “consumer cannibalism” (“Eating the Other” 31). Sharon Patricia Holland puts it another way in Raising the Dead: “Consistently hovering between ‘sapphire’ and ‘mammy,’ black women are a danger both to themselves and their communities. Mammies if we don’t speak and Sapphires when we do, black women occupy a category of being like no other self in literature or in reality. We are so malleable, so brilliantly represented as a constant within our stubborn inconsistency that we can be manipulated while remaining simultaneously resistant to all attempts at regulation” (41). Holland goes on to say, given the quagmire of theorizing and reading black women and their “texts” (and here I would include the black female body as text), how does one formulate a useful theoretical subjectivity that “dances our way out of our constriction” (42)? Holland’s creative and ingenious riffing of Funk group Parliament’s4 1978 signature song “One Nation under a Groove” provides a wonderful segue into the creative and theoretical intent of our current study. Imagining the Black Female Body is a collection of essays committed to




exploring the revolutionary and subtle ways black women and their allies have sought to speak their unique embodied experiences in print and visual culture. When invoking the term “body,” in conjunction with its other descriptives, black and female, we understand the inextricable link between idea and subject formation and the historic conditions that shape our perceptions of flesh and bone. It is, however, the variety of venerable codings that move the body from flesh to its figurative manifestation as metaphor within certain cultural and artistic settings that offers the most illuminating glimpse into the persistent and likewise flexible free-associative signs of black women’s personal (internal) and communal (external) experiences. As metaphor, the black woman’s body brings into focus a gathering of social realities that evaluates how meticulously interwoven the political is to the social, the literal is to the figurative, so much so that, as Hortense Spillers states elsewhere, “distinctions between them are virtually useless” (68). Our contributors have sought creative ways out of this quagmire, as the borderland space between the literal and figurative provides fertile ground for tilling alternative perspectives of the black female body, both in terms of her relationship to herself and her community, and in terms of her representations in her own mind’s eye and in society at large. In interrogating the nexus that had most early feminist studies minimize or completely ignore the unique experiences of black women by focusing primarily on white female bodies or the dominant stereotypical images black women struggle against (in some cases, impotently), our contributors bear witness to the recovery efforts of artists and critics who excavate this historical terrain with the primary intent of discovering how those misdeeds done to the black female body get reshaped in the literary and cultural imaginary. Analogously, the devaluation of the black female body in slavery serves as a reflective mirror into the social, legal, and economic binds that refigured the black female subject as flesh and established a symbolic order of rhetorical and literal gesturing that ruptured spirit from flesh, mind from body. The current state of race relations, particularly as it relates to black womanhood, suggests that the images that emerge from these racially charged discussions link the contemporary dynamics of black sexual politics with that of the historical legacy of black women’s treatment in this country. Thus, we privilege these links between history, culture, and creativity. Moreover, the black female body becomes a holistic being in this volume, both in intent and in deed as artist and theorist suture together a vision of this body—mind, flesh, and spirit—that will make speculative



Public Property 5

and creative movements “out of this constriction,” and restore the primary vision of black women—their courage, dignity, communal responsibility, and pride. This volume, then, emphasizes the importance of self-representation and the critical recovery of voices relegated to the margins. As bell hooks makes poignantly clear, the act of “talking back” for the disempowered—the marginalized—precipitates one’s movement from object to subject. It is a necessary requirement for claiming a self (Talking Back 9). It is in this move, then, that black women become the subjects of their own inquiry and the objects of their own studies, changing and challenging the words, criticism, and theories used to evaluate their work and their personhood. Our collection is specific in its reach. It does not attempt to recover the ground that has been so aptly tilled by other outstanding volumes on this subject.5 Rather, what we hope to do is explore the contours of these conversations, the continuities and discontinuities of black women’s subjectivity and agency in a world that places the physical self in direct contact with images and their vices. In assuaging how the word is made flesh, how images take on a life of their own, we do the necessary work of reconstituting metalevels of meaning and being in black women’s embodied experiences. Black women’s expressivity then becomes a multilayered enterprise. It is liberating and similarly confining, healing and likewise painful, for such engagements in the simultaneity of multiple and shifting and self-contradictory representations necessitate unique and sometimes troubling conversations. These discussions are by no means, however, the decisive antidote to the black woman’s condition. If anything, these inquiries reveal the contradictory impulses of using a body that is marked and likewise coded. As Hortense Spillers reminds us, in the retrieval of mutilated black female bodies, the critic and artist must, in a very real sense, reenact the very moment he or she is envisioning (69). In other words, we all share in the disfiguring and refiguring of the black female body with our pens because, as Sharon Patricia Holland points out, “What we have come to know experientially as the ‘truth’—about ourselves and others—is embedded in the dangerous crevices of the father’s tongue, the national language” (47). That said, our attempts at reconstituting alternative meanings for the embodied experiences of black women spring from the philosophical understanding of revisiting, in some cases, the original site of violation in order to redirect attention to the literal and physical ways this body is rebuilt in our cultural imaginary. The ritualistic manner in which authors reconcile their views on the




images they create in their narratives demarcates the theoretical arena in which the critic may “enter in” to forge a language—a code, a sign, a vision—that is not only salve for the wounded black female body but also a mechanism that reestablishes the integrity of the black female self in our literary and public spaces. Thus the representations of black women in art, literature, and culture perform a delicate and challenging dance of redemption—a redemption necessary to flesh out the precarious dynamics of being black and female at the turn of this century. This collection is divided into three units, or clusters. Each cluster considers not only the overall intent of this project—imagining the black female body—but also fulfills the theoretical and conceptual purpose inherent in its own unit, dispelling the myth that there is only one way to read the body or black women’s identity. The boundaries between each unit are not set in stone—they are porous. This fluidity establishes an eclectic yet purposeful methodological function of stimulating conversations across disciplines. In this practice, chapters address issues of identity and representation in literary, cultural, and historical mediums as they suggest provocative and innovative ways to redirect existing discourse on the black female body. In the first section, “Making,” Ana Nunes, Venetria K. Patton, and Kaila Adia Story return the focus of this project to the nineteenth century as they reevaluate racist medical practices and historical and cultural institutions that helped to frame black women’s embodied experiences here and abroad. These authors embark on a Morrisonian journey to “raise the dead,” as Sharon Patricia Holland suggests, as they undertake the necessary steps to retrieve imaginary and real black female bodies from a national border filled with the body parts of our foremothers. As Holland makes clear, “the dead” are not just those subjects who exist beyond or within the alternative universes of the living and the dying; “the dead” are transgressive bodies that are empowered to speak to the cultural and national phenomenon of figurative silencing and/or social and historical erasures that pepper our national and international archives. The writers, critics, and artists here realize that in “raising the dead,” their subjects have agency in the physical bodies created—an agency that allows them to tell their stories “of . . . deathin-life” (Holland 4). In “Stigmata: Embodying the Scars of Slavery,” Patton turns her critical eye toward the retelling of slavery, suggesting, as Deborah McDowell does, that while the majority of contemporary novels written about



Public Property 7

it emphasize what was done to the bodies of slave women, what these novels also show is how black women processed what was done to them in ways that “talk back” to a history that has silenced their pain. According to Barbara Omolade, the gender-specific commodification of African women during slavery caused the industry and its white master to use every part of her. She was a fragmented being—a thing: “her head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and her vagina” (7). Patton charts how writers like Phyllis Alesia Perry reinhabit this disfigured being as a way of exploring and rewriting the meaning of the African American female body. In particular, Patton focuses on Perry’s protagonist, Lizzie, whose body bears the stigmatic markings of slavery upon reading her great-greatgrandmother Ayo’s diary. Using multilayered flashbacks and a cyclical sense of time within the body of the narrative itself, Perry re-members, that is pieces together, the story of chattel bondage along matrilineal lines because, as “maker and marker of boundaries,” the mother’s body is “reproducer of the group as a social body” (Doyle 27) and comes to signify, in many instances, “a bodily and collective past” (Doyle 6). This multilayering of bodies—in both written and physical forms (Perry’s book and her protagonist in the book)—points up the uncanny ways the black female body is language itself, a portal into a complicated social history where “black female bodies serve as the principal point of passage between humanity and nonhumanity as well as the articulation of that passage.”6 Perry utilizes these complex signs of flesh, body, and gender to form a remembrance of slavery grounded not only in the identity formation of a people but also in the collective body of womanness as the scars encircling Lizzie’s wrists and ankles and crisscrossing her back some one hundred years later make visible what is not visible—the genealogical begetting of the psychological wounds of slavery. Moreover, in making her characters three-dimensional, Patton concludes, as does Perry, that the scarred black body serves “as an active metaphor for the reinvention of African American subjectivity within certain cultural moments” (Henderson 7). Despite the pain associated with remembering the horrific experiences of slavery, remembering allows one to piece one’s self together— mind, body, and spirit—along the sutures of communal, familial, and cultural ties that keep the past ever present as a reminder of the unyielding and indomitable spirit of a people determined to survive. In “Disembodiments: Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Metamorphoses,” Nunes investigates the hybrid and mutable models of the black self that




appear in the Coral Cities series of African American artist Ellen Gallagher. Nunes argues that Gallagher sees the body as a vehicle “to explore the imprints of black history in the African American consciousness.” This is particularly accurate for figurations of the Middle Passage that appear in the artworks of Gallagher and Howardena Pindell, who use the figurative body as a narrative thread to establish a link between the disembodied ancestors who appear as broken figures in their work, and the contemporary self who must piece these figures together in the cultural imaginary. As such, Gallagher’s Coral Cities series reimagines the black Atlantic as Drexciya, a mythological aquatic world inhabited by the descendants of pregnant slaves who were either thrown over or plunged to their deaths during the Middle Passage. In many of these works, the mother is represented as a disembodied female head “no longer confined to the ship’s hold . . . no longer whole or together, [but] rather dispersed in the genealogical map of the Americas—fragmented and mutilated.” The unborn children of these captives emerge as halfhuman, half-fish beings who have adapted to the new water environment in utero. Nunes suggests that, for Gallagher, the aquatic is the ideal setting for transforming African and African American history— thus the use of human and aquatic forms to exemplify the postmodern markers of hybridity, mutability, and fragmentation—requisite elements for metamorphosis and change. In “Racing Sex—Sexing Race: The Invention of the Black Feminine Body,” Story traces the perception of black women’s bodies and their behavior through two centuries of Western and European thought. Finding her inspiration in the wounded and puzzled faces of her black female students who felt that contemporary depictions of them in commercial hip-hop music videos “gave them a bad name,” Story confirms that the African and/or black female body was converted ideologically into the construction she terms “the black feminine body.” “If we think of the body as a corporeal (physical) text that can be read by ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinate’ bodies through a sociopolitical and differential gaze,” writes Story, “then we can begin to understand how for centuries (European) Western society has valued certain bodies and suppressed others.” Story’s ideological investigation of these values is extensive in her chapter. She traces the presumed corporeal differences of peoples back to the early 1400s, weaving together an important historiographic tapestry of exclusion based on the flesh. This global framing in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa had an impact on the linguistic systems of many nations as people became known not



Public Property 9

for their humanity but for their differences, and more importantly, this framing helped to shape the commercial trafficking of human flesh, and as Story reiterates, over time the African female body (her sexual organs in particular) “began to represent the animal side of humanity, and sometimes their sexual organs were directly linked to that of apes.” Such vile and disturbing assessments of African people means our very language, and the imagination that produced it, must be reinvented in ways that not only acknowledge these historical projections placed on the black body, but reinscribes the performances of this feminine being within alternative coded systems. As Charmaine Nelson makes clear, symbol making, be it visual, psychological, or ontological, “indicates the body’s or subject’s process of materialization.” Narratives then become “indexes of the legitimization and moral interpretation” of these subjects, a process used by artists and audiences alike to help facilitate the process of viewership (xiii). In section two, “UnMaking,” Maria J. Guzman, Michelle L. Filling, and Debra A. Powell-Wright consider the nuanced and revolutionary practices of artists Grace Jones, Nina Simone, and Talib Kweli as each harnesses the symbolic power of the lyrical and the visual to reconstitute the black female form. Disassembling such categories as “male,” “female,” and “transgender,” Guzman, in particular, unmasks the normative methodological apparatuses that fuse performance with subjectivity in art and theater. Guzman’s critique of Grace Jones’s gender-bending, haute couture antics in her chapter “‘Pull Up to the Bumper’: Fashion and Queerness in Grace Jones’s One Man Show” suggests the theatricality of style and fashion present an occasion for the black female body to be “bent”—superimposed—visually and conceptually with contradictory male and female signs. She argues that androgyny was a popular metaphor for bodily transformation in the 1980s. Jones’s employment of this practice made her a music and queer icon in popular culture, and afforded her the chance to accumulate new versions of identity through music and video technology. Although known to be heterosexual, Jones used the fashion and music industries to reshape her identity through visual imagery, indulging in what Guzman calls “the more visually baroque version of pansexuality.” This tactic was very effective for Jones because within certain American fashion circles, her ethnic features were considered too strong for American magazines. Within the global community, however, Jones enjoyed immense popularity as international companies used her to sell everything from hair spray to axle grease. Based on these divergent views of her body, Jones’s adoption of the body




of androgyny integrates its own desires within gendered law because, as Guzman states, this body fails to regulate its behavior “in order to reproduce the heterosexual model.” This subversive behavior flirts with the spectacular, and Jones risks having her differences exploited as she is exotified within the common marketplace of the flesh. But it is Jones’s willingness to “blur the line between sexual identities known through popular culture” that gives her the rhetorical power to comment on the complex and troubling history of race in the Western culture—particularly as it relates to the primitivism of the black female body. As Guzman concludes, “The locus of primitivism was the black female body, which became the harbinger for a savage sexuality that exceeded the limits of representation.” Jones’s performances in One Man Show stretch these limits as she becomes object and subject in her own show. But it is exactly this twining, coupled with her provocative interplay of history and narrative, that allows Jones’s work to “attain its own rhetoric of power.” In “Images That Sell: The Black Female Body Imag(in)ed in 1960s and 1970s Magazine Ads,” Filling extends the lenses of progressive black sexual politics to include an examination of the standards of beauty that govern the various ways black women’s bodies were imagined in magazine advertisements in the popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. According to Filling, the iconography of black beauty became intertwined with the social and political aesthetics of the Black Power movement as the Afro, silk blouse, and leather jacket reentered mainstream America as symbols of black liberation. Black women’s bodies, situated in the beauty ads of that time, became reflectors of this cultural interplay among politics, marketing, and consumer culture. Features such as hair and skin came to signify assimilation to white standards of beauty, or they could represent a departure from such conformity, presenting an opportunity to communicate “competing values about Blackness and beauty culture to both African American and white communities.” And, as Filling points out, while consumerism and capitalism appear to be the principal driving force behind beauty culture, “beauty culture has powerful implications for social, political, and cultural history,” and the appropriation of the black female body in these ads signaled these shifting power relations. In “Four Women, For Women: Black Women—All Grown Up,” Powell-Wright reenters the creative space of music as she tackles the physicality and cultural history of four archetypal African American women—Aunt Sarah, Siffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches—as



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presented in the lyrical works of Nina Simone and Talib Kweli. Crossing the generational divide of the Black Arts Movement and hip-hop, Powell-Wright shows how Simone’s 1966 album Four Women created a black women’s aesthetic that not only represented the gender and sexual politics of the 1960s but also gave working-class black women— whose bodies disappeared in the libidinous wave of socialism and capitalism—a voice. Simone’s use of these images is not a mere mimicking of racist ideology, but rather a gesture to present a new understanding of black women’s sexual politics that reclaims sexuality for the greater social good. Thirty-four years later, Talib Kweli pays tribute to Simone’s revolutionary tactics with the final cut on his 2000 CD Train of Thought, titled “For Women.” Inspired by his chance meeting with 107-year-old “Aunt Sarah,” a woman he assists up the stairs after getting off the no. 2 train in Brooklyn, New York, Kweli channels Aunt Sarah’s ancestral voice to reflect on how the four black women in Simone’s day have evolved circa 2000. Kweli provides contemporary narratives for his portraits, portraits that demonstrate why Peaches is angry, for example, and why, despite her circumstances, she still has hope. Like Simone, Kweli celebrates the blackness of his women, the textures of their skin, their hair, and their lips—all signifiers that make them undesirable to some in the larger public forum. In providing Simone’s women with contemporary surrogates, Kweli echoes Simone’s song of love for black women as their spiritual expressivity gets “fleshed out” in lyrical form. Powell-Wright’s assessment of Simone’s and Kweli’s affirmation of black womanhood leads us to the last section of this collection, “ReMaking.” In it, Julie Burrell, Stacie Selmon McCormick, and Zetta Elliott engage in critical examinations of authors and artists whose work rematerializes the black female form through a dismantling of biological markers and their symbolic meanings. Blackness becomes transgressive in and of itself in this space—a frontier for each scholar to explore racial parody, disciplinary exclusion, and competing discourses of accuracy and authenticity when it comes to vision and representation. If identity comes down to meanings attached to objects of vision, and this vision has been central to keeping bodies and peoples in a particular social order, as Charmaine Nelson suggests in the epigraph to this chapter (xii), then the question becomes, can you use the Master’s Tools to dismantle his house?7 Burrell gets to the heart of this question in her chapter “The Lower Stratum of History: The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of SuzanLori Parks and Kara Walker.” Burrell confronts the painful history of




grotesque and comic stereotypes that continue to haunt the artistic imaginary of black female artists, and speculates on Parks’s and Walker’s use of these images in their work. According to Burrell, Parks’s and Walker’s use of the grotesque and the abject reveal the critics’ ethical imperative: can such images work toward an antiracist agenda? The answer is complex in Burrell’s opinion. Parks and Walker risk critical and cultural condemnation in revisiting the very body they wish to reframe and restore on America’s public stage. Their excessive overtures at displaying this fantastic and phantasmagoric black female form, its overly sexualized and abused personage, its performance of lewd acts that include excretion and fellatio, suggests a painful acknowledgment of those heinous deeds done to this female body. Such examinations reconsider the complexities of performative agency, an agency compromised by the spectatorial politics of reobjectification when these deeds are married to the cultural narrative of the carnivalesque. It is the lower stratum “that both defecates and gives birth, reproduces and degenerates . . . that the topsy-turvy world of carnival turns all that is ‘high’ to ‘low,’” according to Burrell. Parks and Walker refuse to simply transform negative images into positive ones, for to do so reinscribes the racist vulgar with an other power. Rather, what Parks and Walker do is to force their audience to “dwell in the negative, in the lower stratum as it were, and emerge, not newly empowered, but scathed.” The penetrated black female body then becomes, in this instance, a mediated space, a body-text, that not only calls forth the humanity of black people but also exposes the pleasure gained by “spectatorship’s place in racist representation.” This intersubjectivity is an integral part of racialized meaning making. “To be human is to be sullied,” writes Burrell. And the art of Parks and Walker reminds us that “to deal with history humanely is to allow it to reach us with its polluting touch.” If the abject and the grotesque offer opportunities to confront the cultural trauma of racism and sexism at the heart of Parks’s and Walker’s ethical engagement of the representations of black people, then McCormick shows how Morrison and Kincaid translate into their works a transgressive black female body that is “fluid, ambiguous, unstable” in her chapter “Navel-Erasing: Androgyny and Self-Making in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.” Using the critical work of Trinh Minh-Ha, who, as McCormick writes, encourages women writers to “write the body and write through the body in order to reappropriate femininity in a way that removes it from the traditional ideas of womanhood initiated and



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sustained in large part by men,” McCormick charts the use of the navel in the fictions of Morrison and Kincaid, calling it a symbolic representative of self-expression and androgyny. For each, androgyny becomes a passageway to freedom and movement, a way of understanding the self and its relationship to the world. Navel-Erasing “is an act of forgetting without annihilating,” using the framework of one’s history to envision a different future uncircumscribed by the past. This act is literally embodied in Morrison’s character, Pilate Dead, and in Kincaid’s central character, Xuela. Pilate is self-birthed and self-created, as she has no physical navel because her mother dies at the moment of her birth. The agency gained from this self-act leads McCormick to conclude that Morrison’s authorial decision to make Pilate navelless with a degree of physical strength “is illustrative of her navigating between various states of being.” Kincaid’s central character, Xuela, negotiates the boundaries between life and death as well, as she is also born at the moment of her mother’s death. And like Pilate, Xuela becomes an orphan because her father “delivers” her to a laundry woman to rear. Xuela spends her life being passed around, her body even being used as an instrument of pleasure by Monsieur LaBatte. In order to reclaim her body from these forms of abuse, Xuela aborts the child that results from these “liaisons” in an act of defiance because, as McCormick argues, “laying claim to her body and her right to determine when she will bear children . . . signals that [Xuela] will not participate in . . . the reproduction of patriarchy.” Similarly, Xuela shifts into the category of “man” as she cuts off her hair and wears the clothes of a dead man to secure a job as a laborer. Kincaid’s creative gesture, like Morrison’s, allows their characters’ bodies to evolve over the course of the narratives. This declaration of self-rule, for the authors and their characters, means the unencumbered female body functions as an emblem of “revolutionary potential,” according to McCormick, and such revolutionary offerings present “new ways of thinking about black women’s bodies and what it means to write those bodies.” In “‘If Rigor Is Our Dream’: The Re-Membering of Violence by Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance,” Zetta Elliott answers the call of critic Hortense Spillers, who issues a mandate calling for the “retrieval of mutilated female bodies” that lie disembodied across the manifold landscape of African American and American memory. Elliott grounds her exploration in the missing line from Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage,” wherein he asks the question, “One three centuries removed / . . . . . . . . . . . . / What is Africa to me?” It is in this




reconfigured space—the elliptical void—that Elliott reconstitutes black women’s experiences and memories of historical pain, violence, and terror as the missing “middle” passage in Cullen’s text becomes their figurative “middle passage.” In short, Elliott frames the black female body as the material link for the immaterial presence of this absence. And, although pathologized as sexually deviant and abject, this female body registers real violence and terror as the traumas of black women (in the form of rape and lynching) are considered lesser historical subjects. Elliott demonstrates how Harlem Renaissance writers Marita Bonner, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Jessie Redmon Fauset recapture this absence, making it a prominent objective in their works as they show how the spectacle of marking and branding transfers from one generation to another using the black female body as its substitute. Elliott uses Bonner’s “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” and other short stories to point up the social restraints of middle-class black women whose “inner space” is violated because “they watch their early desires and impulses die, smothered beneath the falsely calm demeanor required of all women by a racist and sexist bourgeois society.” Bonner goes on to say “that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes; that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears and throat. Somehow all is wrong.” Utilizing Georgia Douglas Johnson’s play Blue Blood, Elliott focuses on the rape of black women—its physical, spiritual, and psychic damage. With Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novel Plum Bun, Elliott charts in acute detail the pain and trauma of “passing,” and the war that occurs in the body and psyche of black women who are physically “white” and spiritually “black” through blood. In the end, Elliott concludes that the writing and righting of the violence done to the black woman’s body during Reconstruction and beyond “enables the black female subject to operate as a conscious agent, one who is aware of her past and the wounds that are no longer visible upon her skin, but that are inflicted endlessly by a system of oppression that reveals itself only in subtle, symbolic substitutions.” Such a revelation replaces the absence in Cullen’s poem with figurative bodies who speak the meaning of Africa into a revised public discourse that both calls forth and empowers. Elliott’s efforts to designate space in the margins to speak the body whole lead us to our final chapter in this volume. In the afterword, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson takes the reader on a provocative and personal sojourn of the intellectual, spiritual, and physical costs of inhabiting the public female body. In “‘You . . . You Remind Me of . . .’:



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A Black Feminist’s Rejection of the White Imagination,” Davidson recounts her intimate encounters with people who mistake her for comedian Whoopi Goldberg. Though Davidson is a professor, mother, and scholar, these qualities disappear in the known and more acceptable qualifier “black female comedian” because, like Cornel West’s contentious encounters with New York and New Jersey police,8 Davidson is rendered invisible—and hypervisible—because people refuse to see her. Her body is fixed, rendered knowable and public. So public in fact that, as Davidson recalls, “a crazed ‘frat’ boy grabbed and shook me, while screaming ‘Whoopi, Whoopi, Whoopi!’” After the assault ended, her attacker pushed her aside and walked off laughing with his friends. Strangers’ willingness to offensively touch her helps us to understand the underlying causes behind the failure to see black women as individuals. “Inasmuch as the black female body is supposedly a mysterious unapproachable entity,” writes Davidson, “controlling images serve to make that body comprehensible and controllable.” The result of such images (Davidson believes comedian Whoopi Goldberg embodies all four stereotypes of black womanhood) is the erasure of their very own being. Davidson’s solution for this sort of erasure is to use such incidents as teaching moments as we continue to use multiple mediums of expression—literature, film, art, and music—to give voice to “the plurality of the black female experience.” In this way, we can speak truth to power and provide a shared energy that allows black women to love themselves in all the colors and textures of the human rainbow we were created in. This collection goes a long way to demonstrate how the indomitable spirit of women of African ancestry becomes a catalyst for communal change. The contributors here—allies in revealing and dismantling the intricate network of forces that seek to devalue the black woman’s body and refashion her spirit into fragmented half-truths—acknowledge the delicate challenges black women face in their everyday lives. As Michelle Obama’s lived experiences have taught us, our bodies can become a text to be read—fondled—within other people’s distorted imagination. But this same body can be spiritually embraced—treasured—within the same social discussion. Anyone reading the volume of personal letters written to First Lady Michelle Obama realizes that millions of black women, in anticipation of her arrival at this unprecedented moment in history, walk into the White House with her through the blood of our ancestors. As one contributor writes on the back cover to the collection of letters Go Tell Michelle, “We are one woman, blessed to be born Black in America . . . I rejoice for every little girl, every teenager, young 10.1057/9780230115477 - Imagining the Black Female Body, Edited by Carol E. Henderson



adult and yes, even every senior, who, like me, can look at you and see herself ” (Nevergold Seals and Brooks-Bertram). In exploring the various imaginings of the black female body in print and visual culture, it is hoped that the contradictory impulses of using a body that is marked and likewise coded, will give way to an alternative symphony of voices that honor the legacies of black women—both real and imagined. Notes 1. Here I am reminded of Patricia Hill Collins’s use of the term in Black Feminist Thought. Collins defines a “controlling image” as a central tool in “the political economy of domination fostering Black women’s oppression” (67). These images make certain “isms” appear “natural” (i.e., racism, sexism, classism), and they shore up the interlocking systems of race, class, and gender oppression. 2. This is a nod to Hortense Spillers’s provocative and landmark article, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” 3. Time would not permit me to evaluate the numerous articles available on these topics. One need only put “Michelle Obama and black female body” in a Google search and evaluate the commentary. While some critics have argued that Michelle Obama is a public figure and thus entitled to “evaluation,” no one can recall in recent years commentators focusing on the posteriors of other First Ladies. Disturbing as well is the global fascination with the hairstyles of the first children (both young ladies). 4. See the epigraph to Chapter 2, “Bakulu Discourse,” in Holland’s Raising the Dead to fully appreciate the ways she utilizes the lyrics to Funkadelic’s 1978 signature song, “One Nation Under a Groove.” 5. Our volume owes much of its creative energy to the stellar contributions of other outstanding studies on the black female body that came before us. Each of these volumes, in its unique way, has continued the long and vibrant tradition of showing the precarious position the black woman’s body occupies in African American and American culture and the creative ways black women have attempted to wrest control away from those systems that seek to distort their personage. Our study extends these conversations, demonstrating that the past is never too far away when assessing the material and spiritual importance of the black female body. This list includes, but is not limited to, such works as Michael Bennett’s and Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women (2001); Deborah Willis’s and Carla Williams’s The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (2002); Kimberly Wallace-Sanders’s Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (2002); and E. Frances White’s Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (2001). Dorothy Roberts’s 1998 study on black women’s struggles to own their own reproductive rights in her provocative book Killing the Black Body frames an important juncture in the critical resurgence of black women



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body studies. Other contemporary works that speak either directly or primarily on the sexual politics of the black female’s body include Ayana Byrd and Akiba Solomon’s Naked: Black Women Bare All about their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts (2005); Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (2005); Charmaine A. Nelson’s The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007); and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (2007). I have chosen not to list the voluminous literary articles that could fit in this category for fear of creating a multipage endnote. But articles like bell hooks’s “Eating the Other” and Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” are two that must have space here. 6. Holland aptly summarizes Hortense Spillers’s assessment of the black female body in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” This quote is from Holland’s book Raising the Dead, p. 43. 7. This is a creative nod to Audre Lorde’s provocative and enduring essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in her collection of essays, Sister Outsider (1984). 8. Cornel West’s troubling encounters with Princeton police in New Jersey is readily accounted for in his book Race Matters. West recalls he was stopped three times in ten days for driving too slowly on a residential street in Princeton. In another instance that found him driving from New York to teach at Williams College, he was stopped on fake cocaine trafficking charges because of the car he was driving. When he informed the police officer that he was a college professor of religion, the police officer replied, “Yeh, and I’m the Flying Nun. Let’s go nigger!” (xv). This police officer’s denial of West’s status—fixing him in the status of “nigger”—aligns itself nicely with Davidson’s experiences.

Works Cited Bennett, Michael, and Vanessa Dickerson, eds. Recovering the Black Female Body. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001. Print. Byrd, Ayana, and Akiba Solomon, eds. Naked: Black Women Bare All about Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print. Coleman, Arica. “Thoughts on a Black First Lady in Waiting.” History News Network, George Mason University. 25 Aug. 2008. <www.hnn.us/articles/53429. html>. Web. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Dowd, Maureen. “Mincing Up Michele.” New York Times. 11 Jun. 2008. Print. Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Print. Henderson, Carol E. Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. Print. Hobson, Janell. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.




Holland, Francis. “Michelle Obama’s Bermuda Shorts Arouse White Supremacists.” 19 Aug. 2009. Now Public: Crowd Powered Media. Web. Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Print. hooks, bell. “Eating the Other.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Print. ———. Talking Back. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Print. Jackson, Ronald L., II. Scripting the Black Masculine. Albany: SUNY P, 2006. Print. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984. Print. Nelson, Charmaine A. The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Print. Nevergold Seals, Barbara A., and Peggy Brooks-Bertram. Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Print. Omolade, Barbara. The Rising Song of African American Women. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. One Citizen. The Daily KOS. 31 May 2008. Coffee Stained News Weblog. Web. Peterson, Carla L. Doers of the Word. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. Print. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Print. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York UP, 2007. Print. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 64–81. Print. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, ed. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Print. West, Cornel. Race Matters. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print. White, E. Francis. Dark Continent of Our Bodies. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001. Print. Willis, Deborah, and Carla Williams, eds. The Black Female Body: A Photographic History. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. Print.



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∞




Racing Sex—Sexing Race The Invention of the Black Feminine Body Kaila Adia Story

When invoking the term “body” we tend to think first of its materiality— its composition as flesh and bone, its outline and contours, its outgrowth of nail and hair. But the body as we well know is never simply matter, for it is never divorced from perception and interpretation. As matter, the body is there to be seen and felt, and in the process it is subject to examination and speculation.

—Carla Peterson, Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African American Women

W

ithin Western borders, the human body has always been viewed and analyzed as a social body that physically and ideologically locates itself within society. The value of the individual human body has been so important to the Western social, cultural, and political agendas that its perceived corporeal value (based on race, national origins, and gender) inevitably translated into its perceived ideological value. “The ways people knew their places in the world had to do with their bodies and the histories of those bodies, and when they violated the prescriptions for those places, their bodies were punished, often spectacularly. One’s place in the body politic was as natural as the places of the organs in one’s body, and political disorder [was] as unnatural as the shifting and displacement of those organs” (Scheman 186).



1

In Western societies, the natural places that measure and regulate our bodies within the body politic then have all been dependent on the body’s corporeal and translated ideological value. In this sense our perception of our own bodies and other bodies becomes our reality. Elizabeth Grosz explains how Western societies have inscribed individual human bodies by their construction of corporeal worth, which is inevitably based on its soul or psyche worth: Our body forms are considered expressions of an interior, not inscriptions on a flat surface. By constructing a soul or psyche for itself, the “civilized body” forms libidinal flows, sensations, experiences, and intensities into needs, wants . . . The body becomes a text, a system of signs to be deciphered, read, and read into. Social law is incarnated, “corporealized,” correlatively; bodies are textualized, read by others as expressive of a subject’s psychic interior. A storehouse of inscriptions and messages between external and internal boundaries . . . generates or constructs the body’s movements into “behavior,” which then interpersonally and socially identifiable meanings and functions within a social system.” (198)

Since the body is seen as a corporeal (physical) text in our society, then the body is “always in view and on view. As such, it invites a gaze, a gaze of difference, a gaze of differentiation—the most historically constant being the gendered gaze” (Oyewumi 2). Typically, gender discourses surrounding the body and race discourses surrounding the body have historically been treated as separate and distinct dialectics (Schiebinger 116). However, in this chapter, they are being treated as one and the same. I contend that gender discourses and race discourses surrounding the body have historically influenced each other and created a complex interplay that has had its hand in the shaping and invention of the black feminine body. Although the body has been and is seen as a text that is gazed upon by its viewers, early Western philosophical discourses contended that some human bodies were read and other bodies were attached to minds that allowed them to be the readers. Again, the social location of a reading body was determined by its translated ideological value (based on race, national origins, and gender) that was seen through a physical lens. “Early in Western discourse, a binary opposition between body and mind emerged. The much-vaunted Cartesian dualism was an affirmation of a tradition in which the body was seen as a trap from which any rational person had to escape. Ironically, even as the body remained at the center of both sociopolitical categories and



24 Kaila Adia Story

discourse, many thinkers denied its existence for certain categories of people, most notably themselves” (Oyewumi 3). Since Cartesian dualism left certain bodies attached to minds and certain bodies attached to matter or flesh, “women, primitives, Jews, Africans, the poor, and all those who qualified for the label of different in varying historical epochs have been considered to be the embodied, dominated therefore by instinct and affect, reason being beyond them” (Oyewumi 3). Thus, if we think of the body as a physical text that can be read by “dominant” and “subordinate” bodies, through a sociopolitical and differential gaze, then we can begin to understand how for centuries Western society has valued certain bodies and suppressed others. “Differences and hierarchy, then, are enshrined on bodies; and bodies enshrine differences and hierarchy. Hence, dualisms like nature/culture, public/private, and visible/invisible are variations on the theme of male/female bodies hierarchically ordered, differentially placed in relation to power, and spatially distanced one from the other” (Oyewumi 7). These presumed corporeal differences and inevitable social hierarchies were especially at work during the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am not arguing that these sociopolitical ideologies that Europe set forth started to manifest in their sciences only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; I am arguing, however, that these differential notions of the self became a very important discursive staple in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These investigative constructions of embodiment, gender, race, and sexuality began to formulate out of Europe’s initial contact with Africa. “[Europe] found the natives of Africa very different from themselves. Negroes looked different; their religion was un-Christian; their manner of living was anything but [European]; they seemed to be particularly libidinous sort of people. All these clusters of perceptions were related to each other, though they may be spread apart for inspection, and they were related also to circumstances of contact in Africa, to previously accumulated traditions concerning that strange and distant continent, and to certain special qualities of [European] society on the eve of its expansion into the New World” (Jordan 4). Since the early 1400s, when Portugal began to trade directly with West African societies, Europe’s presence in Africa has remained a constant. Increasing expansionism during the late sixteenth century with the opening of sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, and rice plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean, has been fortified in history as a collective



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defining moment. The need for expansion was not in the name of science; rather it was facilitated by more pressing issues in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Intolerable socioeconomic conditions, famine, disease, war, and rebellion characterized Europe, and expansion offered “an avenue of escape, a kind of geographical solution to existing social chaos” as well as the promise of facilitating economic recovery in Europe (Jordan 4). The African body proved to be a viable labor source for Europe due to its acculturation to tropical climates and farming. Europe began exploiting Africa inasmuch as it relied on it for its own survival. Between 1500 and 1870, an estimated 12 to 20 million Africans were enslaved and forcibly shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and the Caribbean (Davidson 1995). Enslavement, which was characterized by the visual, ideological, and physical alteration of African bodies and European bodies, gave Europe a catalyst to begin focusing their interest in trade almost exclusively on the body—physically and ideologically. First established out of desire for economic gain, enslavement simultaneously turned into an ideological investment for Europe. It was during this expansion and exploration of the body, physically and ideologically, that the initial seedlings of race were constructed (Davidson 1995). Europe’s initial contact with and immediate perceptions about Africa were loaded with intense ideological meaning. To Europeans African people represented a strong juxtaposition to themselves. The English particularly “found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their most ingrained values; no other color except white conveyed so much emotional impact” (Jordan 7). Thus, even before Europe’s contact with Africa, there was already a sociopolitical ideology surrounding blackness not as race within itself but as a mere consequence or opposite of whiteness. As described by the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of “black” before the sixteenth century included, “Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul . . . Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister . . . Foul, iniquitous, atrocious, horrible, wicked . . . indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc.” Black was an emotionally partisan color, the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion. Embedded in the concept of blackness was its direct opposite—whiteness . . . White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil. (7)



26 Kaila Adia Story

Since Europe’s idea of blackness as a color was already outlined in their religion and culture as inherently evil, by the time Europeans came face to face with peoples who were colored black, their perceptions of Africans began to become filtered through their lenses of polarization. African’s black bodies immediately signified their inherent evilness, libidinousness, and disgrace to Europeans. “Over time, black people themselves were compared to apes, and their childishness, savageness, bestiality, sexuality, and lack of intellectual capacity [was] stressed,” and became a fundamental congruency of European cultural expectation (Stepan 42). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this congruency continued to garner more support within and throughout Europe as the enslavement of Africans progressed, and Europe needed to provide a justification for its inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans. In a culture where bodies were endowed with messages and ideological meaning, black bodies were subjected to the ultimate scrutiny based on racial prescriptions of humanity. Female bodies came to be regarded with similar if not the same type of measurement. “The eighteenth century was the great age of classification. The voyages of discovery had flooded Europe with new and strange specimens of plants, animals, and humans. Natural historians attempting to lay the grid of reason over the unwieldy stuff of nature sought new and simple principles that would hold universally” (Schiebinger 117). European science, in search of its physical origination, attempted to move beyond its religious belief in physical creation through a Christian God, and began to study in detail the anthropoid ape, “thinking that something in their physiology might pinpoint that elusive boundary between humans and simians” (Schiebinger 88). Although voyagers brought back with them a female and male ape of each species, the female ape was always studied as consequence or deviation of the male ape, and overwhelmingly the studies focused on the sex organs and sexuality of the female ape. “When naturalists’ attention turned to females, only sexual traits were considered. This was characteristic of European scientific studies of females— human or animal. Since Aristotle, the female had been studied only insofar as she deviated from the male . . . this way of thinking, where the male constituted the universal subject and the female a sexual subset, pervaded natural history in the eighteenth century. Females across the kingdoms of nature were viewed as primarily sexual beings . . . thus it is not surprising that studies of female anatomy designed to reveal the exact boundary between humans and apes interrogated aspects




of their sexuality” (Schiebinger 88–89). Consequently, to European naturalists women’s sexual organs began to represent the animal side of humanity, and sometimes their sexual organs were directly linked to those of apes. “Debates about human uniqueness in the female came to focus on key sexual characters: menstruation, the clitoris, the breasts, and the hymen—that celebrated ‘veil of modesty.’ Menstruation had long puzzled male naturalists . . . Women alone had ‘moles’ in their wombs regulating the flow. Contact with menstrual blood was said to turn new wine sour, destroy crops, kill bees, and drive dogs mad” (Schiebinger 89–90). The “scientific” discourse surrounding menstruation led early naturalists to conclude that “apes and monkeys did not menstruate,” and as a consequence of this, women who had large quantities of menstrual flow became ranked “along a single chain of being” (Schiebinger 90–91). European naturalists also hypothesized that women’s menses should coincide with their respective environments, and that women who lived in colder climates would have a reduced menstrual flow as opposed to women who lived in hotter climates. “[Naturalists] made two assumptions: that a copious flow is uniquely human and that females menstruate more heavily in warm climates than in cold . . . When investigating the menses of African women and apes [they] found, however, that despite the warmth of their homelands, ‘Negresses’ menstruated very little, apes and baboons even less, monkeys still less, and some types of monkeys not at all . . . Thus, [they] concluded that European women, distinguished by copious menses, were more human than African women or female apes. For [them], one’s rank in this bloody business determined one’s moral worth” (Schiebinger 91). Even though the Enlightenment period was well under way during the eighteenth century, and philosophers and scientists concluded that faith in rationality and scientific discovery was to be the bedrock of society, the “natural” principles that they attempted to universally project onto human bodies reduced humanity to mere “scientific” measure and this yardstick designated certain bodies, typically male and European, with moral worth. African bodies and European female bodies were compared to apes and other mammals to determine their moral worth and degree of humanity. “Experiment” and “discovery” by European naturalists and anatomists deemed European women’s bodies dangerous and suspicious due to the fact that they had anatomy unlike males; African bodies were hypersexual and ultimately nonhuman because of their polarization to whiteness. African bodies’ social,



28 Kaila Adia Story

scientific, and cultural location was that of animals whose bodies had been “stripped clean of history and culture as it was of clothes” and physically represented the earliest stages of evolution (Schiebinger 116). During the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Europe cycled through a myriad of ideological evolutions, religious queries, and scientific revelations. Throughout all of these significant historical moments, the dangerous and vile bodies of European women and Africans continued to be constructed as either subsets of humanity or animal-like creatures whose linkages in the human chain of being were given and natural truths. By the nineteenth century, the African or black female body came into focus as entertainment and scientific discovery. “In Europe in the nineteenth century, the body of the black female symbolized three themes—colonialism, scientific evolution, and sexuality. Virtually always when she is depicted she is either a sexualized mythology or a neutered anomaly, defined by her sexuality or lack of it” (Willis and Williams 2). Her (the African or black female) examination within science reduced her to an animal or a creature that through training could be controlled, and her image through popular media and exposition “was understood to represent that which could be dominated and that which could be possessed, especially sexually” (Willis and Williams 3). The scrutiny of human bodies was part of the scientific community’s response to the expansive, optimistic, and egalitarian energy of the Enlightenment period. Transcendently, “Middle-and-lower class men, women, Jews, Africans, and West Indians living in Europe [believed that they too would] share the privileges heretofore reserved for elite European men” (Schiebinger 144). Through the human sciences, however, elite European men would be able to secure their natural sociopolitical and cultural rights, by arguing that African and women’s bodies were nothing but deviations of themselves. Scientific racism and sexism both “regarded women and non-European men as deviations from the European male norm. Both developed new methods to measure and discuss difference, both sought natural foundations to justify social inequalities between the sexes and the races” (Schiebinger 144). Accordingly, scientific theories of race began to dance and overlap with theories of gender, continually influencing each other, sometimes merging, and always determining that women and Africans were among the lowest strata of human (Schiebinger 147).




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In nineteenth-century Europe and eventually America, monogenism and polygenism were the two preevolutionary justifications for racial ranking; the first view, monogenism, “upheld the scriptural unity of all peoples in the single creation of Adam and Eve” and contended that “human races are a product of degeneration from Eden’s perfection. Races have declined to different degrees, whites least and blacks most” (Gould 39). The second view, polygenism, “abandoned scripture as allegorical and held that human races were separate biological species, the descendants of different Adams” (Gould 42). Although both views of the human hierarchy and “great chain of being” were different, both contended that “blacks [and women] need not participate in the equality of man” (Gould 47). It is at this point of departure that science and culture begin to become intertwined. Scientific race and gender discourses began to influence the cultural and political milieu of Europe, and the race and gendered politics of Europe began to color the scientific lenses of anatomists, scientists, and paleontologists. Monogenism was at one point the more popular of the two theories of evolution due to its location within Christian doctrine and its “common sense” approach to science; the fact that all humans could breed with each other and produce offspring seemed to “guarantee their union as a single species” (Gould 39). Georges Buffon, one of the great naturalists of eighteenth-century France and a strong abolitionist, believed that “inferior races” such as Africans could be improved and regenerated if placed in the proper environments. To Buffon, this meant in the company of Europeans. “The most temperate climate lies between the 40th and 50th degree of latitude, and it produces the most handsome and beautiful men. It is from this climate that the ideas of the genuine color of mankind, and of the various degrees of beauty ought to be derived” (Gould 39). Other proponents of monogenism or degeneration theories argued that polygenism was a theory that only sought to promote the enslavement and exploitation of Africans or other members of the “lower races” and was a theory that merely used scientific support to garner these political and social relations. Etienne Serres, a French anatomist and proponent of degeneration theory, believed polygenism was a “barbaric theory” and that the American scientific community should be ashamed that they promoted such a theory in the name of science. However, in his own way, Serres



Sociocultural Racial Ranking: A Brief Discussion of Monogenism and Polygenism

found a way to “scientifically prove” African inferiority. Studying African and European anatomy to determine corporeal hierarchy admittedly proved difficult to Serres in the realms of criteria and data, and thus Serres settled on the theory of recapitulation. Serres contended that Africans were perpetual White children and upheld the idea that “higher creatures repeat the adult stages of lower animals during their own growth” (Gould 39). Serres argued that African and Asian adults were to be seen by science and society as European children, due to the distance between their navels and penises—Europeans had a great or large distance between their navels and their penises, Asians had a shorter distance than Europeans, and the distance between Africans’ navels and penises was the shortest. This, to Serres, marked Africans as the lowest form of man. David Hume, a polygenist, also argued that Africans were somewhat of a different species and were inherently inferior. Although Hume’s belief argued that Africans were a separate species of man, Hume, like his cohort, also believed that time spent around Europeans would elevate Africans’ status of humanity, but still not to the degree of Europeans. I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered and symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people without education will start up amongst us and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly. (Gould 42)

It is clear from Hume’s commentary that science and culture had an integral relationship. “Scientific data” became translated as sociopolitical and sociocultural fact. At the same time that the European scientific community was presenting its facts of human arrangement to the public, Europeans were witnessing and participating in a society where African people were politically and culturally abject, occupying the lowest political and social positions. The taxonomy of race and racial logic was not only used to prove the biological inferiority of Africans




but also the ideological insignificance of Africans. African bodies became marked as objects for exploration and study under the auspices of European economic advancement, and although physical enslavement in Europe had been abolished since the seventeenth century, that did not stop Europe from exploring and exploiting African land and peoples through the respective lenses of monogenism and polygenism. While monogenism was largely popular in European science, polygenism, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, found its home in the budding profession of American science. The “American school” of anthropology, borrowing from the Emersonian philosophy of breaking with Europe intellectually, “became a group of professionals with indigenous ideas and an internal dynamic that did not require constant fueling from Europe” (Gould 42). Polygenism “acted as an important agent in this transformation; for it was one of the first theories of largely American origin that won the attention and respect of European scientists” (Gould 42). Polygenism, the belief that human races were actually different species culturally, fit within the social relations of American society as monogenism fit within European society. As Europeans believed that Africans were degenerated humans that could regenerate in their presence and become civilized by their relationship with them, Americans believed Africans were a different species that could only be controlled in order for civilization to continue. Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist and pupil of Georges Cuvier, immigrated to America in the 1840s and “immediately elevated the status of American natural history,” eventually becoming the leading spokesperson for polygenism after interacting with American blacks in Philadelphia (Gould 43). Even though Agassiz was a devout creationist, which would naturally make him a proponent of monogenism, Agassiz evolved to polygenism for two main reasons. First, his biological studies of animals concluded that every species had its own environmental nexus and did not migrate far from the center of its origination. Second, an avid taxonomist, Agassiz also determined that different species were characterized by minute distinctions and did not concentrate his energies on the similarities of species. If a species he was studying had the slightest variation it was deemed an entirely different organism. “Agassiz may have been predisposed to polygeny by biological belief . . . [and] confronted both by the sight of American blacks and the urgings of his polygenist colleagues,” but these things still did not totally convert the devout creationist (Gould 44). After interacting with black servants at a Philadelphia hotel in 1846, Agassiz became repulsed and



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It was in Philadelphia that I first found myself in prolonged contact with negroes; all the domestics in my hotel were men of color. I can scarcely express to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling that they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type [genre] and the unique origin of our species. But truth before all. Nevertheless, I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in me in thinking that they are really men. Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing their black faces with their thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large curved nails, and especially the livid color of the palm of their hands, I could not take my eyes off their face in order to tell them to stay far away. And when they advanced that hideous hand towards my plate in order to serve me, I wished I were able to depart in order to eat a piece of bread elsewhere, rather than dine with such service. What unhappiness for the white race—to have tied their existence so closely with that of negroes in certain countries! God preserve us from such contact! (Gould 44)

Agassiz’s plea with God in this candid letter to his mother falls directly in line with the thought processes of his American polygenist colleagues and with the society to which he was now becoming acculturated. In the Christian Examiner in 1850, Agassiz published his foremost declaration on the human races. Being a tortured scientist in that he struggled internally to reconcile his scientific training with his Christianity, Agassiz argued that he was not a “demagogue” nor was he a “defender of slavery” in terms of his polygenist beliefs. Agassiz wrote, It is has been charged upon the views here advanced that they to tend support slavery . . . Is that a fair objection to a philosophical investigation? Here we have to do only with the question of the origin of men; let the politicians, let those who feel themselves called upon to regulate human society, see what they can do with the results . . . We disclaim, however, all connection with any question involving political matters. It is simply with reference to the possibility of appreciating the differences existing between different men, and of eventually determining whether they have originated all over the world, and under what circumstances, that we have here tried to trace some facts respecting the human races. (Gould 45)



frightened by the possibility of African people being regarded as equal to white men.

To satisfy Americans and his own Christian sentiment and belief, Agassiz continued to state that the creation story of Adam and Eve that is found within the Bible “refers only to the origin of Caucasians,” and that “Negroes and Caucasians are as distinct in the mummified remains of Egypt as they are today.” As a result of these invariant and geographical differences between Africans and Europeans (Americans) Agassiz concluded that this in fact meant Africans were a different species (Gould 46). To conclude his statement, however, Agassiz contended that although he was an “objective scientist,” who had no personal or ideological investment in his findings, he still gave a moral plea to the public that Africans were inherently inferior based on his invented racialized “personality characteristics.” The indomitable, courageous, proud Indian—in how very different a light he stands by the side of the submissive, obsequious, imitative negro, or by the side of the tricky, cunning, and cowardly Mongolian! Are not these facts indications that the different races do not rank upon one level in nature . . . It seems to us to be mock-philanthropy and mock-philosophy to assume that all races have the same abilities, enjoy the same powers, and show the same natural dispositions, and that in consequence of this equality they are entitled to the same position in human society. History speaks here for itself . . . This compact continent of Africa exhibits a population which has been in constant intercourse with the white race, which has enjoyed the benefit of the example of the Egyptian civilization, of the Phoenician civilization, of the Roman civilization, of the Arab civilization . . . and nevertheless there has never been a regulated society of black men developed on that continent. Does not this indicate in this race a peculiar apathy, a peculiar indifference to the advantages afforded by civilized society? (Gould 46)

And yet Agassiz was not finished with his declaration. He completed his statement by suggesting different social policies that needed to be put into place as remedy, if you will, to solve the great problem of whites living among Africans, whom they saw as a different species. Agassiz contended that education was to be the corrective for the African. “What would be the best education to be imparted to the different races in consequence of their primitive difference . . . We entertain not the slightest doubt that human affairs with reference to the colored races would be far more judiciously conducted if, in our intercourse with them, we were guided by a full consciousness of the real difference existing between us and them, and a desire to foster those dispositions that are eminently marked in them, rather than by treating them on terms of equality” (Gould 47).



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Thus, to Agassiz, Africans needed to be educated insofar as that allowed them to remain a different and separate species. There was no need for Africans to be given sympathy for their lot as slaves or subhumans because it was biologically ordered this way. The only way, in Agassiz’s eyes, to rid whites of the guilt they “forced upon themselves” was to remain “conscious” of the fact that science as well as history had “proven” the inferiority of Africans. Whether divinely degenerated or biologically inferior, monogenists and polygenists sought to scientifically prove the inferior nature of Africans during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Inasmuch as the proponents of monogenism and polygenism were invested in “scientifically” uncovering the mysteries of mankind, they also had personal and ideological investments in rendering Africans’ bodies as inferior. What remains clear about both camps is that Africans’ physical and ideological inferiority was necessary to the very structure of European and American societies. However, the problem European and American scientists faced in the years to come was their attempt to find “actual hard data” to prove their theories. This led nineteenth-century scientists to propose a series of analogies between racial and sexual differences that was newly generated through the measuring of human skulls. Race and Gender Analogies and the Search for Hard Data

Just as monogenism and polygenism were once widely accepted theories within the European and American “scientific” community, American scientists in the nineteenth century began to search for new ways to still utilize the theory of Polygenism, while using hard or raw data to support it. European and American scientific notions of human difference and similarity “were widely accepted, partly because of their fundamental congruence with cultural expectations” (Stepan 42). It is important to remember that, culturally speaking, Europe as well as America had held on to the notions of African inferiority since the Middle Ages and, through the sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, felt they had scientifically proven this inferiority. The new emergence of racial and sexual analogy fell right in line with the ways in which Europeans as well as Americans regarded Africans. “The scientists’ contribution was to elevate hitherto unconsciously held analogies, to expand their range through new observations and comparisons, and to give them precision through specialized vocabularies and new technologies. Another result was that the analogies became ‘naturalized’ in the




language of science, and their metaphorical nature disguised” (Stepan 42). The finagled measurements of the human skull called craniometry provided scientists with the hard data they needed to link Africans with apes and other mammals and inevitably concluded that they were a different species or subhuman. “It was the measurements of the skull, brain weights, and brain convolutions that gave apparent precision to the analogies between anthropoid apes, lower races, women, criminal types, lower classes and the child” (Stepan 43). Samuel George Morton, a distinguished scientist and physician, had amassed six hundred skulls, which he began collecting in the 1820s to study his hypothesis “that a ranking of races could be established objectively by physical characteristics of the brain, particularly by its size” (Gould 51). Morton set out to rank races by the average sizes of their brains. He filled the cranial cavity with sifted white mustard seed, poured the seed back into a graduated cylinder and read the skull’s volume in cubic inches. Later on, he became dissatisfied with mustard seed because he could not obtain consistent results. The seeds did not pack well, for they were too light and still varied too much in size, despite sieving. Remeasurements of single skulls might differ by more than 5 percent, or 4 cubic inches in skulls with an average capacity near 80 cubic inches. Consequently, he switched to oneeighth-inch-diameter lead shot “of the size called BB” and achieved consistent results that never varied by more than a single cubic inch for the same skull” (Gould 53).

Morton eventually published his findings in Crania Americana in 1839 and Crania Aegyptiaca in 1844. Each table of skulls represented a “major contribution of American polygeny to debates about racial ranking. They outlived the theory of separate creations and were reprinted repeatedly during the nineteenth century as irrefutable, ‘hard’ data on the mental worth of human races” (Gould 53). Stephen Jay Gould, in Chapter 2 of his book the Mismeasure of Men, replicates Morton’s tables to refute Morton’s “hard” data about the races in terms of his skull measurements. Morton in fact finagled his “objective” and “hard” data to suit his own racist beliefs about the racial ranking of mankind. Morton’s findings “needless to say . . . matched every good Yankee’s prejudice—whites on top, Indians in the middle, and blacks on bottom; and among whites, Teutons and AngloSaxons on top, Jews in the middle, and Hindus on the bottom” (Gould 53–54). Although Gould concludes that Morton’s “hard” data was in



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fact biased, due to his accumulation of small-bodied (therefore smallbrained) African and Indian peoples and his overrepresentation of large-bodied (therefore large-brained) European and Caucasian peoples, I argue that Morton’s “hard” data was in fact only created to support his prior assumption of African inferiority. Gould goes through Morton’s research to find that “Morton’s summaries are a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions” (54). However, Gould still argues that he has no “evidence of conscious fraud” on the part of Morton because he feels that if Morton were in fact a “conscious fudger, he would not have published his data so openly” (54). I differ with Gould’s conclusion. While I’m not arguing that Morton was “consciously” skewing the data, I am arguing that his method of accumulating “hard data” to “scientifically” prove the inferiority of Africans was no different than the hypothesizing and observational data that preceded his own. European as well as American scientists not only were “scientifically” invested in the conviction of African inferiority but also created an ideological outlay with this assumption, due to their capitalist and social interests. It is at this point of departure that science and culture merged and began informing one another, so we become unclear as to where science begins and culture ends. The European and American sociopolitical structure of society rested on the scientific positioning of Africans and women in order to rank them socially, and the social positioning of Africans and women in society gave many scientists their hypotheses about how the races of man were to be ranked. The effects of “scientific” reasoning had a major impact on European and American visual culture. These differential scientific prescriptions of human rank and behavior were all translated visually through cultural, genealogical, and sociopolitical lenses to reinscribe the black female body as the antithesis of the white female body. Enslavement and Asymmetries of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

In her book Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, Lorraine O’Grady discusses the ways in which the black female body and the white female body have served as asymmetries of one another. “The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is White; on the other, not-White or, prototypically, Black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in




the West’s metaphoric construction of ‘woman.’ White is what woman is; not-White (and the stereotypes not-White gathers in) is what she had better not be” (152). Colonial expansion, enslavement, and “science” all contributed to the ways in which the black female body came to be regarded within visual and actual European culture (Gilman 100; Sharpley-Whiting 22; Stoler 14; Willis and Williams 1–2). While the scientific community concluded Africans were inferior biologically, the institutions of enslavement and colonization advanced the conclusion that Africans were inferior ideologically as well physically. During enslavement, the black body was turned into a corporeal possession that mattered, as it was physically productive for plantation work. Enslavement as an institution visually and aesthetically altered the African body, leaving its corporeal value open to interpretation and perception. Since African bodies were being viewed through a racist and sexist “scientific” lens, the worth of the African body hinged on the ideological convictions of Europeans. In her work Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitations of Sex, Judith Butler retraces the origins of materiality and argues “the classical configuration of matter as a site of generation or origination becomes especially significant when the account of what an object is and means requires recourse to its originating principle” (31). More specifically, she argues that matter (flesh or corporeality), when not associated with reproduction, is generally linked to origination and causality. In her discussion of matter she locates the substances of which any physical object consists or is composed, and these substances themselves assume a history and a form. In the second component of her argument, Butler begins to discuss the production of intelligibility—how individuals’ own subjectivity often reads a body’s worth. She contends that the materiality or matter of the body in and of itself is not an absolute certainty but is rooted in a matrix of origination and composure that is inevitability colored by European rationality and power and leads one to intelligibility—a subjective reading of matter. Therefore “to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where ‘to matter’ means at once ‘to materialize’ and ‘to mean’” (32). Consequently, if the body then is clearly matter, how that body comes to materialize, mean, or matter is contingent on its origination, its transformation, and its potentiality; the body’s intelligibility therefore is not a given but is produced. Butler goes on to discuss how the discourse surrounding these bodies that “don’t matter” happens at the site of performativity,



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which is colored by modalities of power. “For discourse to materialize a set of effects, ‘discourse’ itself must be understood as complex and convergent chains in which ‘effects’ are vectors of power. In this sense, what is constituted in discourse is not fixed in or by discourse, but becomes the condition and occasion for further action. This does not mean that any action is possible on the basis of a discursive effect. On the contrary, certain reiterative chains of discursive production are barely legible as reiterations, for the effects they have materialized are those without which no bearing in discourse can be taken” (32). Performativity, Butler argues, is not “willful” or “arbitrary” but has been confined to the domains of intelligibility, which are bound with the effects of a “historicity of discourse” and “historicity” of norms, which have constituted the power of discourse. Therefore, the normalization of the body depends largely on reiteration and exclusion. Butler’s argument delineates the ways in which European enslavers physically and ideologically removed African bodies from their respective social contexts during enslavement. I contend that as a result of doing this, European enslavers reinvented the materiality of African bodies as commodities (which inevitably excluded them from normalcy). As Europeans placed themselves in a position of authority over African bodies, they simultaneously placed themselves in a position to reproduce the intelligibility of African bodies. As a result, Europeans began to recreate and rewrite the origins, transformation, and potentiality of African bodies through the institutions of enslavement, colonization, and science. Since African bodies existed during enslavement and colonization as commodified possessions and were regarded within the realm of science as either apes or subhuman creations that happened to be bodies, the materiality of their bodies became less significant and in fact disposable, therefore scripting African bodies as having no origins, no transformative abilities, and no potential, inevitably making them not matter. “In the name of science, colonized peoples were compared to Western types. Major institutions were founded to finance and support such work: the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1843; the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris in 1859; and the National Geographic Society, founded in the United States in 1888. Studies of skin color, facial structure, and particularly genitalia contributed to the classification of human types. Regarded as less developed than White, Black became associated with moral deficiency, sexual deviance, and intellectual inferiority” (Willis and Williams 1–2). As a consequence of this process, African bodies became the mere corporeal




manifestations of the European imagination. The social and ideological assignment of black bodies as deviant, impulsive, hypersexual, imitative, and criminal by European science, culture, and society transformed African bodies into Europe’s commodified possessions. Europe having “scientifically,” ideologically, physically, and culturally obscured the social and political relations of their African commodities, the value attributed to these possessions was based solely upon their presented appearance. This appearance was then measured against bodies that Europe deemed normal or typical (which were inevitably their own). The European “scientific” conclusion that designated African bodies as inferior, as I have said before, inevitably translated into the visual culture of the West. The nude or seminude bodies of black women in nineteenth-century paintings and photographs suggested the hypersexuality of African (black) women and the hidden sexuality of European women who, although objectified through these visual images, were still allowed to remain modest and fully human. Consequently, this juxtaposition of semiclothed European women with nude black women in the art world and the already “scientific” conclusion that designated African (black) female and male bodies inferior in the larger society converted the speculation and fantasies of black sexuality as deviant or abnormal sexuality into concrete fact. Thus, at any point in time when the black female body and African female body caught the European gaze, it becomes not only important that they were written about and studied in a particular way in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, but the black female body also came to represent a different type of physiological difference to Europe and ultimately to the West. The “scientific,” and differential conclusions that Europe reached in terms of the black female body, over determined the anatomy and persona of the black female body to such a degree that in fact invented an ideological construction that was as much real as it was imagined. African or black women soon turned into public spectacle and “scientific discovery” and came not only to embody this invention but also, in fact, their bodies came to serve as the “master texts” or example of it. This (European) Western projection of “hypersexuality,” “immodesty,” and “inhumanity” onto the black or African female body served two essential needs for Europe. The first is that this invention allowed and continues to allow (European) Western man to serve as the pinnacle of humanity and further helps to maintain his sexual, racial, and moral superiority. Second, it established an ideological perception of the black female body that made these



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scripts inherent to what blackness and femaleness meant and mean. Black female bodies on any kind of display—then on stages, now on television—gave Europe and now the West a corporeal example for the “scientific conclusions” that it had reached concerning the black female body. The imagery surrounding black female bodies then (as is the case now) was and is both erotic and propagandistic. Our representation and the discourse surrounding our “fleshy” figure have now informed our own collective perception of what it physically means to be black and female. Although different ideologies have informed our collective consciousness throughout time and space, the invented black feminine body is still regarded in the same way, and although the purposes for the invention have changed and continue to be nuanced to fit its particular moments, the invention, necessary for European and now Western corporeal affirmation, remains one of the only representations of black feminine embodiment that we see. This becomes problematic not only for the women who inhabit these black and female bodies but also for our entire nation. In the aftermath of Don Imus’s “nappy-headed hoes” comment about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, the black feminine body has once again resurfaced for both blacks and whites as the living embodiment of the black female body. Imus, knowing nothing personally about the black women who played for the Rutgers basketball team, inferred because of their visible blackness and femaleness that they were in fact “whores” as well as “nappy headed.” Imus, like many of his European predecessors, inferred that the black and female basketball players’ bodies represented in their mere physiology the projected image and invention of the “black feminine body.” From the fifteenth to the twenty-first century, the dangerous and vile bodies of black women have continued to be constructed as the subsets of humanity or revealed their bodies’ uninhibited and ball-busting whorish nature. In every century it has been imperative that the constructed “black feminine body” continue to resurface and reappear in film, television, and videos, to ensure that Western man’s “superior” position within the Western body politic is solidified. The current analysis of the black female body and its invented image—the black feminine body—is in no way conclusive. It rather offers an alternative lens through which to possibly understand why the black female body has been and is seen as the black feminine body. If this chapter has accomplished anything, I hope it serves as testimony to the fact that despite popular belief, the




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Notes 1. I use the term “Black Feminine body” to refer to specific black female body (gendered and sexual) performances that embody (European) Western projections of the “hypersexuality,” “immodesty,” and “inhumanity” regarded as inherent to blackness and femaleness. 2. Winthrop Jordan in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 argues that “English voyagers did not touch the shores of West Africa until after 1550, a century after . . . [the] Portuguese thrust southward for a water passage to the Orient.” Although Jordan states English, I say Europe here because it was not just English men and women who had these thoughts of African people. Travel logs from the Portuguese and the French state these types of sentiments concerning African people. 3. Although Butler does not specifically discuss race, she discusses the queering of the body with her exclusion theory. I utilize this point in her argument to insert race for queering.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitations of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Davidson, Basil. The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics. New York: Three Rivers, 1995. Print. Gilman, Sander. Sexuality: An Illustrated History. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989. Print. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason.” Feminist Epistemologies. Ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. New York: Routledge, 1994. 190–200. Print. Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550– 1812. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1968. Print. O’Grady, Lorraine. “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Joanna Freuh et al. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 150–52. Print. Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Print.



script and the subsequent invented black feminine body did not start with us. However, it is up us to take on the challenge of discovering and inventing new ways for the black female body to become regarded and seen. Indeed this is a great challenge, but hopefully, our ancestral legacy of survival and maintenance will aid us in this quest.

Peterson, Carla. “Foreword: Eccentric Bodies.” Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African American Women. Ed. Michael Bennett et al. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. viiii–xi. Print. Scheman, Naomi. Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege. New York: Routledge, 1993. 185–87. Print. Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon, 1993. Print. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Print. Stepan, Nancy Leys. “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science.” Anatomy of Racism. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Print. Stoler, Ann. “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia.” The Gender/Sexuality Reader. Ed. Roger N. Lancaster et al. New York: Routledge, 1997. 13–36. Print. Willis, Deborah, and Carla Williams. The Black Female Body: A Photographic History. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. Print.







Disembodiments Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Metamorphoses Ana Nunes

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igurations of the Middle Passage have presented the body as an archive of a history that attempts to deal with the want of a continuum of cultural memory. Artists’ reliance on a history that has to be constructed and imagined is reflected on a marked black body. In her painting Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family/ Ghosts (1988), Howardena Pindell positions herself at the center of her autobiographical account. Her face emerges clear from the water, but her body is submerged in a blue sea of a personal history that is made more from scraps than from a continuous narrative thread. Sinking her own body in deep water, the central figure in the canvas establishes a link between her contemporary self and that of the forebears. The ancestors appear as broken figures—disembodied hands, limbs, the occasional partial or blurred head—but the figure that dominates the image is the eye. The eye is cut from the face, but nonetheless imposes a significant gaze on the viewer. Pindell’s work reveals several layers of African American history, from slavery to a more recent past, evident in the inclusion of extracts from edicts governing the institution and the rights of slave owners, a printout of the “Separate but Equal” credo of the Jim Crow era, and other scraps of text that are an integral part of the tableau created by the artist. However, it is the white diagram of a slave ship that stands out in Pindell’s genealogical and historical scrapbook. The depiction of a ship that refuses to be sunk in the blue that covers the canvas,



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imposing its whiteness as an entry to another time and space, represents the original ghost of African American experience. Although the figure of the ship reflects nineteenth-century illustrations of this type of vessel, the conventional representation of the stacked black bodies is absent here. The ancestral bodies are no longer confined to the ship’s hold, but they are no longer whole or together either. Rather, they are dispersed in the genealogical map of the Americas—fragmented and mutilated. Although the slave ship constitutes a central element of Pindell’s composition, she challenges its role as the primary link to Africa, the ancestral home. A series of strips was sewn to the canvas, alluding to, as Sharon F. Patton observes, “the narrow-strip weavings of West of Africa, to women’s handiwork, and, with the impasto of paint, creat[ing] a corrugated surface that suggests physical and psychological wounds and healing” (242). The healing, notwithstanding, remains compromised by the mark left on the surface on the canvas/psyche/ skin, the eternal scar of history. In her Coral Cities series, African American artist Ellen Gallagher enters into dialogue with Pindell’s work. Both artists see the body as a vehicle to explore the imprints of black history in the African American consciousness. Gallagher, however, challenges Pindell’s autobiographical scrapbook. Her approach to the African American historical record is to explore the ways in which history can be recreated, if not factually, imaginatively. Gallagher draws attention to the influence that stereotypical representations of race and gender exercise on American culture. Referring to a lasting caricature of black people, the artist observes, “Black face minstrel . . . is the literal reading of the African body into American public culture. Disembodied eyes and lips float, hostage in the electric face of the minstrel stage, distorting the African body into American black face” (Heartney 254). Gallagher attempts to represent the multiple processes of objectification that have reigned over private and collective consciousness. In this way, she also challenges traditional boundaries established between visual arts and the politics of race and gender. The idea of art for art’s sake is challenged by the examination of critical historical, social, and economic contexts. Her work incites the viewer to rethink the cultural tendency to read the black body, particularly the black female body, as a cultural text. Moreover, the artist calls for an African American self-generated subjectivity in which the self is able to reconceptualize her or his own body outside imposed hegemonic discourses. Central to this project is the deconstruction of the artificial boundary established between



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private and public spheres. Thus, Gallagher’s artistic project is consistent with feminist criticism that emphasizes the influence of the public arena over the private, interior self and the imperative to deconstruct the body as a cultural signifier. The black female body has been, as Hortense J. Spillers puts it, “a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury rhetoric wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” (454). In order to challenge the black face with bulging eyes, enlarged lips, flattened nose, the black female self has to appropriate its own body—often a marker of imposed signification—and construct its own meanings, questioning both culturally acquired internal and external gazes. In Coral Cities, Gallagher reimagines the black Atlantic as a mythological aquatic world inhabited by the descendants of pregnant slaves who either plunged or were thrown into the ocean during the Middle Passage. The slaves’ unborn children adapted to the water in utero and developed into half-human, half-fish beings. For Gallagher, the aquatic realm provides the ideal setting in which to reveal and transform African American history. In her work, human and aquatic forms merge to suggest an identity characterized by hybridity, mutability, and fragmentation. These postmodern markers are apparent in the representation of disembodied female heads. In this respect, and others that will become apparent throughout this exploration, Gallagher’s work challenges the idea of originality, which was at the center of the modernist movement and engages in a creative practice that appropriates material from other media, giving it new form and meaning. In this instance, the artist uses the Drexciya project of the eponymous Detroit techno band led by James Stinson and Gerald Donald (see Tate 18). At the centre of Drexciya is an aquatic community of female slaves who either jumped or were thrown overboard during the inferno of the Middle Passage. Critical to both Drexciya and Gallagher’s version, Coral Cities is the idea of resistance present in the figuration of marooned communities. However, those who escaped their masters, either by force or by their own resolve, are not placed in the mountaintops of the West Indies, or in recondite parts of Brazil where they would lead a life of isolation or be threatened by the danger of capture. Nonetheless, Coral Cities does not represent an ideal of freedom, but rather freedom within captivity. The watery deep transports the slaves and their descendants to a civilization beneath the black Atlantic, but this is not a return to the ancestral home. It is a return to the watery deep made impossible by the physical mutations that the slaves undergo in order to survive in



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the new aquatic environment. In this context, Gallagher’s work suggests that both in the watery deep and in the New World, the displacement imposed by the Middle Passage required more than survival; it demanded metamorphosis and evolution. This notion of a compromised freedom is reflected in Gallagher’s representation of the Maroons as disembodied heads. In fact, on the rare occasion when the body is represented, as in the central piece of the exhibition presented in the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery in 2007, it is disfigured and dismembered. In this piece, Bird in Hand (oil, mixed media, gold leaf on canvas, 2006), the Melvillian Ahab is transformed into a black mariner with preoccupations of his own. His wooden leg has gained roots, embedding this figure in the seabed—the graveyard of those lost in the Middle Passage. The use of rooting imagery here is significant in a number of ways. With its connotations of rummaging, inquiry, turning things over in search of something—the bodies of the missing, a partially lost past, layers of culture diluted in sea water—the image of the sailor functions as the artist’s alter ego en route to a foraging expedition. The findings appear not only scattered on the surface of Bird in Hand but also on the canvas of the other works in the exhibition. Thus, as Karen Alexander puts it, Peg-Leg’s “magnetic presence sucks in the whole of black history . . . , sailing the seas of history to retrieve the discarded cargo of black souls” (77). Gallagher’s visual strategy is based on minute pictographs (which in Bird in Hand form the subject’s Afro) built on shallow relief, which on closer examination reveal eyes, mouths, noses, hairstyles that the artist has distorted in order to portray the imprint of racial discourses on the black female body. Peg-Leg’s laced cuff that adorns his only arm alludes to a time when slave ships triangulated the Atlantic, but a closer look at the locks that compose his colossal Afro reveal Gallagher’s attempt to cross temporal and spatial boundaries. Each lock of hair reveals its own small vignette. Several of these vignettes represent a hand holding a magnifying lens, revealing the microscopic specks of dirt on another hand, reminding the viewer of Gallagher’s preoccupation with what lies beneath the surface. Her work demands a closer look at the world and an attention to detail, and above all it elicits a different view of the familiar. In this way, Peg-Leg’s Afro evokes both those lost to the Middle Passage and those who, in the twentieth century, lost their identities to the imperative to conform their bodies to standardized notions of white beauty. By filling Peg-Leg’s strands of hair with images from



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advertisements found in black magazines of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Gallagher recontextualizes these images. On one hand, she takes these depictions of black female models advertising products such as “Miracle Whip” and “Greaseless,” which promise straighter hair or lighter skin, and sets them against words and phrases such as “success,” “human,” “buy it,” “Love Charm,” and “You!” The obvious link between image and text is the obliteration of the female self in a culture that singles out certain black women’s physical attributes as undesirable but somewhat redeemable by consumer goods. Nonetheless, Gallagher’s artistic project is more ambitious than this. Even as she presents a parody of the kinds of interiorized racist gaze on the female black body, as Hal Foster et al observe, “she breaks down its constituent parts, its loaded details nearly to the point of their destruction” (642). The adverb “nearly” calls attention to the dangerous waters navigated by Gallagher. The use of stereotypical images of African Americans runs the risk of perpetuating the racist discourses that the artist attempts to dismantle. However, portraying stereotypes as a primary mark of racism, Gallagher does not merely present a collage of the images she collects from midcentury black publications such as Ebony, Black Digest, and Our World. Working with Plasticine, cut paper on paper, gesso, gold leaf, and ink, among other techniques, she reworks the caricature of the black face, flattening the nose, widening the lips, distorting the eyes almost to a point beyond recognition. Imposing her low relief on formulaic depictions of black people, she restages the racial identity of the American un/conscious. This strategy, which the critic Kobena Mercer calls “the stereotypical grotesque” (Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh 641)1 allows the artist to confront stereotypical representations of race and gender (changing its attributes and contexts), while turning the gaze of racism on the viewer.2 It is interesting to note that, like Pindell’s Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family/Ghosts and Gallagher’s Coral Cities, the eye remains a powerful witness of racist structures and the preferred metonymy for both external and internalized gazes. By turning the gaze of racial prejudice on the other, African American artists expose “the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze,” just as Morrison explains in her 1993 afterword to The Bluest Eye (168). However, Gallagher’s use of stereotypical representations of the black body is distinct from other contemporary black female artists. Carrie Mae Weems, for example, challenges the objectification of the black body as an image of otherness by constructing intimate portraits of the



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black family, often drawn from her personal experiences and familial history. Bringing her camera into the domestic space, Weems contests two influential approaches to the black body as cultural archive. One is the photo-documentary tradition that has produced a vast catalogue of the African American as the Other. The second is the official sociological study, such as the notorious 1965 Moynihan Report on the black family, which has objectified the African American family unit and turned it into a kind of scientific paradigm with roots in Darwinist ideas of social evolution. In projects such as the series Family Pictures and Kitchen Table, Weems aims at drawing a complex identity for the black self by representing African American subjectivity in intimate settings guarded from the hegemonic gaze. If Weems’s portraits aim at representing a black body using markers of individuality of the self and complexity of experience, Lorna Simpson makes use of what Beryl J. Wright terms the “generic figure” (401). Simpson’s photographs usually reveal a partial female body. The head may have been cut from the image, or more characteristically the body is represented from the back. “Concealment or effacement of body elements, particularly of the face,” as Wright observes, “is an act of resistance that denies the presumption of unrestricted access to the exterior body and to the interior life within” (406). In this way, the viewer’s desire or subconscious inclination to master the figure’s interiority is frustrated. Simpson’s early projects, such as The Water Bearer (1986), present the “generic figure” that will become archetypal in her work. A black woman in what appears to be a white cotton shift aims to represent any black woman who finds herself at the crossroads of racism, sexism, and economic disadvantage. Through the use of these devices, Simpson, as Wright suggests, “enables the studio model to achieve her iconic role as ‘Every-black-woman’ and avoids any unintended conflation between the individual and the generic figure” (406). Simpson’s generic figure attempts to dilute the body as cultural archive. Guarded Conditions (1989), a series of Polaroid photographs, features a woman seen from behind in attire that veils both her age and her social class. Below the prints runs a sequence of text that alternates throughout the series: “SKIN ATTACKS/SEX ATTACKS.” Not only does the juxtaposition of the image and text set sexual and racialized versions of the female black body against its biological and even medical dimensions, but this pairing also strives to complicate black corporeality and deconstruct one-dimensional representations of the African American self.



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While Simpson presents the body as a complex physical reality that is better conveyed in a partial or veiled manner, Gallagher chooses to omit it from her work. Her focus is on a face distorted by the “stereotypical grotesque” or presenting a rather innovative version of the “generic figure.” “Denial of access,” as Wright argues, “is the effective means to control all forms of dominant gaze” (406). The absence of the body closes it to imposed interpretations. However, in order for the head to function as more than a metonymic fragment, Gallagher’s work, which clearly plays with the notion of “denial of access,” requires a novel representational code. Gallagher’s artistic vision is rooted in the idea of finding a visual strategy that can translate the absences of African American history into tangible presences, revising realistic reconstructions of the past in search of “new representations . . . in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable,” as Jean-François Lyotard puts it (81). In Coral Cities, Gallagher creates a fantasy out of the historical reality of the Middle Passage. The artist combs the seabed in search of those who threw themselves or were thrown out of slave ships. In the series Watery Ecstatic 2003, 2005, and 2006, the slaves are found in the watery deep as part of marvellous sea creatures. In one painting from Watery Ecstatic 2005 (unnumbered series) a jellyfish, painted in vivid greens and dazzling pinks, carries in its trailing tentacles the faces of the lost and found. Their hair has become almost pure white, perhaps marking the passage of time, and their faces are somewhat expressionless, indicating that the freedom of the deep sea does not represent a return to either homeland or family. The motif of the jellyfish, or sometimes only its floating tentacles, is repeated in this series of watercolors (which also make use of pencil, ink, oil, varnish, cut paper, and other techniques), but there is variation in the repetition. In one of the 2003 works, sea urchins with their hard spines drift dangerously close to the heads of the marooned, reminding the viewer of the sharp edges of a painful history. In another, a white fish reveals its menacing teeth. The white fish directly carved on paper contrasts with the green tentacles of the jellyfish, reminiscent of the ghostly “men without skin” who haunt Morrison’s Beloved (210). In all these works, the most vivid aspect of the minute faces that punctuate the floating green ribbons of the aquatic creatures is the eyes. The eyes, which make a noticeable attempt to catch the eyes of the other faces, reveal a desire for connection, communication, and community.



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The need to reestablish a sense of community when all that was familiar has vanished is also evoked in the Watery Ecstatic works of 2004 and 2005 in which the artist carves her imaginings directly onto layers of white watercolor paper. Here Gallagher plays with the scrimshaw crafting used by whalers to pass the time. The mariners tended to carve figurations of their trade, women, or home (Lipman, Warren, and Bishop 112). Gallagher’s work evokes the last motif. The circular form in which she arranges the series of female heads suggests a sense of community and the desire to establish links to the ancestral home. This connection between these marooned communities and Africa is made by transforming hair, a natural aspect of the physiological body, into a cultural signifier. The hair of the jellyfish series is depicted as organic matter at the mercy of the currents and the passage of time, while in works such as Dirty O’s (2006) and Bird in Hand, to state just two examples, hair is represented as a cultural object. In these the clipped images from black magazines display advertisements for wigs for women that mimic the characteristics of white hair with its attributes of desirability and attractiveness. Both wig and wig wearers, as mentioned before, are transformed by Gallagher’s use of the stereotypical grotesque, and the oppressive standards of white female beauty are revealed. Gallagher is well aware that hair, as Mercer puts it, “is never a straightforward biological fact, because it is almost always groomed, prepared, cut, concealed and generally worked upon by human hands. Such practices socialize hair, making it the medium of significant statements about self and society and the codes of value that bind them, or do not” (420). In Gallagher’s hands, hair is portrayed as a malleable medium invested with symbolic value. It can unveil racist ideology, exhume the history of the Middle Passage, or reveal African cultural practices. It is worth noting that in Gallagher’s work these figurations of hair are not clearly divided in ideological or semiotic fields, but they are part of parallel and sometimes competing meanings, as in the case of Peg-Leg’s Afro, which encloses the miniature pictographs of the wig advertisements. In this way, Gallagher deconstructs the Afro as “natural” black hair and places it in its cultural and political contexts as a reaction vehicle against hegemonic ideologies. The artist’s project is one that juxtaposes seemingly disparate realities, spaces, and time spans in order to reveal the complexity of African American history and identity. Thus, the Afro also functions as link between now and the past, bondage and ideologies of consumption, and as a “reconstitutive link to Africa . . . helping



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to redefine a diaspora people not as Negro but as Afro-American,” as Mercer argues (423). Diaspora is a key element of Gallagher’s work. Her own familial history encompasses Atlantic islands. Her father’s family comes from the Cape Verde archipelago, where her grandfather was a whaler before he left for Providence, Rhode Island, and her mother has roots in Ireland. The navigation of the Atlantic, as the forced voyage of the Middle Passage, or the more contemporary strained journey of migration functions as central leitmotif in the artist’s oeuvre. This Atlantic diaspora is perhaps more clearly articulated in her scrimshaw works. Seen from a distance, these seem to be maps of islands lost in the oceanic vastness and, as such, they suggest the imperative of creating a cartography of the Middle Passage and its diaspora. In this manner, the artist shows her understanding of the role of art as memorial and monument to the dead and object of remembrance to the living. Upon closer inspection, Gallagher’s white maps reveal a loose circle of disembodied female heads, displaying intricate hairstyles evoking African hair culture. Here hair functions as the signpost to Africa. It is interesting to note that in these works, the generic figure of the jellyfish paintings is absent. There is an individualization of the female figure represented by the diverse hairstyles. This points to the ethnic variety seen aboard the slave ships and the decimation of a continent that then, as now, was culturally diverse. The distinctiveness of the place of ancestry is frequently lost in a substantive that describes a whole continent, stressing the memories vanished in the transatlantic crossing. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that in Western culture and even in African American visual and literary production, Africa, a vast and culturally and linguistically varied region, is often represented as uniform and somewhat standardized. The concept of hegemony is, thus, a fluid one. Gallagher, however, via her meticulous carving, confers to each figure her own sense of individuality. Albeit with all other references lost in the seabed, a rhetoric of nationality or ethnicity cannot be reconstructed. But it can, as Gallagher demonstrates, be signaled. A critical aspect of Gallagher’s insistence on the diasporic as a means of representing a historical chart of the New World from the Middle Passage to the present day is the representation of the marked or mutilated black body. Morrison is possibly the one contemporary author who has given primacy to the female body as marked territory that challenges her characters’ own sense of identity. From Pauline’s deformed foot; Eva’s missing leg; Sula’s birthmark; Baby Sugg’s limp;



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Sethe’s scarred back described by Paul D in a moment of (com)passion as “the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display” (Morrison, Beloved 17) and instants later as “a revolting clump of scars” (Morrison, Beloved 21); Sethe’s mother’s branded body, whose mouth is permanently twisted from being punished with a bit; Beloved’s “smile under her chin” (Morrison, Beloved 275); Golden Gray’s lost arm; and Dorca’s marked face, the body defies the characters’ sense of self while remaining elusive as a means of explaining that same self. As McDowell persuasively argues, “In Beloved, as throughout Morrison’s corpus, the dispersed pieces of the body can only partly represent the ‘self ’ and are not reducible to the ‘self.’ In other words, body and self do not coincide; the body does not constitute the sum total of the self ” (308). When Beloved emerges from the water, it seems that her body is all that is left from her crossing. Nonetheless, despite her unlined skin, her body is broken: “It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces. When her tooth came out—an odd fragment, last in a row—she thought it was starting” (133). Morrison dramatizes the loss of home and family, the disruption of all mores to the point that all that is left from the transatlantic passage is the body. However, this is a body that has been kidnapped, shackled, beaten, abused, subjected to hunger, cold, and lying in its own filth—this is an occupied body. In Beloved, the colonized body is a site of both physical and psychological oppression: “Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you . . . Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up” (251). For Morrison, the body is a “stubbornly local phenomenon,” as Terry Eagleton puts it (70). Thus, it constitutes a plastic surface where history has left definite imprints. However, manifested in this writer’s work is also how the local and historical can be universal and timeless, and how the marked body can link past and future in search of “new representations . . . in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable,” to return to Lyotard. In Gallagher’s work the notion of the occupied body manifested in Morrison’s novel gives way to a sense of absence. The strategy of disembodiment seemingly frees the self from its scarred corporeality. However, the head, the house of personal and racial memory, remains. The eyes also remain, bearing witness to the physical assaults on the body. Gallagher shares with Morrison the interest in the dialectic between



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past and present and in a diasporic body that can encompass several places and time spans. These are artistic projects that require a new aesthetic. Such art, as Homi Bhabha puts it, “demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of the past and present . . . Such art does not merely recall the past, refiguring its contingent ‘inbetween’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living” (7). Inherent in Bhabha’s “past-present” is the creation of the future diaspora, which is influenced by the collective memory, but not confined by it; moved by history, but not defeated by it. “This kind of work,” as Nicholas Mirzoeff states, “cannot be done by standard histories or realistic representations” (209). This is precisely the diasporic reality that Gallagher seeks to construct: a reality that it not limited by the boundaries of factual histories or the frontiers of realistic representations. The revision of hegemonic histories, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue, requires the creation of alternative aesthetics: “These aesthetics bypass the formal conventions of dramatic realism . . . featuring other historical rhythms, other narrative structures, other views of the body, sexuality, spirituality, and collective life” (41). This is a polycentric figurative and narrative model aimed at disrupting authoritarian forms of discourse. In Coral Cities, Gallagher attempts to recover the undocumented and fundamentally “unpresentable” past of the diaspora. There is no record of those who died en route aboard slave ships. “They never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people,” as Morrison explains (Darling 247). Thus, Gallagher’s creation of a fantastic aquatic world corresponds with a desire to visually represent a historical reality for which there is no register. This “desire for narrative freedom from realism, and from univocal narrative stance,” as Wendy Faris states, also “implicitly correspond[s] textually in a new way to a critique of totalitarian discourses of all kinds” (180). In this way, inherent in Gallagher’s project is not only the adoption of the fantastic as an effective means of portraying African American history but also the pursuit of a figurative model that would allow her to present a critique of dominant ideologies. Her creation of a fantastic world inhabited by half-human, half-fish creatures can, thus, be equated to the use of magical realism in the literary text. Magical realism, as Theo L. D’haen argues, enables writers to displace hegemonic ideologies by “first appropriating the techniques of the ‘centr-al’ line and then . . . create an alternative world correcting so-called existing



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reality, and thus to right the wrongs this ‘reality’ depends upon. Magical realism thus reveals itself as a ruse to invade and take over dominant discourse(s)” (195). Hence, magical realism facilitates the displacement of the hegemonic control over discourse and recovers the silenced voices of those who remained outside history and who were, therefore, obliterated from realistic modes of representation. In this way, Gallagher, like magical-realist writers, offers the viewer a counternarrative that aims at critiquing, revising, and transforming the world as perceived in stereotypical views of identity and history. Hers is not a chronological or linear history, as implied in the circular form of her figurations and the juxtaposing of elements from different times and places, but rather a history that aims at disrupting the linearity of narratives rooted in practices of institutional abuse, thus unsettling forms of univocal discourse. For this artist, the diasporic present is embedded in the past and several time spans can be condensed, juxtaposed, contrasted in the same canvas. There is, then, a sense that history is spatial rather than temporal. This evokes the techniques used in Romare Bearden’s collages where African American history is represented, as Patton states, in “an overall shallow pictorial space . . . There is a similar jazz-rhythm created for the eye in the juxtaposition of different-sized figures in one spatial plane” (189). In this graphic space where the lost bodies of the Middle Passage are set side by side with the bodies lost to demands of hegemonic discourses of the twentieth century, Gallagher paints a canvas of synthesis in which seemingly contradictory forces such as past and present, personal and collective can be contained, evoking Houston Baker’s view of the blues as “a robust matrix, where endless antinomies are mediated and understanding and explanation finds conditions of possibility” (7). Her work confronts the viewer with these paradoxical elements. As Ralph Ellison states in relation to another artist, Gallagher’s canvases reflect the “leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of the Negro history” (Patton 189). In this manner, Gallagher’s notion of diaspora is characterized by heterogeneity and hybridity. Her watery metamorphoses of the black body point toward diasporic identities that are, as Stuart Hall observes, “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235).



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Disembodiments 57

1. The “stereotypical grotesque” was used by black artists such as Faith Ringgold and David Hammons in the 1970s. 2. The “stereotypical grotesque” has also been used to dismantle preconceived notions of sexuality tied to ideas of race and gender. Karen Walker’s caricatures of sexual scenes between slaves and their masters is a good example of how this type of grotesque can be used to challenge different aspects of the politics of identity.

Works Cited Alexander, Karen. “A Challenge to History: Ellen Gallagher’s Coral Cities.” Coral Cities: Ellen Gallagher. Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2007. 71–78. Print. Baker, Houston, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Darling, Marsha. “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danielle Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. 244–46. Print. D’haen, Theo L. “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 191–208. Print. Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Post-Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Print. Faris, Wendy B. “Sheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995, 163–190. Print. Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora”, 1990. Web. . Heartney, Eleanor. “Mapping the Unmentionable.” After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Ed. Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott. London: Prestel, 2007, 252–73. Print. Lipman, Jean, Elizabeth V. Warren, and Robert Charles Bishop. Young America: A Folk Art History. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press/Museum of American Folk Art, 1986. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. Mercer, Kobena. “Black Hair/Style Politics.” The Subcultures Reader. Ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton. New York: Routledge, 1997. 420–35. Print.



Notes

McDowell, Deborah E. “Recovery Missions: Imaging the Body Ideals.” Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. Ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001. 296–317. Print. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Multiple Viewpoint: Diaspora and Visual Culture.” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002. 204– 214. Print. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Picador, 1988. Print. ———. The Bluest Eye, 1970. London: Virago, 1994. Print. Patton, Sharon F. African-American Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics.” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002. 525–32. Print. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. London: Duke UP, 1994. 454–81. Print. Tate, Greg. “Are You Free or Are You a Mystery?” Coral Cities: Ellen Gallagher. Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2007. 17–29. Print. Wright, Beryl J. “Black Body: Recording the Body.” Callaloo 19.2 (1996): 397–413.



58 Ana Nunes

Stigmata Embodying the Scars of Slavery Venetria K. Patton

D

eborah McDowell has observed that while black men wrote most of the slave narratives, black women have written the majority of contemporary novels about slavery—novels that emphasize “not what was done to slave women, but what they did with what was done to them” (146). I would argue that black women writers’ investment in contemporary novels of slavery is rooted in the history of partus sequitur ventrem—the child follows the condition of the mother. Thus the mother’s body determined the slave status of her offspring. Through this doctrine, the mother’s body serves as a border to police the purity of the nation’s boundary (Patton 124). In Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture, Laura Doyle notes, “In the race-bounded economy the mother is a maker and marker of boundaries, a generator of liminality . . .” (27). This position of “maker and marker of boundaries” places slave women in a rather precarious position. According to Doyle, “Because of the mother’s alignment with the body and her function as reproducer of the group as a social body, the mother comes to signify, often ambivalently, a bodily and collective past” (6). It is this collective past that I find embodied in the scars prevalent in contemporary novels of slavery, whether it is Ursa’s damaged womb in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), Dana’s severed arm in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), or Lizzie’s scarred body in Phyllis Alesia



3

Perry’s Stigmata (1999). Whether through stories passed down by the Corregidora women, Dana’s supernatural time travel, or Lizzie’s inexplicable shackle scars, these protagonists must cope with a matrilineal history shrouded in the pain of slavery. However, for the purpose of this chapter, I will limit my discussion to Perry’s Stigmata and Lizzie’s relationships with her grandmother, Grace, and great-great-grandmother, Ayo. Although the intercession of Grace and Ayo may initially seem unsettling and unwelcome since it leads to 14 years of confinement in mental institutions, the story that unfolds is actually one of healing as Lizzie connects to a matrilineal story of slavery and its legacy. In fact, Lizzie’s scars illustrate the ongoing process of healing slavery’s wounds. I will argue that Perry uses Lizzie’s scars or stigmata as a way of exploring and rewriting the meaning of the African American body. In Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature, Carol Henderson argues that the scarred black body serves “as an active metaphor for the reinvention of African American subjectivity within certain cultural moments” (7). I assert that authors of contemporary novels of slavery do not return to the site of slavery in order to emphasize its devastating effects, but instead use their writing as a means to heal the wounds of slavery. Thus Lizzie’s scarred body serves as a rewriting of the legacy of slavery. The condition of slavery is often seen as one that eradicated ties to African homelands and traditions and left a broken or damaged person; however, we see in Stigmata an insistence on remembering not just the harm inflicted by slavery, but a determination to cling to the scraps of African heritage as well. We see characters who may be physically damaged but who refuse to be mentally broken. Slavery then becomes a legacy of survival, not defeat. Stigmata opens in Atlanta in 1994 with Lizzie having been in her latest mental institution for the past two years. She finds it funny that the doctor thinks he’s cured her madness, while she knows there is no cure for her condition. After 14 years “and some well-acted moments of sanity,” she is headed home to Tuskegee (Perry 6). It is clear from the outset that Lizzie is playing the role of the cured patient. However, what becomes increasingly clear is that her diagnosis of insanity may have been a misreading of slavery’s scars. The story unfolds in a nonlinear format of multilayered flashbacks, present tense, and excerpts from her great-great-grandmother’s journal. A sense of circularity is introduced by the first entry from Ayo’s diary, dated December 26, 1898, in which Ayo explains to Lizzie’s great-grandmother, Joy, why she wants her to record her history. Ayo’s



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insistence on documenting her story is her first attempt to rewrite the legacy of slavery. With enslavement, Ayo was expected to forget her African past, but the first thing Ayo does with her journal is to deny her slave name and claim her African name: “‘Bessie ain’t my name . . . My name Ayo’” (Perry 7). Bessie, we assume, is the name Ayo was given by her owners, but this is her story, not theirs. After stating that her true name is Ayo, she notes the importance of remembering who one is and what one means to the world: “‘I come from a long line of forever people. We are forever. Here at the bottom of heaven we live in the circle. We back and gone and back again’” (Perry 7). African religion authority John S. Mbiti notes in Introduction to African Religion that Africans view the universe as eternal: “In many places, circles are used as symbols of the continuity of the universe. They are the symbols of eternity, of unendingness, of continuity” (Mbiti 37).1 The circle is also an apt illustration of the African concept of time, which is synchronic or cyclical in nature rather than diachronic or linear. This cyclical sense of time is also apparent in African religious beliefs “that human life does not terminate at the death of the individual, but continues beyond death” (Mbiti 75). Ayo uses this continuity to tell a story that can’t be sufficiently told by entries in a diary. As the novel progresses, we find that Ayo must use her very body to tell her story—it is as if she makes her very scars speak. But even this is not enough to fully tell her story, so her granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter must pick up the thread and help their foremother tell this unspeakable tale. Thus Lizzie finds herself inhabiting the lives of her foremothers, Ayo and Grace, in an attempt to rewrite the legacy of slavery. At the age of 14, Lizzie inherited her grandmother’s quilt and her great-great-grandmother’s papers. Grace left instructions to give her trunk not to one of her daughters, but to a granddaughter who had not even been born. Lizzie’s father says, “I think your Grandma Grace must have had some kind of premonition about you” (Perry 23). This ability to know the future seems to be an inherited trait, as Ayo also predicted the birth of Joy’s long-awaited first child. Not only does she predict Grace’s birth, but she also foretells her ability to see into the future. In the March 22, 1899, diary entry, Ayo says of the yet unborn Grace, “She cant get here cause Im in the way she say. But when Im gone she come to take my place. She gon know things the one that’s comin” (Perry 34). Ayo dies the following year, the same year Grace is born, which suggests that Grace does indeed come to take Ayo’s place and with it she inherits Ayo’s slavery experience. Literary critic Lisa Long notes, “It is significant



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that in Stigmata the ‘possession’ skips generations from grandmother to granddaughter, so that the woman who suffers the Middle Passage and slavery never visits that experience on her own daughter. Still, the further from slavery one moves, the more pain those granddaughters must bear” (473). Lizzie must attend to both Ayo’s and Grace’s experiences, but Grace only had to contend with Ayo’s. “This cycle does not bode well for Lizzie’s future granddaughter, who, we presume, will endure the weight of Lizzie’s fourteen-year institutionalization” (Perry 473). Thus Ayo, Grace, and Lizzie form a matrilineal line of descent in which every other generation is bestowed with the gift of second sight that allows them to inhabit the lives of their foremothers. However, the ability to crisscross space and time to inhabit the past and present is generally not seen as a gift but as a form of madness. In fact, it is the fear of being put in an asylum that leads Grace to abandon her husband and children. Ayo’s memories invade Grace, and she believes she has lost her mind because she knows things she should not know and feels excruciating pain for no apparent reason. Grace realizes that if she stays, her husband will be forced to commit her, and her mother and sisters will not be able to help her. While Grace ran away to avoid an insane asylum, Lizzie is institutionalized for 14 years before faking her recovery. Upon her release, though, she picks up where Grace left off. Just as Grace was compelled to record her Grandmother Ayo’s life story through a quilt, Lizzie must tell Grace’s story through a new quilt. This passing on of her foremother’s story will not end with Lizzie, as she realizes the quilt’s fabric has to last long enough for the next storyteller. Lizzie has joined a long line of women who refuse to let the painful history of slavery be forgotten. Thus the rewriting of her enslavement begins with Ayo’s diary and continues with the story quilts of her descendants, Grace and Lizzie. The granddaughter and greatgranddaughter are driven to quilting in order to make sense of their visions and scars. Thus the marks Lizzie bears on her arms and legs are not only symbolic of the manacles worn by Ayo but also serve as a testament to the refusal to forget. Just as Ayo before her chose to remember, Lizzie’s very body demands that the horrors of slavery never be forgotten. When Father Tom asks Lizzie how she got the scars around her wrists, she responds, “‘A legacy. Two lifetimes ago. I was a slave then’” (Perry 212). Earlier in their conversation, she explained, “‘My trouble is, Father, that I’m an old soul in a young body’” (Perry 211). She has tried to explain her visions to many doctors only to have them dismissed as fantasies




brought on by the reading of her great-great-grandmother’s diary. Yet she has no way of explaining how she knows things about the past that she could not possibly know without having been there herself. However, her Aunt Eva considers Lizzie lucky because she has been here before. Eva sees her sister Grace in Lizzie and knows about her visions of Ayo, but for Eva reincarnation is a given, as she believes “all of us have been around once or twice” (Perry 117). Ayo seems to share this sentiment as she recounts a memory of her mother: “This is the hand of my mother, she says. And of my grandmother. Petals of the flower. Your life is many lives” (Perry 176). The multiplicity of Lizzie’s life is reflected in the scars on her wrists, ankles, and back, as these scars speak of the horrors endured not by Lizzie but by her foremother. Yet, her doctors have told her that reincarnation is not real, and so Lizzie has pretended that she cut her own wrists and ankles. But for Lizzie reincarnation is real, and her scars are stigmata, a physical trauma to remind her of a past not to be forgotten. Initially, Lizzie does not have a word to describe the connection she experiences with her ancestor, Ayo. In a moment of frustrated sarcasm, she displays her scarred back to her psychiatrist, Dr. Brun, and tells her, “‘What you’re looking at was rather commonplace back then. Scars like these. That’s the thing, Doctor, I’m just a typical nineteenth-century nigger with an extraordinary gift. The gift of memory’” (Perry 204). However, it is not until a discussion with a Catholic priest that Lizzie learns about stigmata and realizes that there is a precedent for what she is experiencing. Father Tom tells Lizzie about a monk wounded in the manner of Christ’s crucifixion: “‘It’s called stigmata, child. That’s what you have’” (Perry 213). Although Perry does not name the monk, this appears to be a reference to Saint Francis of Assisi. St. Bonaventure, one of St. Francis’s early biographers, read his stigmata “as an indicator of an inner condition” (Kiely 32). I believe this is how Perry intends for her readers to read the scars on Lizzie’s body—they are representative of her inner turmoil. Robert Kiely observes, “For Christians, the wounds of the crucified Christ are the paradigm of transformative stigmata, marks of punishment and pain reread as signs of healing and salvation” (21). It is this type of rereading that Lizzie is able to do once she has a word for what is happening to her body. Rather than merely thinking of herself as crazy, Lizzie can learn from her body. Father Tom suggests, “‘Maybe you’re marked so you won’t forget this time, so you will remember and move on’” (Perry 213). Father Tom’s remarks are a bit ambiguous in that he could mean Lizzie won’t forget this period of



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Ayo’s enslavement or that this time Ayo will not forget. It is almost as if Ayo has had three chances to contend with these memories: first as Ayo, then as Grace, and now as Lizzie. However, recognizing the importance of remembering seems to be what leads Lizzie from apparent mental illness to healing and wholeness. It is almost as if the repression of memory or its denial is the cause of Lizzie’s anguish, but once she is willing to remember she is in a position to heal. However, this movement from illness to healing is not easy. Lizzie spends 14 years in mental institutions contending with a trauma she and her doctors cannot comprehend. Psychotherapist Laura S. Brown notes that a key aspect to the definition of a traumatic event according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSMIII-R) is that “‘The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of human experience’” (qtd. in Brown 100). Clearly what Lizzie is experiencing as she flashes back in time to the lives of her foremothers is beyond the pale of human experience, as was the initial experience of slavery by Ayo, which triggers these episodes for her descendants, Grace and Lizzie. “The trauma is a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a continual leaving of its site” (Caruth 10). Part of the trauma for both Lizzie and Grace is that they are yanked back and forth between their worlds and the world(s) of their ancestor(s). Grace and Lizzie have no control over when they will be snatched from their lives into the past, and Lizzie may be thrown into either Grace’s or Ayo’s experiences. Thus these moments are disconcerting to say the least. Nor does inhabiting these moments of their ancestor’s life mean that Lizzie and Grace fully understand their foremother. They are just as perplexed by Ayo’s predicament as Ayo must have been. Psychiatrist Dori Laub and psychologist Nanette Auerhahn have argued that “since neither culture nor experience provide structures for formulating acts of massive aggression, survivors cannot articulate trauma, even to themselves. . . . Close to the experience, survivors are captive observers who can only repeat it. They cannot make sense of it; they cannot know it cognitively” (288). Thus even though Grace and Lizzie relive Ayo’s experiences, they cannot protect Ayo; they can merely share her pain and confusion but at a distance. These visions or memories are confused in their minds, thus reflecting Cathy Caruth’s observation, “The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (5). Grace and Lizzie also display the symptoms of




Ayo, who endured the horrors of the Middle Passage, but they cannot fully grasp what is happening to them. Ayo’s painful history begins this matrilineal legacy of cultural trauma. Interestingly, Laub and Auerhahn note a connection between trauma and familial dysfunction, “as trauma disrupts the link between self and empathic other, a link first established by the expectation of mutual responsiveness in the mother-child bond and ‘objectified’ in the maternal introject” (287). For Laub and Auerhahn, trauma is the “absence of a mothering function” (287) to prevent trauma, which is akin to what is experienced by Ayo and her descendants. Ayo’s mother could not prevent her abduction, and Ayo and Grace cannot shield their granddaughter(s) from Ayo’s painful memories. According to Henderson, if one is to understand “the generational ‘begetting’ of cultural wounds, one must return to the figure of the black mother” (14). This brings one back to Doyle’s point of the precarious position of the black mother as “maker and marker of boundaries” (27). This role places her in the unenviable position of being “the instrument and embodiment of their oppression” (Doyle 33). Ayo must not only contend with her transition from Ayo to Bessie, but she must also accept the legacy she has bequeathed to her descendants. Grace has a similar dilemma as she contends with her guilt for abandoning her daughter Sarah when she feared her husband would be forced to commit her to an insane asylum due to the visions she was experiencing. Grace is grappling with abandoning her daughter and seeking a means of making amends while explaining her actions. However, Grace’s sorrows begin with Ayo’s initial traumatic transformation from Ayo to Bessie. Just as Grace cannot escape her guilt for abandoning Sarah, neither can Ayo absolve her guilt for wandering away from her mother and being caught by slave catchers. The separation of families was a common feature of slavery, which operated as though enslaved Africans were commodities rather than sensate beings. Mothers and children were separated with impunity, as African women were deemed to be “natally dead” and thus not emotionally connected to their offspring. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison observes that there is an assumption “that slave women are not mothers; they are ‘natally dead,’ with no obligations to their offspring or their own parents” (21). In fact, Orlando Patterson describes the situation of slavery as “natal alienation” because the slave is “alienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of birth, he ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate social order” (5). However, Patterson is also



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quick to note, “When we say that the slave was natally alienated and ceased to belong independently to any formally recognized community, this does not mean that he or she did not experience or share informal social relations. . . . The important point, however, is that these relationships were never recognized as legitimate or binding” (6). This lack of recognition of her relationship with her mother is part of Ayo’s trauma, and thus part of the rewriting of slavery’s legacy for Ayo is an attempt to reconnect with her mother via her memories. Joy writes in the diary, “She once told me that Ayo got los when she crossed the water. Bessie kinda took over. She had to think like her not like Ayo from Afraca” (Perry 50). When telling Joy about her capture, Ayo explains the pain that her wanderlust created because it led to her enslavement. However, when Ayo recounts this pain, it is not her pain alone, but also her mother’s pain that she remembers. Not only has Ayo lost her mother and homeland, but her mother has lost a daughter as well. This was the moment that engendered psychic trauma for generations of women, but in order to move beyond Ayo’s pain Lizzie must figure out how to face her foremother’s painful past. Henderson believes that “for African Americans to reconstitute their humanity, they must return to the site of that violence—their own captive bodies” (Henderson 38). The stigmata that Lizzie experiences seems to be a means of drawing her back to her body and her foremothers’ bodies. Her very body is demanding that she remember her cultural past. Lizzie begins by seeing visions, but they quickly become more intense and physically painful. Lizzie’s response is similar to her grandmother Grace’s—she resists the memories and tries to avoid them. Lizzie believes she has “to get out of the past or perish” (Perry 120). However, on the evening her parents believe she has attempted suicide, Lizzie has no choice but to confront what is happening to her. She has been experiencing Ayo’s terrifying Middle Passage ordeal only to discover that “All the aches and mysterious stabs of pain now have their corresponding wounds. Raggedy, ugly, familiar skin openings and welted patterns” (Perry 146). Ana Nunes observes that in “African American literature, the disfigurement of the body constitutes a central vehicle of both personal and collective history. Lizzie’s stigmata works as a physical manifestation of Morrison’s concept of rememory, the never-ending resurfacing of a traumatic and partially lost history” (230). However, this physical manifestation of trauma is not limited to African American contexts. Caruth asserts that trauma “is always the story of a wound that cries out” (Duboin 288). Laurie Vickroy shares this assessment as




she notes, “Survivors’ painful connection to past trauma is also displayed and replayed through the body, even branded into their flesh” (32). Vickroy goes on to observe that “trauma writers make the suffering body the small, focused universe of the tormented and a vehicle for rendering unimaginable experience tangible to readers” (33). Although Perry is not one of the writers included in Vickroy’s study, it is clear that she would fit within this category of trauma writers. According to Vickroy, “serious trauma writers attempt to guide readers through a re-created process of traumatic memory in order that this experience be understood more widely” (8). This is exactly what Lisa Long argues Perry does by using physical pain as a means to authenticate her historical renderings: “The protagonists believe that history really happened because it hurts them. Without the bodily transubstantiation of distant suffering, there is no apprehension of the past” (461). Thus for Perry, the wound and associated pain are essential aspects of her story. After all, Lizzie can pass off her visions as dreams, but there is no denying the bloody wounds that cover her body. Yet Lizzie’s parents are horrified when they see their wounded and bloodied daughter and can only read the scene as one of self-mutilation. However, one must remember “the dual functionality of scars as simultaneously signs of wounding and signs of healing” (Henderson 7). Lizzie’s parents see her bloody bedroom as symbolic of her downward spiral to insanity, but this is actually a step toward healing. One can read this scene as a transitional moment for Lizzie. The wounds are not simply marks of pain, but also symbols of “connection between the ancestors and Lizzie, the past and present” (Nunes 230). Dennis Slattery asserts, “The wounded body is sacred in some deep level of its existence; it is a body specialized and formed by experience; in its new way of being present to the world, the wounded body gains something not possessed before” (7). Slattery elaborates on this point by noting “that a richer experience of being open to the world occurs through wounding” (13). He believes “our wounds have the capacity to advance our consciousness to new levels of awareness” (16). Lizzie seems to move toward this new level of awareness through her two years of silence. According to Vickroy, “Silence has multivalent meanings when considering trauma and narrating specific elements and processes of that experience. . . . Silence can represent a traumatic gap, a withholding of words because of terror, guilt, or coercion; it characterizes traumatic memory as wordless, visual, and reenactive rather than cognitive/verbal when facing the unspeakable” (187). Lizzie tries to explain her silence



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by saying, “if they knew, if they heard and smelled and saw all, they’d understand how speech, for me, has become inadequate” (Perry 157). Bessel Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart note that trauma “cannot be easily translated into the symbolic language necessary for linguistic retrieval” because this “speechless terror” is experienced on a “somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares and flashbacks” (442–43). At this point, Lizzie cannot form the words to make her experience understandable to others because she is not yet in a position to fully process what is happening to her. “During the two years of silence, I dream memories of Africa every night and wake to mornings of fiery pain. My scars burn at the edges” (Perry 157). Since Lizzie has never been to Africa, these must be Ayo’s memories. Ayo is determined to cling to whatever pieces of her heritage she can hold on to despite the horrors of slavery. Yes, she remembers the pain inflicted, but she refuses to allow this to eradicate her memory of home. The burning sensation Lizzie experiences also seems to be an indication that something is going on below the surface of the scars, just as something is going on beneath the facade of her silence. According to Stefanie Sievers, “despite the overall negative connotations of this long period of external stasis and lack of genuine communication, the novel also suggests that a necessary development is happening within Lizzie during that time” (135). For example, it is during this time that she meets Mrs. Corday, another patient who confirms for Lizzie and the reader that Lizzie is not imagining what is happening to her because Mrs. Corday actually sees Lizzie as Grace. On another occasion Mrs. Corday sees Lizzie as a young Ayo. At this point, Lizzie would like to speak, but instead she begins to bleed from her wounds. Mrs. Corday stares in awe and fusses over Lizzie while asking her to teach her how to do that. These two episodes with Mrs. Corday precede the healing of Lizzie’s wounds, which suggests that she needed some indication that what she was experiencing was real before she could move forward in the healing process. Lizzie notes that the scars have healed, but they leave ugly marks. Dr. Cremrick puzzles over the fact that the scars look a few years old despite the fact that she was bleeding just last week. This odd timetable for the healing of her wounds suggests that the healing process was more than a physical endeavor. A few months after her wounds have healed, Lizzie begins speaking again. Lizzie’s decision to speak suggests that she is moving forward in her recovery, while her conversation with her cousin Ruth calls into question the original determination of attempted suicide. During their




conversation, Ruth observes, “‘Sanity . . . is a mutual agreement between folks trying to control their world . . . The definitions of sanity change every day’” (Perry 192). This acknowledgment by Ruth leads Lizzie to explain that she did not try to commit suicide. Although Ruth does not say she believes Lizzie, her response implies her belief: “‘I’m sorry they hurt you . . . I don’t know why they have to do that’” (Perry 193). Ruth may not understand the reason, but Lizzie has come to understand the importance of remembering. She tells Ruth it is to keep her from forgetting again. Lizzie realizes that she cannot run away from the past. Henderson argues, “writing becomes an antidote to pain, a way to reinterpret the language of the body and heal the wounds of the psyche” (58). Ayo chose writing in the form of the diary she narrated to her daughter Joy. She tells her daughter, “I am Ayo. I remember. This is for those whose bones lay sleepin in the heart of mother ocean for those who tomorrows I never knew who groaned and died in that dark damp aside a me. You rite this daughter for me and for them” (Perry 7). Interestingly, Perry records a similar statement from Ayo, but with a significant difference in the opening lines, “I am Ayo. Joy. I choose to remember” (Perry 17). In the first account Ayo is described as merely remembering, but in the second account she reports her decision to remember. Thus memory is linked to will. Despite the pain associated with her memories, Ayo consciously decides to remember, and she induces her ancestors to keep her memories alive. Remembering is important not only for her but also for those who did not live to tell their stories. She and her ancestors must serve as witnesses to what was done to them. “Moreover, as a storyteller, she has gained vision. She can now testify and become an agent who takes possession of her own past through words that denounce the evils she has survived” (Duboin 291). This is why it is so important for Ayo to begin by claiming her rightful name; this is not Bessie’s story, for that would be someone else’s view of her life. “Ayo tells her haunting story more than three decades after her emancipation. Speaking out is a way for her to exorcize her demons and feel free at last” (Duboin 291). Ayo is speaking for herself and for those who did not make it, and she insists on speaking in her own words. Vickroy believes that “for healing to take place, survivors must find ways to tell their stories and to receive some social acknowledgement if not acceptance” (19). Ayo began seeking this acknowledgment through her diary, but as a dialogic text it is not a fully satisfying approach to telling her story. Duboin notes that the diary “interweaves the mother’s



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effort to articulate her pain . . . with the daughter’s difficulty in writing it down, her unwillingness to listen to a story she cannot fully comprehend” (290). Joy tells her mother that she’s tried talking about stuff that isn’t real because she “is unprepared to face the reality of hard facts, and the unconceivable yet real atrocities of slavery” (Duboin 290). Perhaps it is this resistance that leads Ayo to reach out across generations to her descendants in order to have her story really heard and accepted. This is also how the practice of skipping generations begins. It is as if speaking directly to one’s daughter is too painful because the bond is too close, but with the distance of a granddaughter one is better able to communicate. Thus Ayo turns to Grace after encountering Joy’s resistance, and Grace turns to Lizzie rather than burdening her daughter Sarah. However, Grace, like her mother Joy, initially resists Ayo’s story by trying to run away from the scenes in her head. “Erecting barriers against knowing is often the first response to such trauma” (Laub and Auerhahn 290). Grace flees Alabama for Detroit, thinking that she can leave Ayo behind. She has no visions or voices while on the train, but shortly after settling into the Detroit rooming house her ankles begin to bleed. Grace becomes hysterical once she realizes that Ayo is still with her and not back in Alabama. Laub and Auerhahn describe the traumatic experience as “being caught between the compulsion to complete the process of knowing and the inability or fear of doing so” (288). Grace’s initial reaction is fear and avoidance, but she eventually comes to accept the importance of remembering and documenting Ayo’s experience. Rather than a diary, she chooses to use a quilt as her vehicle to record her grandmother’s story of being stolen from Africa and forced into slavery. Before leaving her family, Grace begins a story quilt based on the visions from Ayo’s life. According to Duboin, Perry uses the appliqué quilt “as an overarching metaphor for the legacy of the past, the permanence of rich traditions, and the construction of self within a matrilineage. The quilts crafted or inherited by her female characters are to be seen as narratives that relate individual and collective experiences. They are the gendered expression of a shared cultural memory, the re-writing of American and African American history” (293). As an artifact of shared cultural memory, the quilt has a communal nature, which seems to differentiate it from the dialogic text of the diary. Ayo does not have to prove her experiences to Grace, as she did with Joy, because Grace shares her experiences by inhabiting key moments of Ayo’s life. However, for Grace, “quilting serves the same




purposes as writing. . . . Sewing allows Grace to complete the healing process . . . It is an outlet . . . to memorialize the dead, as well as a historical testimony to be passed on” (Duboin 294). Thus Grace uses the quilt as a means to gain some understanding of her visions, but also as a means of telling Ayo’s story. Duboin observes, “Quilting is a family tradition that has roots in African history and culture; it ties up the past with the present, the old with the new. It also facilitates female bonding and bridging across generations and continents” (294). However, it is important to note that Grace’s and Lizzie’s quilts are hybrid artifacts, representing their African American identities. According to Houston Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker, “The transmutation of quilting, a European, feminine tradition, into a black women’s folk art, represents an innovative fusion of African cloth manufacture, piecing, and appliqué with awesome New World experiences—and expediencies” (156). This fusion of European and African traditions is particularly apparent in the appliquéd narrative quilts created by Grace and Lizzie. Their technique “in the making of the quilt is similar to that used in the tapestries of West Africa, while the narrative structure roots it in an American tradition, evoking the geographical and cultural journey of black people from the African continent to the New World” (Nunes 237). Thus the appliqué style creates a link to their African heritage, much like Ayo’s insistence on using her African name. The story that they are telling is necessarily rooted in their African heritage. Although she feels better with the completion of the quilt and sends it home to her sister Mary Nell, Grace writes strict instructions not to show the quilt to her daughter Sarah in hopes that she will “not curse her with these things that are happening to me. I thought getting all that down on the quilt in front of me out of me would get rid of it somehow” (Perry 15). Through the quilt, Grace has also sought to rewrite Ayo’s legacy of slavery, but just as the diary was not sufficient to tell the tale, neither is the quilt. Neither words nor images can fully capture Ayo’s story. This seems to be the motivation for Ayo to pass down “that knowin . . . a gift from me her family that’s lost” (Perry 34). Ayo wants to share her story with her descendants but must turn to extraordinary methods to tell a story beyond the realm of the human imagination. The difficult nature of Ayo’s story is implied by the recipients’ response. Both Grace and Lizzie initially resist the images they see and try to escape Ayo’s memories. In fact, Grace eventually dies from



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cancer without fully coming to terms with her visions or her decision to abandon her family. Therefore Lizzie’s drive to tell Grace’s story through the quilt is not only to document the pain of slavery across generations, but it is also an attempt by Grace to reach out through Lizzie to the daughter she abandoned. For Lizzie’s mother Sarah, all that matters about Grace is that “She left. She died” (Perry 70). But it is clear that Sarah has never gotten over returning from her grandmother’s house only to find her mother gone. Lizzie gradually unfolds Grace’s story to Sarah through the quilt, but Sarah initially refuses to accept that Lizzie is her mother, great-grandmother, and daughter in one body.2 As much as Sarah tries to deny what Lizzie tries to explain about her reincarnation, she also cannot deny that Lizzie knows things only her mother could know. Sarah’s acceptance of the truth comes only after Lizzie adds the last piece to the quilt—a blue scrap from the dress Ayo wore on the day she was kidnapped and enslaved. Nunes refers to this blue scrap as a “fragment of cultural memory,” which “functions in the narrative as a link to Africa, but it also symbolizes the passing on of the historical testimony along the generational line” (236). With this last piece, Ayo’s descendants have come full circle—Grace’s story is complete only when the symbol of Ayo’s capture and enslavement has been added to the quilt. As she adds the piece, Lizzie explains, “‘That’s what this quilt is about. The past. And putting the past aside when we’re through’” (Perry 228). The pain of the past can be healed only after it’s confronted. According to Long’s reading of Stigmata, Perry challenges “readers to conceive of remembering as a palpable, physical experience” (460). Thus it is not enough for Lizzie to merely remember her foremother’s experience, she must relive it and bear the scars. Her body can then “attest to the reality of slavery” (Long 460). Long asserts in her discussion of Stigmata and Butler’s Kindred that “the suffering that ordinarily cannot be conveyed is invoked in these novels as metonymic proof of a knowable past” (461). Sarah has escaped this traumatic embodiment of slavery’s pain since the matrilineal line of reincarnation skips every other generation. Grace thinks her daughter will be safe because she cannot relive these painful memories, but Long argues, “Sarah is perhaps the most damaged character in Stigmata, stifled by her inability or unwillingness to see the history her daughter embodies for her” (473). Thus in order for Sarah to be healed, her mother, Grace, must return in the figure of Lizzie to reconnect her with her familial history of slavery. Only after Sarah confronts the past can she come to terms with it.




Sarah is finally able to come to terms with the past and her mother’s abandonment through the assistance of her ancestors—Grace and Ayo—as embodied in Lizzie, thus suggesting, “one’s access to the past is determined by the intensity of one’s connection to ancestors” (Long 462). Sarah accesses the past only with the return of her mother from the dead. Toward the end of the novel Grace, through Lizzie, observes, “The circle is complete and my daughter sits across from me with the gap finally closed” (Perry 230). Although Sarah used to pray for God to send her mother back to her, Grace could return only through her granddaughter, Lizzie. This reunion of mother and daughter is followed by an excerpt from Ayo’s journal in which Joy records Ayo’s death and the passing down of the scrap of blue cloth from the dress she wore when she was captured in Africa: “Take care of that little girl she say and she smiled and say I meant to put this in but I never did and she gave me a piece of blue cloth she had balled up in her hand” (Perry 230). The scene is more than a parallel scene of mother–daughter affection; it is a fitting example of the way in which Lizzie has managed to merge the lives of Ayo and Grace with her own. Sievers observes,“Following her release in 1994, Lizzie then consciously integrates Ayo’s and Grace’s lives into her own. . . . This intersection of identities is supported structurally by having all chapters in this narrative strand conclude with entries from Ayo’s diary. To have Ayo’s words accompany the time period in Lizzie’s life when she is supposedly cured is an indication that she is, in fact, able to integrate the life stories of her foremothers into her own without being overwhelmed by them” (136). This point is supported by Van der Kolk and Van der Hart’s assertion that “In the case of complete recovery, the person does not suffer anymore from the reappearance of traumatic memories in the form of flashbacks, behavioral re-enactments, etc. Instead the story can be told, the person can look back at what happened; he has given it a place in his life history . . . and thereby in the whole of his personality” (447–48). Thus despite Lizzie’s claim that there is no cure for her condition, she has successfully merged her life with that of her foremother, and like the scars on her body she is proof of the intersection of the past and present (Perry 204). The scars serve as both a reminder of the past and a legacy connecting Ayo’s descendants across generations. This matrilineal legacy of Ayo’s descendants is just one thread of a larger cultural trauma. In Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Ron Eyerman explores slavery as a cultural



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trauma, which he defines as “a collective memory, a form of remembrance that grounded the identity-formation of a people” (1). A distinguishing component of cultural trauma is that one need not directly experience an event that induces trauma. “It is through time-delayed and negotiated recollection that cultural trauma is experienced, a process which places representation in a key role” (Eyerman 12). Thus while Ayo may have experienced trauma, her descendants experienced cultural trauma. It is the impact of cultural trauma that Perry seeks to depict through her focus on the scars encircling Lizzie’s wrists and ankles and crisscrossing her back. These literal scars allow readers to imagine the psychological scars as well. It is no coincidence that writers such as Perry, Butler, and Jones have opted to wound their protagonists in some way in order to symbolize the wounds of slavery, but also to begin the healing process. We are now over one hundred years past the abolition of slavery in the United States, and thus many believe that slavery is a thing of the past that no longer carries tangible hurts. Perhaps this is why some writers are drawn to physical wounds as a means to make the pain of slavery visible. Once the pain is made tangible, maybe the healing can begin. Lizzie will always carry her scars, Dana’s arm will not grow back, and Ursa’s womb cannot be repaired. These permanent scars or wounds are indicative of the lingering impact of slavery even on women who were never slaves themselves. Their bodies tell their stories; however, these are not stories of defeat, but ones of survival. We as readers are called to be witnesses. In the words of Father Tom, we will remember and move on. The point is not to wallow in the past, but to use the past as a stepping stone for growth and development, so that the errors of the past will not be repeated. Like Ayo, we must choose to remember. Notes 1. Although I may make reference to African beliefs, I realize that Africa is a vast continent with many differences. However, like scholars such as Mbiti, I do believe it is possible to look at shared customs and points of view, particularly in reference to particular regions of Africa. 2. I can’t help but note allusions to the Trinity in that Lizzie represents three persons in one body. Perry seems to have revised the notion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to that of great-great grandmother, grandmother, and granddaughter. Ayo, like the Father, also sends her other two persons to reach others, such as Sarah.




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Baker, Houston A., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. “Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use.’” “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker. Ed. Barbara Christian. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994. 149–65. Print. Bonaventure. The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; The Life of Saint Francis. Trans. Ewert Cousins. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1978. Print. Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1995. 100–112. Print. Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1979. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1995. 3–12. Print. Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Print. Duboin, Corinne. “Trauma Narrative, Memorialization, and Mourning in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata.” Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 284–304. Project Muse. Web. 1 Sept. 2009. Henderson, Carol E. Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. Print. Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon, 1975. Print. Kiely, Robert. “Further Considerations of the Holy Stigmata of St. Francis: Where Was Brother Leo?” Religion and the Arts 3.1 (1999): 20–40. Print. Laub, Dori, and Nanette C. Auerhahn. “Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74.2 (1993): 287–302. Print. Long, Lisa. “A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata.” College English 64.4 (2002): 459–83. JSTOR. Web. 1 Sept. 2009. McDowell, Deborah E. “Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom—Dessa Rose.” Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989. 144–63. Print. Mbiti, John S. Introduction to African Religion. 2nd ed. Oxford: Heinemann, 1991. Print. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. Print. Nunes, Ana. “From the Fantastic to Magic Realism: The Spectral Presence in Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata.” Revisiting Slave Narratives II/Les Avatars Contemporains des récits d’esclaves II. Ed. Judith Misrahi-Barak. Montpellier, France: Université Paul-Valéry, 2007. 223–48. Print. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Print. Patton, Venetria. Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction. Albany: SUNY P, 2000. Print. Perry, Phyllis Alesia. Stigmata. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. Print.



Works Cited

Sievers, Stefanie. “Embodied Memories—Sharable Stories? The Legacies of Slavery as a Problem of Representation in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata.” Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Maria Diedrich. Münster, Germany: LIT, 2004. 131–39. Print. Slattery, Dennis Patrick. The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh. Albany: SUNY P, 2000. Print. Van der Kolk, Bessel, and Onno Van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” American Imago 48.4 (1991): 425–54. ProQuest. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. Print.






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“Pull Up to the Bumper” Fashion and Queerness in Grace Jones’s One Man Show Maria J. Guzman

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race Jones’s One Man Show (1982), a music-video version of performances she did in London and New York City, continues to be an unusual relic of the 1980s music scene. Its star, Grace Jones, is a music and queer icon in popular culture. She is an artist who personifies a spectrum of personalities to audiences, but she has never been a man, contrary to rumors that suggest otherwise. In spite of her completely singular approach to the reigning interest in androgyny, she has become an iconic figure of the 1980s and is even experiencing a newfound popularity among music fans today. Two summers ago, I happened to be in London, England, and read about her surprise appearance at the Meltdown Festival, which was curated by Jarvis Cocker that year. The following year, one of the most influential contemporary British duos, Massive Attack, curated the event, and arranged it to be a tribute to Jones’s entire musical career. It is clear to me that she has continued to appeal to music lovers and artists alike. Just a few months ago, I enjoyed her cameos in an exhibit based on Andy Warhol’s art and his love affair with music of all genres, Warhol Live, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. International companies have used her image to advertise everything from hair spray to axle grease, which is an estimation of her many-sided persona (Norment 90). Most recently, bloggers and fashion critics have used her as the measure of credibility for the experimental



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stylings of Rhianna, Lady Gaga, and other young performers. Truly, there is something about her. Born Grace Mendoza in 1952, she grew up in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and later relocated to Syracuse, New York. Carolyn Anderson has suggested that Jones developed her signature style partly as a reaction against her strict religious upbringing and her exposure to more permissive American cultural styles. Anderson links the crafting of Jones’s bold persona to an early period in Jones’s life, shortly after her move to the United States at the age of 12 (493). It has been noted in interviews that Jones had few friends in high school, and was raised in a household that required she wear only dresses or skirts in public. In response, she chose to accommodate such wishes by wearing extravagant, handmade Givenchy designs to school (Norment 92). One of Jones’s early interviews in Ebony magazine cited her Pentecostal upbringing as a priority throughout her life. This detail about Jones’s upbringing is only briefly mentioned in discussions about her performances yet explains much about her bicultural rendition of style and self-expression. I firmly believe that this is what makes her such an outstanding example of a black woman in the music industry during such an eclectic and experimental time in American culture as the 1980s. More often than not, cultural awareness beyond our own immediate experiences (or immediate memories) seems to be a quality that many individuals must actively cultivate, and for many people who experience bicultural lifestyles it can be quite gratifying to see experimentation reflected in popular culture. It is a glamorous, and at times poetic, affirmation that there are other women and men out there who also see culture with a more performative sensibility. This is what I find most appealing about Grace Jones—her seamless presentation of the multitude of roles that are available to individuals in contemporary society. Inasmuch as her presence is fascinating and entertaining to some, it is also a symbol of identification and self-assessment. In this context, her references to French culture as displayed throughout One Man Show may stem from her relationship to Jean-Paul Goude as well as her earlier experiences as a popular model whose career was especially well received in France. In short, both desirable and undesirable roles are created by individuals, who in turn create the vague national identities that we all recognize as acceptable representations. These identities exist in an abbreviated, distant manner, not unlike our favorite characters from a television show.



80 Maria J. Guzman

In addition, Jones’s early fashion play raises an important question: how can individuals who have been viewed as outsiders interact with popular culture? It is worth noting at this point that Grace Jones attended Syracuse University briefly before leaving to pursue a modeling career, which was primarily based in Paris because her features were criticized as being “too strong for American magazines” (Internet Movie Database [IMDB]). I often wonder how she understood her own appeal to various audiences, which then gave her the understanding to manage it in order to become the cult sensation that she is today. Public reception plays a large role in transnational identity; therefore, Jones’s early impression upon American audiences typifies Western attitudes about beauty. In fact, after several years in France, Jones returned and became a fixture in the more liberal community of the disco scene. She frequented Studio 54 and was eventually touted as “The Queen of Gay Discos” (IMDB). She began recording music in 1976 and released her first album, Portfolio (1977), with famed disco producer Tom Moulton. Her following albums, Fame (1978) and Muse (1979), were produced by Moulton as well. In 1980, she worked with reggae– dub pioneers Sly & Robbie on the single “Warm Leatherette.” The song was a cover of an electro-punk single by The Normal, and broadened her appeal to new wave and punk fans alike. In addition, this period marked Jones’s transformation from disco diva to new wave androgyne (IMDB). By 1981, Jones had released a body of work that could be formatted into a full-length feature, One Man Show. The video includes performances of “Warm Leatherette,” “Walking in the Rain,” “Feel Up,” “La Vie en Rose,” “Demolition Man,” “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “Private Life,” “My Jamaican Guy,” “Living My Life,” and “Libertango/I’ve Seen That Face Before.” It was directed by her creative and romantic partner, Jean-Paul Goude; the New York City footage was shot by Michael Shamberg. The video was produced by Eddie Babbage and released in 1982, and was nominated for a Grammy the following year (And We Danced, “Grace Jones”). My analysis will begin with a discussion of the perceived logic and significance of fashion and current theoretical interpretations of identity (namely, corporeal style as explained by Judith Butler). I am concerned with the issue of how the black female body relates to these views as well as how popular discourse has accumulated new versions of identity through music and video technologies. My conclusion is that Grace Jones personified the complexities of black female sexuality through a technologically enhanced worldview, exploring multiple



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82 Maria J. Guzman

Fashion and Queer Performance

Queer identities have been ascribed negative associations throughout the modern era, and non-heterosexual lifestyles or practices of any kind have been defined as dysfunctional and threatening to the general population. This ideation has in turn marked the queer body as potentially diseased or out of control. The most disturbing rationalization to date has been the hysteria-inducing blame placed upon male homosexual activity for the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) epidemic, which gained national attention in the 1980s. Although Jones was known to be heterosexual, she has garnered much attention based on her appearance as queer or androgynous. During the early 1980s, androgyny was a popular metaphor for bodily transformations, and was adopted by artists like Duran Duran, The Eurythmics, and Grace Jones as an apparatus that reflected various nontraditional versions of sexuality, such as asexuality (Annie Lennox), or the more baroque version of pansexuality, which characterized “hair bands,” new wavers, and glam rockers during the early ’80s (Boy George). While Jones’s contemporaries were also experimenting with cross-dressing and androgyny, most performers of non-Western descent were not. Grace Jones’s adoption of this style provided an alternative model for visualizing the black female body. Her experimental and outrageous style developed at a time when the entertainment and fashion industries produced a uniformly white vision of style and beauty and, theoretically, this placed Jones at a disadvantage. Fashion depends on theatricality and style, which shape desire in order to sell a “look.” It is the consumer-friendly realization that identity can be shaped and reshaped, in part through visual imagery. I would like to point out a distinction between Grace Jones and other performers who may have toyed with the concept of androgyny during Jones’s ascent to celebrity status. Many of them, most notably Madonna, changed offstage and then appeared in their new costumes and personas. Jones was shown ripping off her costume during the initial moments of One Man Show. Donning a gorilla suit, a reference to



roles that undid popular beliefs about race, nationalism, and sexuality. Her work awakens viewers to the possibility that there are many ways to understand and articulate our tumultuous history of imagining the black female body, while also challenging the accuracy of the historical origins of such images.

one of the more historically abusive illustrations of racist ideology, she beats a drum and proceeds to rip off her costume mask. She emerges from her gorilla suit and appears in a wholly different type of suit—the thoroughly ’80s “power suit,” which was one of the first uniforms to have a unisex appeal (see Figure 4.1). Queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have suggested that identity is a composite of behaviors and appearances, not natural at all. Butler’s discussion concerning the performativity of drag is especially pertinent to the construction of gender and the modes of expression in fashion shows, which Jones has clearly taken cues from. Butler cited the visual and conceptual contradiction that

Figure 4.1 Grace Jones dressed in a “power suit” (1981). Photograph courtesy of UrbanImage.tv/ Adrian Boot/(http://www.UrbanImage.tv).




occurs when female and male signs are superimposed, and described gender as a “corporeal style” (365). The word itself, modeling, suggests a manipulation of behavior and appearance. By manipulating visual codes and symbols for “different” cultural identities, she formed a parallel between the imaginary drama of contagiousness that marked queer identities with its more positive and marketable twin, fashionability (Sedgwick 73–74). Grace Jones was in fact, the new hot trend. In “Pull Up to the Bumper” for example, Jones gives us a performance that exhibits the dismissal of gendered authenticity altogether by challenging the very concept of Grace Jones as a real being in the modernist sense of the word. During “Pull Up to the Bumper,” Jones is shown dancing toward the microphone, and is later framed from the neck up while she looks out to the audience. A male break-dancer emulates her in the background, and the camera alternates between an apparently real Grace and her double. She invites the audience to “take your big machine, somewhere in this town” and reminds listeners to “follow all the written rules” in order to “fit into the space.”1 While Jones sings, the male twin dances throughout the performance on a separate podium, eventually kicking off his heels in a gesture that disavows a sense of formal entertainment or gender. This recalls Judith Butler’s assertion that an absence occurs as a result of a failure to recognize prescribed opposites (genders) occupying the same body. Jones also plays on and subsequently discards both male and female traits in an empowered manner that has been long denied to women of color in the hip-hop or rock genres for the most part. This prevents the audience from having their perception of the black female body completely reinforced or affirmed, and it is in part due to the inability to absolutely identify gender as it is popularly defined (Butler 361). In addition, the body of the androgyne fails to integrate its own desires within gendered law, which regulates behavior in order to follow the heterosexual model. One of the funnier moments in One Man Show occurs during “Demolition Man.” Toward the end of the song, the screen is filled with an army of Grace Jones lookalikes, each dressed in her signature power suit. The procession is both oddly charismatic and detached. In a truly inspired nod to both the sexual and industrial revolutions, Jones becomes the antithesis of natural reproduction (giving birth), and it never looked so good! Presenting a series of the same body, symbolized by Jones’s recognizable uniform and makeup, “Pull Up to the Bumper” and “Feel Up” are two performances that also deal



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with visually reorganizing both genders through what Judith Butler has postulated as the production of corporeal style (361). During “Feel Up,” the audience sees three musicians, all men dressed alike in form-fitting suits, playing bass, drums, and bongo drums. Jones also plays percussion in this performance, yet she is not shown as a member of the band—she is shown as the sole performer with a spotlight on her. At the end of the song, the band is once again shown, having increased to five members playing. Then the screen widens to include two more musicians, totaling seven Grace Jones figures. In terms of masculinity, there are two clear features in this section of the video: the musicians are all male, and Jones is always shown apart from them. Therefore, her own possible masculinity is always on the verge of being reinforced visually yet never is. Keeping Jones separate from her sartorial twins maintains a degree of difference, however vague it may be. She remains in this position throughout “Warm Leatherette,” during which she plays the cymbals. By the end of “Warm Leatherette,” Jones has beaten the cymbals until they fall off the podium she stood on. By asserting her dominance through her instruments of choice, power was thus symbolized by the ability to produce sound and subsequently destroy it. Later, during “Feel Up,” Jones’s power seems to be shared with her musicians by clothing them to resemble a “band” of Grace Jones figures. This visual relationship fails to assure viewers of Jones’s position as a masculine or feminine individual. As a result, she remains androgynous. The only readable elements of Jones’s body are interchangeable, like floating features that join her to supporting musicians or dancers. To an extent, the signs for both genders were deemed arbitrary yet incredibly necessary in order for things to “make sense.” This is relevant to Pacteau’s definition of the androgyne as a subversive figure: “From the instant my biological sex is determined, my identity is defined in difference—I am either a boy or a girl. I . . . take up my position in society on one side of the sexual divide . . . reaffirm the difference . . . the androgynous ‘position’ represents a denial, or a transgression, of the rigid gender divide, and as such implies a threat to our given identity and to the system of social roles which define us” (63). Through fashion play and first-person narrative, art and its masculinized mythology are revealed as performances that require many encores in order to remain relevant (Pacteau 71).2 Narratives are akin to fashion’s repertoire of poses. Jones’s performances embarked on an imaginary tour of such fascinations—they are spectacular presentations of various sexual and cultural “poses.” By combining both forms




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Primitivism, Minimalism, and the Black Female Body Jean-Paul saw my work and became a fan and I saw his work and became a fan. Together we developed the Grace Jones look. —Grace Jones, “The World of Grace Jones”

The boundary crossing in Grace Jones’s One Man Show is simultaneously physical and imaginary. Grace Jones’s seemingly contradictory persona appears to exist in several different categories. She is often described as “androgynous,” “dykey,” “scary,” “savage,” and “primitive.” Normally, the category of the androgyne is not associated with the category of the primitive, a contradiction in terms that makes Jones’s performances interesting. Primitivism is characterized by the belief that the black body is oversexed and potentially violent. As mentioned in the previous section, queer identities have been marked as threatening to nonqueer people, and this fear is usually expressed as an ever-present possibility of contagion. Primitivism also has the taint of contagion, whether it was a “fever” for the cultural artifacts and dances or the more threatening event of miscegenation. While engaging the contemporary aesthetics of Minimalism, Jones plays on the trope of the display of the primitive female body in order to undermine the construct of the black woman as inherently sexualized and primitive. Jones has been described by Barry Walters, a music critic for The Advocate, as an “attitude-intensive, gender-twisting, gay-rific persona that mixed high style with subversive substance” (61). The high style referred to by Walters is arguably that of Minimalism, which was also identified by Miriam Kershaw, albeit briefly, in her essay on Jones’s work in the early 1980s (19–25). Kershaw cited it as a feature in Jones’s performances at the Roseland dance club in 1978 (20). The minimalist aesthetic has framed Jones’s body of work and costuming from the early 1980s to the present. The minimalist aesthetic was created during the 1960s, largely in response to Abstract Expressionism, by a group of New York–based artists that included Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. Distinguished by monumental and abstracted shapes, minimalist



of narrative, iconic and personal, Jones’s work attains its own rhetoric of power and essentially blurs the line between male and female, sex and violence, reality and fantasy.

paintings and sculptures were claimed by their creators as forms that were ultimately spatial objects, subject to perceptual and temporal changes. Spectatorship is essential to the experience of minimalist art, yet there remains a fine line between confrontation and distance in its rhetoric. This is partly due to the insistence that authentic minimalist art eschew any form of narrative. In June 2007, Jones performed in London’s annual Meltdown Festival (see Figure 4.2), curated by Jarvis Cocker, wearing an outfit that resembled the minimalist outfits she wore in One Man Show. Her headdress recalled a minimalist accessory that would have easily fit in among the costumes in One Man Show, especially the headdress worn during “Feel Up.”

Figure 4.2 Grace Jones performing “Trust in Me” at Meltdown Festival. Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Beeston (http://www.intermezzo.com).




Grace Jones’s conflation of Minimalism and Primitivism created an unexpected bridge between the primitive body and the minimalist object that was deemed a “physical fact” (Stokstad, Oppenheimer, and Addiss 1106). In addition, the “black” aesthetic that has been represented by Primitivism was delegitimized through implied minimalist narratives that conveyed a clean, white heterosexual male prowess. For example, white masculinity or androgyny can be symbolically transferred onto Jones’s body through the appropriation of the super-slick and streamlined power suit. However, she also dressed as an ape at the beginning of “Warm Leatherette.” Jones’s performances in One Man Show also critiqued another dimension of cultural history—the (relatively) obscured visual history of race in Western culture as it was understood in the late twentieth century. In order to fully appreciate the longevity of this concept, it is important to note that Primitivism was used as an umbrella term that could categorize many cultures into one entity. Primitivism was originally attributed to anything that was not Greek or Italian Renaissance art, Roman and Byzantine art, Egyptian art, Aztec art, and, by the early twentieth century, Oceanic and African art (Rubin 9). As a result of colonialist propaganda and folklore, Primitivism took on a new meaning—that of the savage, uncivilized race that served as a foil to AngloEuropean society. The locus of Primitivism was the black female body, which became the harbinger for a savage sexuality that exceeded the limits of representation. As a consequence of changing values and cultural attitudes, the black female body has undergone various symbolic transformations in Western culture. The art that was produced in response to Primitivism has formed a largely fractured vision of other cultures, based on a general nonwhite identity that is characterized by an alternately coveted and overwhelming sexuality, an inferior intellect and spirituality, and a tendency to violence. Throughout art history, Primitivism has been represented by abstract and pseudonaive subject matter. Although inspired by nonWestern cultures, the main proponents of this style were French male artists, such as Paul Gauguin and Jean Dubuffet, and their inspiration was premised on the display of Other bodies. Grace Jones played up this notion in her performances. During the blitzkrieg montage that Jean-Paul Goude inserted before the live footage in One Man Show, an image appears and resonates with intensity, reaching back into the past while symbolizing modern fashion. It is a photograph of Jones modeling a sheer black dress to a white audience



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in a large room filled with seats that are positioned exclusively for watching her. There is no music, just the oddly canned admiration of her audience—“oohs” and “ahs” provide a soundtrack for the dramatic scenario. The final image is the cover photograph for her album Island Life. Jones is shown in a severe yet fluid pose and is an effect of Goude’s use of photographic collage in order to achieve a more dramatic appeal. These scenarios are equal parts colonialist exhibition and modern spectacle. The commodification of the black female body has a long history in European and American history, and has been correlated to specific sexualities and lifestyles. The associations left behind in the wake of Primitivism have altered how we view the black female body, which has been repeatedly displayed in the nude or in various states of undress. In a wholly self-conscious contrast to this history of display, Jones and Goude evoked spectators’ reactions using a highly orchestrated approach; it began immediately with the opening montage of still photographs in One Man Show. During this brief glimpse into Jones’s history, the audience is made aware of the isolating effect that is a result of displaying other cultures. Ultimately, the audience will see that the final images portray what we can all imagine to be wholly terrifying or completely gratifying—being the center of attention and on full display. In order to fully understand this duality, it is important to keep in mind the history of the black female body as an object on display. Jones was referencing two historical figures: the Hottentot Venus and the Black Venus, or Saartjie Baartman and Josephine Baker. Miriam Kershaw cited the French fantasy of the Black Venus as an influence for the imagery in One Man Show, in which Jean-Paul Goude contemporized the French fascination with the black female body (19).3 According to Goude, “Initially, she was flattered by all of my attention . . . and she’s no dope—Grace is an opportunist and she knew my vision was good for her career. Initially, she let herself be taken over, but then she suspected that I had only fallen in love with her image. Of course . . . that’s the story of my life” (Hodgkinson). Obviously Jones did not wish to replicate the hypercritical tendency to examine the “curious” nature of the black female body. Instead, she reframed herself as a high style, minimalist figure distinguished by bold references to the Western collective unconscious. By choosing a style that was believed to be neutral and nonrepresentational (Minimalism), Jones could insert any subject matter without having to challenge its visual integrity.




Minimalism is an appropriate example, especially when considered along with Miriam Kershaw’s brief yet revealing description of the aesthetics in One Man Show. Kershaw’s reading positioned Jones’s art “in relation to popular culture and modernist conceptions of Primitivism and Minimalism reinterpreted by modernist’s black female Other,” in which “Jones’s grooming and clothing serve a second function. Modernism appropriated the striking geometry of African art. Coming full circle, the African cultural heritage emphasized in Jones’s nearly sculptural appearance is linked to a Minimalist contemporary urban aesthetic” (21). Anna Chave argued that minimalist art was not immune to symbolism, and that minimalist artists’ insistence on the absence of narrative in their work was ultimately false. In fact, Minimalism, like Primitivism, was a disguised reenactment or “pose” modeled after the familiar modernist rhetoric that had perfected the process of fetishizing over a century ago (Kershaw 19). There are aspects of the definition of Primitivism that remain problematic as well. For instance, while it was commendable to embody the primitive and its untouched naïveté, industrialized Western culture evoked the primitive as a sign on which to map what it had socially and psychologically repressed: desire and sexual abandon (Primitivism). In addition, it corresponds to the queer aspects of Jones’s persona as well. Kershaw’s description of Jones as “nearly sculptural” bears a resemblance to Michael Fried’s account of minimalist artist Robert Smith’s objects, each of which became “a kind of statue” as a consequence of their “objecthood” (156). The fear of boundary crossing that Michael Fried mapped out in his extensive discussion of Minimalism’s failure as a modern art movement is articulated in his essay, “Art and Objecthood” (148–75). According to Fried, boundary crossing from one medium to another was theatrical and the cause of “objecthood,” the death of art, no longer autonomous as a truly modern work. Therefore, Jones’s work reaches “objecthood” for its theatrical, multimedia presentation (Fried 153). Perceived as “confrontational” by Fried, literalist (i.e., minimalist) art objects can inspire the same disorienting presence as a person can. Fried used interpersonal metaphors throughout his essay, and suggested that “being distanced by such objects is not . . . unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly—for example, in somewhat darkened rooms—can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way” (155).



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Equally charged with a dominating presence, Grace Jones’s appearance does not comply with the oppressive imagery of passive bodies marked as “primitive,” particularly during “Demolition Man.” Her ability to embrace the more menacing characteristics that mark certain bodies is what makes her powerful to audiences that may also be acutely aware of their perceived difference. In response to such awareness, Jones brags that she’s the “sort of thing they ban” and that she compels her audience to pay attention, like “a moth to a flame.”4 In reference to the objectification of the black female body, Evelyn Hammonds described historical portrayals of black female identity and sexuality as “often described in metaphors of speechlessness, space, or vision, as a ‘void’ or empty space that is simultaneously ever visible (exposed) and invisible and where black women’s bodies are always already colonized” (142). In terms of visual relationships to the audience, minimalist (and most avant-garde) art prescribed the quality of silence and ineffectuality to its “Other,” the object. Minimalism is the quietest of all modern art movements, and Jones’s dramatic show activates its fetishized surface into a site of performance. Minimalist art too has been critiqued for its unilateral preference for highlighting a heterosexual, male white narrative. This is one of the driving forces in Jones’s striking presence: in the midst of various objects and uniforms that reinforce brute masculinity, she is undeniably at its center. Besides the fact that Minimalism is yet another art movement that has been documented as a uniformly male phenomenon, it has also displayed a distinctly industrialized rhetoric (Chave 264). The promise of agency through objectification is an issue that Anna C. Chave took up in her account of Minimalism, which examines the phallocentric themes that are inscribed in the spectatorship of minimalist art. Chave perceived the discourse of Minimalism as based on displays of power that were fully adopted by prominent artists such as Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd. Her premise was most persuasively argued in her analysis of Dan Flavin’s The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum), in which she cited the form as “explicitly phallic” and the minimalist equivalent to a “hot rod” (267). By appropriating minimalist style, Jones created a modern platform for black female artists. The association of power was an accepted part of the minimalist experience, and her image provided viewers with a democratizing illustration of art’s legacy in American culture. Grace Jones used her ability to mold her image as a response to modernist




attitudes about black culture, sexuality, and music. Instead of idealizing art’s capacity for truth, she celebrated the possibility of objecthood as an alternative to stagnant representations of black women in art and popular culture. While multimedia aesthetics may have left critics such as Fried unimpressed, Jones exemplifies the benefits of using elaborate contexts for otherwise overlooked topics in art theory. The songs included in One Man Show are minimalist in spirit, connecting themes in cultural history that have been presented as mutually exclusive. In order to better grasp what we see as an audience, we should be destabilized and brought out of our cultural comfort zones. Notes 1. Lyrics translated by the author. 2. I found the explanation for the possibilities of the visual semiosis that occurs on the body of the perceived androgyne to be relevant to the concept of the male artist as supremely divine and capable of creating and originating styles—as having the ability to reproduce in his own right. Both artistic style and the androgyne exist in an imaginary space and are defined in real space through metaphor (the former through spiritual or biological–natural terms and the latter through Lacanian interpretation by Pacteau). Pacteau explained, “At an unconscious level, where the androgyne belongs, conciliation of the positive and the negative is possible . . . androgyny, as a fetishistic resolution of castration anxiety—providing the woman with the penis she lacks—could also evoke the possibility of the pregnant man.” 3. Kershaw’s essay begins with the conflation of the postcolonial and the postmodern, which are viewed as “interdependent.” This term implies that each exists only because of the other term, which is posed as an opposite. Although she is correct in her assertion that Jones’s performance can contribute to such a discursive approach to art-historical narratives containing Western and nonWestern subjects, I found that Kershaw’s analysis returned to a binarism during certain sections of her essay. For example, she cited Goude as a person whose aesthetic was discernible amid Jones’s performance, which maintains a possessiveness and origin for the two styles that she cited as conceptually tied to each other, mutually creating each other in the process of identification. 4. Lyrics translated by the author.

Works Cited Anderson, Carolyn. “En Route to Transnational Postmodernism: Grace Jones, Josephine Baker and the African Diaspora.” Social Science Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales 32.3 (Sept. 1993): 491–512. Print.



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Butler, Judith. “From Interiority to Gender Performatives.” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print. Hammonds, Evelyn. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” Feminism Meets Queer Theory. Ed. Elizabeth Weeds and Naomi Schor. Boston: Brown UP, 1997, 136–56. Print. Hodgkinson, Will. “Snapshot: Grace Jones.” Guardian Unlimited Online. 24 July 2007. Web. Internet Movie Database. “Biography for Grace Jones.” 3 June 2007. Web. Jarvis Cocker Enters the Forest of No Return: Meltdown Part 2. Intermezzo. 24 July 2007. Web. Kershaw, Miriam. “Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones.” Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century 56.4 (Winter 1997): 19–25. Print. Norment, Lynn. “The Outrageous Grace Jones.” Ebony July 1979, 84–94. Print. One Man Show. Directed by Jean-Paul Goude. VHS. Sequences by Michael Shamberg. Performed by Grace Jones. Los Angeles: Island Visual Arts, 1982. Pacteau, Francette. “The Impossible Referent: Representations of the Androgyne.” Formations of Fantasy. Ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan. London: Methuen, 1986. 62–84. Print. Primitivism. Guggenheim Museum. 19 July 2007. Web. Rubin, William Stanley. “Museum of Modern Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Dallas Museum of Art.” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Web. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Epistemology of the Closet.” Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. 67-90. Print. Stokstad, Marilyn, Margaret A. Oppenheimer, and Stephen Addiss. Art History: From Prehistory to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. 1105–1106. Print. Walters, Barry. “Pull Up to Her Bumper.” The Advocate 761 (1998): 61. Print. The World of Grace Jones. 17 July 2007. Web.







Images That Sell The Black Female Body Imag(in)ed in 1960s and 1970s Magazine Ads Michelle L. Filling

A

s the forty-fourth president of the United States was sworn into office in January 2009, not all eyes were on Barack Obama. The media anxiously awaited Michelle Obama’s appearance in her inaugural outfit and ballgown. Much of the media and the nation’s attention has focused on Michelle’s attire and how she has been “imaged” in photographs in her early days in the White House in very traditional mother roles in the kitchen, and waiting for Sasha and Malia to arrive home from school. While some might criticize this media attention as overshadowing Michelle’s education and potential for leadership within the White House, or discount it as a shameless plug for brands like J. Crew, the image of Michelle Obama contributes to a long history of images of black women who have shaped beauty culture. While the fashion and beauty industries seem to be solely about consumerism, beauty culture has powerful implications for social, political, and cultural history.1 As Michelle Obama appears on the covers of People, Vogue, Life, Time, and Ebony, I question what this media attention means. What does it mean for us to be standing in the grocery checkout lane gazing at First Lady Obama’s toned arms in a shift dress or long legs in shorts as she steps off Air Force One? While this might seem like a replication of the overeroticized and colonizing voyeurism that Saartjie



5

Baartman endured in the 1800s, there is a distinct difference—Michelle Obama’s agency. African American women’s bodies have historically been excluded from white beauty culture or viewed as abnormal, like Baartman; yet Michelle Obama builds on the work of African American women from the 1960s and 1970s to insert her image in mainstream media. To a great extent, she has the power to present her body in a certain way; for example, she has agreed to pose for the covers of magazines (as opposed to just paparazzi shots of her body). The highly glamorous photograph of Michelle Obama on the cover of Vogue magazine seems to be a conscious effort to showcase a black woman’s body as powerful, feminine, and beautiful. Almost a year into President Obama’s term Michelle Obama seemingly had not established any political or social agenda, and yet she has done just that through her power to have her body viewed by the world. She confidently gazes at the camera and projects an image of a beautiful black body that is not ruled or colonized by anyone. She uses the media not only to preserve the historic moment of the first black president but also to further the evolving definition of beauty in America through the imaging of her body. Michelle Obama contributes her iconic image of the black body to the collection of icons that control notions of beauty in America. President Obama’s inauguration day is a product of decades of fighting for justice within America, more specifically driven by the 1960s and 1970s when America seemed like a war zone. Volatile events like the riots in Watts, deaths in campus demonstrations, and assassinations of leaders increased the representation of blackness in the media and dramatically affected race relations in America. The changes that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s did not happen just through the clenched fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympic games in Mexico City, or the protests of the women’s liberation movement, or the rallying calls of Martin Luther King Jr., but in all aspects of culture, including the realm of beauty. Beauty culture, driven by consumerism and capitalism, might not seem a likely place for transformation; however, mainstream white beauty culture experienced a change also as the imaginings of blackness shifted the cultural scene during the 1960s and 1970s, which ultimately affected the way society views a black woman’s body in today’s beauty culture. Although attempts at transforming beauty culture happened throughout the twentieth century, during 1965 to 1975—a time when our country was in great turmoil and unrest—blackness was inserted in mainstream white beauty culture more forcefully than ever.2 The



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cultural events of this time period catalyze a fluctuation in power that penetrates every aspect of culture—including beauty. As the radical political events and social movements of 1965 to 1975 forced black beauty into the media, mainstream beauty culture absorbed the influences of black culture while still retaining its dominant ideological bias. Mainstream beauty culture’s imaginings of blackness are most evident in magazine images in which bodies can be contrived and transformed to signify different markers of race, class, and gender. Magazine advertising demonstrates how marketers’ appropriation of black bodies within both mainstream and black magazines contributed to America’s collective imagining of the black female body. By comparing the ads for beauty products in the 1965 and 1975 issues of Ebony and Good Housekeeping,3 I delineate how notions of blackness became present within mainstream beauty culture by identifying what I term duplication and inverse articulation, that is, the ways in which the marketers use images of black women in relation to their white counterparts. Duplication—when two ads are identical except for the model—reveals the construction of beauty and black women’s ability to occupy the same space as white models, as the sets for the photo shoots remained unchanged. While duplication marks progress in that it presents images of blackness that were previously absent from magazines, the sign systems within these advertisements complicate what the ads signify in terms of black beauty. By looking at signs such as hair and skin within these ads, we can see how black women’s bodies signified either assimilation to white standards of beauty or departure from such conformity. In order to evaluate progress in racial representations with magazines, we must also examine moments of inverse articulation, which describes when advertisers used black models in traditionally white magazines, thus articulating or expressing black beauty to market to a largely white audience. Of course, within both duplication and inverse articulation, sign systems of the models’ bodies can signify either black or white aesthetics of beauty, which could suggest how these ads further the emergence of black beauty. When John Johnson created Ebony in 1945, he created it in the likeness of Life magazine, thus creating a black duplication of a white magazine. Johnson attempted to mirror its competitor and archetype, Life, in terms of format but not content. Ben Burns, editor of Ebony, describes how he imitated the white magazine: “I had copies of Life constantly in front of me to emulate, and I did so religiously” (85).4 Sections of the magazines clearly mirrored each other, such as “Speaking of People” in



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Ebony and “Speaking of Pictures” in Life. However, Ebony did not just copy Life, it articulated what it meant to be black in America. While Johnson used similar organizational structures as in Life, he revealed a difference in experience for black Americans through the content of the images and articles. Johnson imitated Life to show a level of equality, and also aimed to highlight black Americans’ ability to succeed in spite of oppression and racism. With the advent of the first black magazine with a large-scale circulation, white advertisers saw the black middle class as prime consumers to target via print ads in Ebony. At first, instead of doing market research on how to reach this specific audience, advertisers used the same ads but with a black model substituted for the original white model, thus creating duplication. Eventually, companies created ads exclusively for Ebony that did not appear in mainstream white magazines like Good Housekeeping because they realized the economic benefit of marketing directly to the black community. While it might seem easy to mark these new ads designed exclusively for the black community as an indication of progress because they seem to recognize the contemporary needs and desires of the black community, we must not herald these new ads as more authentic or more progressive than the duplicate ads. In fact, the duplicate ads use the same kind of substitution that Ebony, as a whole, used. The duplicate ads convey an idealized version of separate but equal as they showcase how both races can inhabit the same spaces and fulfill the same roles. In this sense, duplicate ads reveal how constructs of beauty are just that—constructed. Through the lens of duplication and inverse articulation, we can see how Ebony, a magazine that Johnson created in the likeness of a white magazine, attempted to progress the advancement of representations of blackness within beauty culture through its acceptance of both duplicate and original ads and its inclusion of articles that highlighted the contributions of black women to America’s evolving beauty culture. Based on more than 330 advertisements for beauty products appearing in the 1965 and 1975 issues of Ebony and Good Housekeeping, I find that cultural assumptions about black women’s bodies are embedded in the advertisements. In Ebony, the advertisements attempt to define black beauty, yet their attempt at codification becomes challenged by a readership whose keen awareness of the political and social movements of the time causes them to call for alteration, critique, and transformation of the signs and signifiers at work in the ads. A semiotic analysis of the advertisements in Ebony and Good Housekeeping develops my argument that (a) beauty culture exists within the matrix of multiple texts




that intersect and influence each other, (b) these texts both reflect and reshape beauty culture, and (c) the imag(in)ing of black women’s bodies contributes to the evolving ethos of how America defines beauty. When Ebony first began running ads, the companies only used their stock ads, which featured white models, because they never had an advertising forum like Ebony with a predominantly black readership. Eventually this began to shift in the 1950s and 1960s as black women set forth the call for advertising that reflected their beauty—their hair, skin, and smiles. Duplicate advertising, which saved companies money by utilizing the same ad but with the substitution of models of different races, ultimately influenced beauty culture in a way that marketers who were just trying to maximize their money never anticipated. Duplication shows how black women can exist in the same constructed space as white women. While these ads show how beauty is constructed, the images within the duplication contain complex sign systems that signify more than just equality between the black and white models. This marketing technique appears in the January 1965 issues of Good Housekeeping and Ebony where Clairol advertises “Loving Care” Hair Color Lotion in two ads with identical layouts. For hair product advertisements such as these, we must consider how they evoke a sign system of hair. Ads display the signifier, hair, in a multitude of textures, lengths, and styles. If a model styles her hair in an Afro, a straightened bob, or organized plaits, these markers signify differently and range from embracing an unprocessed style synonymous with the Black Power movement, to assimilating a white standard of hair styling, to creating a style that evokes an African aesthetic. Based on this signification, hair becomes part of a complex sign system that, when depicted in advertisements, communicates competing values about blackness and beauty culture to both African American and white communities. In the Good Housekeeping ad, a white woman with her head turned slightly to the left and with a pleasant, almost innocently coy smile looks at the camera while the reflection of her profile appears in a mirror behind her. In large white print, the ad says, “Hate that gray? Wash it away! Now! Color only the gray without changing your natural hair color!” The woman wears jewelry and makeup that allows her to appear to be middle to upper class. She looks as though she is ready for a night on the town, and yet her stereotyped image, complete with a strand of pearls, resembles a June Cleaver-esque housewife. The duplicate ad in Ebony contains exactly the same layout except the model is black and the text of the large print is black.5 The graphic designers most



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likely switched the font color because the background for the Ebony ad needed to be lighter to contrast the model’s dark skin. The ads reveal an intertextual sign system of hair, as the black model’s hair resembles the style worn by the white model. The black hair has been processed so that it is smooth and straight and then restyled into soft, large waves. The black model’s hair signifies the aesthetic created in the duplicate ad in Good Housekeeping, which creates a sign of hair associated with a middle- to upper-class housewife. The other notable duplication within the two ads is that at the bottom there is a small picture of a man with the caption: “Makes your husband feel younger, too . . . just to look at you!” While it would have been easy for Clairol just to delete the image and caption from the ad appearing in Ebony because of its placement in the bottom left margin of the ad, they instead photographed a black male model for the duplicate ad. Clairol’s attention to these small details and creation of a duplicate ad shows its commitment to achieving a marketing campaign that directly appeals to the black community. Hair appears as a sign even in these smaller photographs of the husbands. The black husband has his hair neatly trimmed close to his scalp, thus signifying a departure from the popular Afro and its connections to the Black Power movement. The hair of the male and female models in the duplicate ad creates a sign of conservative, middle-class blackness that mirrors the hair styling and class established in the Good Housekeeping ad. Although duplicate advertising symbolized a positive move away from using exclusively white models, the use of duplicate advertising mirrors its contemporary cultural, social, and political movements in terms of racial inequality. Using the same ad layout with a different model seems to create a separate-but-equal climate in the world of advertising. Over a decade after Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), it would seem that American culture should have been moving beyond a separate-but-equal mentality. Of course, consumer culture differs greatly from legal realms in that economics drives it, not justice. The establishment of Ebony itself recognizes that equal racial representation does not exist in generalist magazines like Life and Good Housekeeping. While companies generally did not put black models in mainstream white magazine ads in the 1960s, by creating duplicate advertising, companies recognized the value of black models for the African American market of consumers who read magazines like Ebony and later, Essence, and simultaneously ignored any differences between black and white consumers.6 Duplicate ads demonstrate how these




companies could not essentialize differences in the black community and expected darkened images of whiteness to effectively target black consumers through a reinscription of class biases with a “color-blind” application of beauty. Eventually, in a move that advanced the place of blackness within beauty culture, Clairol designed advertisements specifically for Ebony. Perhaps this change indicates that duplicate ads were not working because they were still classed in a way that did not reach all audiences. Regardless, this shift away from duplicate advertising meant that companies were investing money in the black modeling industry and placing value in the contributions of black women to America’s changing beauty culture. In March 1965, Clairol placed a large ad in Ebony whose duplicate never appeared in Good Housekeeping, thus suggesting they were specifically targeting the readers of Ebony. In the ad, five smiling black women, perfectly coifed and wearing pearls, crisp white collars, and soft sweaters, exude a conservative style. The models’ preppy style represents a rejection of the counterculture fashions popular in the 1960s. Although the women in the ad appear too young to actually have gray hair, the advertisement targets middle-aged women who experience an early onset of gray hair. The ad features a four-page pullout insert with a “shade-selector chart” for women to take with them to their hairdresser. The chart features the faces of many black models showcasing the various shades of hair dye. Although Clairol intends for the product to be used to cover gray, they market it to women who want to be “right in fashion, soft and ladylike” by showing how people admire the models “for their radiant smiles, their up-to-the-minute prettiness.” The wording of the ad focuses on high style and the “fun of fashion.” Although most African American women would not be aware of the duplicate advertising unless they also read mainstream white magazines like Good Housekeeping, Clairol’s ad uniquely designed for Ebony showcases the strength of the economic base in the black community that Clairol would create a marketing campaign designed exclusively for black women. Reading the hair as a sign system within this ad, the hair signifies conformity to conservative white beauty standards, as many of the shades are blonde, similar to the Loving Care ad that appeared in January 1965. While this March 1965 ad is not a duplicate, the hair signifies the same compliance with white standards.7 Each model’s hair replicates the style of the hair worn by the girl next to her, but with a different color shade. The hair is straightened and styled into a voluminous



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and precisely arranged bob. In order to achieve the almost wiglike perfection of the models’ hair, most black women would need to undergo several processes to straighten and color the hair. In fact, one shade of Clairol dye, “Pale Baby Blonde,” requires prelightening for the average black woman. The small print at the bottom of the ad reveals that three of the five models applied their Clairol color to “prelightened hair.” The ad asks the reader, “If you want to . . . why not?” The ellipsis of this statement leaves the end of the statement ambiguous. The ad could be asking if the reader wants to dye her hair or if she wants to subscribe to this vision of middle-class blackness that embraces a white aesthetic of beauty. The ad supports the question “why not?” by describing the hair color as “natural,” when obviously “Pale Baby Blonde” is not a “natural” color on a Black woman. While this ad seems powerful because Clairol designed it exclusively for black women, the sign system of hair reveals the signification of a white aesthetic of beauty at work in the ad. Duplicate advertising continued in 1975,8 which reveals the constructed nature of beauty within advertising. When companies alter the duplicate ads in more ways than just exchanging a model, these alterations often reveal differing ideologies about black and white beauty. Maybelline used duplicate ads for their “Fresh & Lovely” ad campaign. Each ad uses a large picture of a woman’s smiling face, framed by the words “Hello! Fresh Face” followed by smaller text that reads, “That’s you with a little help from Maybelline.” In May 1975 a “Fresh Face” ad for lipstick appears in Ebony. The ad reveals a caption from the black model: “I want my lips to be delicious. To feel dewy, not dry. To gleam with clear, constant color. And I want them to say nice fresh things about me. And to keep on saying them for hours.” In the November 1975 Good Housekeeping, a “Fresh Face” advertisement showcases foundation with the same layout. The ad quotes the white model as saying, “I want my skin to look gorgeous. Fresh and un-made up even in the bright sunlight. Am I asking for miracles?” While these two ads are actually advertising two different products, lipstick and foundation, the ads are altered duplicates that reveal a difference in the imaginings of white and black beauty. The language in the ad in Ebony focuses on her lips being “delicious” as if they are edible and meant to be consumed in the same way that the public consumes images of beauty. The black model wants her lips to project “nice fresh things” about her, so that her lips communicate more than just a color of lipstick—they project nicety and freshness. The ad suggests that the lipstick has the power to rewrite the black woman’s image as counter to the prevailing




beauty culture that heralds whiteness as “fresh” and “nice.” With this reading, the ad simultaneously suggests that without the lipstick, the black woman’s lips do not project “nice things.” Blackness in the realm of beauty culture becomes entangled with issues of character as demonstrated by this ad, which connects a black woman’s lips with her amiability. The ad with the white model does not connect beauty and character. She desires her white “skin to look gorgeous . . . fresh and un-made up.” She asks, “Am I asking for miracles?” The answer to this rhetorical question is “no.” But is the answer “no” because of the foundation or because it is easier for a white woman’s skin to be perceived as “gorgeous” and “un-made up” due to the prevailing ideals of skin in relation to beauty? In both ads the models desire something in terms of their facial beauty. The text of the ad with the black model suggests the power of the makeup to transform the woman from undesirable to deliciously dewy, fresh, and nice, whereas the white model’s needs seem less transformative because she is not asking for a miraculous change. These two ads show how advertisers imagined blackness as far removed from current ideals of beauty and that beauty products could transform not only the woman’s image but her character as well. In 1975 Johnson seemed to have dual intentions for his publication as he sought to make money via white advertisers like Clairol while simultaneously trying to support black-owned advertisers. This mission reflects what was also happening in some political arenas at the time, as black city officials backed equal access to jobs and policy making and simultaneously supported nationalist efforts to control politics and economics for African Americans.9 This tension, combined with the friction between the concept of a natural black beauty aesthetic and an aesthetic that conformed more to white standards of beauty, resulted in some of the most dramatic changes in black beauty culture. Many black-owned companies advertised products that lightened skin and straightened hair, essentially helping African Americans to conform to white standards of beauty. For this reason, many regarded these products as controversial during a time when black equaled radical power. Ironically, though, Nadinola (a skin brightener–lightener product) ran one of the most politically charged ads in 1968 and continued to reprint it throughout the black arts movement. The Ebony ad contained a large photograph of a black woman with an Afro and big hoop earrings with the statement “Black is beautiful.” The ad uses the rhetorical strategy of building on racial pride and bringing out the “natural” beauty in black women. Instead of focusing on skin lightening, the ad focuses on




evening out the skin tone: “Naturally beautiful. But there’s one requirement: naturally beautiful skin. That’s where Nadinola comes in. Nadinola brings out the natural beauty of your complexion, gives you a smooth, glowing skin tone that’s even all over. No blotches. No uneven dark areas. No blemishes. Just a beautiful you. Black is beautiful. What makes it even more beautiful? Nadinola. Naturally.” In Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920–1975, Susannah Walker describes the Nadinola ad as “a shrewd attempt to retain a market for a product that, given the political climate at the time, seemed doomed” (178). Walker’s evaluation of Nadinola’s campaign recognizes how politics and beauty surprisingly influence each other quite dramatically. Nadinola’s ad, even if a desperate ploy to stay in business, commodifies black pride and makes a statement about what society values.10 The commodification of symbols of black pride continued to appear in Ebony beauty product ads throughout the 1970s, which helped to promulgate the “Black is beautiful” movement within beauty culture.11 The “Black is beautiful” concept became evident in mainstream beauty culture in the 1970s when Revlon launched an ad campaign of inverse articulation; that is, they used black models to market their product within a traditionally white magazine. Until this moment of inverse articulation, Revlon’s “Charlie” perfume consistently used a stereotypical all-American girl, blonde, smiling, and confidently striding, to promote their perfume. In the 1970s they decided to use Darnella Thomas, a black model who had previously appeared in Glamour, to take the traditional Charlie stride to a new level. The ads featuring Thomas appeared in Glamour and Vogue, a reversal of the usual use of duplicate models. According to Thomas, Revlon paid her by the day and never signed her to a contract (Summers 74). Nevertheless, Revlon committed to using black beauty to sell their perfume to a largely white audience in these mainstream magazines. In each of the fragrance ads, the text, “Now the world belongs to Charlie,” frames the smiling, striding new Charlie girl—Darnella Thomas. This line becomes significant in the presence of inverse articulation because it declares that the world, which both historically oppressed images of blackness and reinvented signs of blackness to fit prescribed notions of it, now belonged to this African American woman. The ad describes the fragrance as “gorgeous, sexy-young,” which also signifies the model who presumably wears the perfume and thus, by the logic of advertising, gains those attributes by wearing it. In each of Thomas’s Charlie ads, her hair appears different. In one she styles it curly, in another she straightens it, and in the third it becomes obscured by a




hat. These three representations of her hair signify the multiple styles Thomas can assume. The ad with the hat mirrors another Charlie ad in which a white model wears a similar pantsuit and hat. The ever-present pants, heels, and confident stride of the Charlie girl symbolize the power and feminism within her articulation of womanhood (black or white). Revlon’s use of inverse articulation to replace the iconic blonde Charlie with a black model demonstrates a fissure in the face of an all-white beauty culture. Over the course of a decade, advertisements changed the face of beauty culture. The 1960s and 1970s reflect a time when icons of beauty become intertwined with social and political movements as elements like the Afro, silk blouses, and leather jackets became associated with the tenets of the Black Power movement. Magazine advertisements contribute to the development of icons of beauty and demonstrate the various ways women’s bodies and roles are imagined. Black women in ads function in multiple ways—as reflectors of white standards of beauty, temptresses, and purveyors of black beauty. Ebony boldly asked the question, “Have Black Models Really Made It?” as they put four black fashion models—Naomi Sims, Princess Elizabeth of Toro, Avis McCarther, and Madelyn Sanders—on the cover of their May 1970 cover. To answer Ebony’s question— no, the models had not “made it,” but rather they were in the constant process of making it. That is, admittedly, black models did not receive equal representation in 1970, but their presence within mainstream beauty culture indicated a change within print media that opened a space for blackness. Mainstream beauty culture changed as black models posed on the covers of magazines that previously only showed whiteness. The multiple ways black women are imagined within ads in the 1960s and 1970s indicate the interplay among the Black Power movement, women’s liberation, beauty culture, and marketing. The increased publication of images of black women in beauty ads—duplicate and original ads within Ebony and inverse ads within mainstream magazines—catalyzed a shift within mainstream beauty culture that allowed for an increased imagining of the black body as beautiful. As the events of the 1960s and 1970s continue to drive the racial, social, and political movements of the twenty-first century, we look at how beauty culture continues to be intertwined with our changing values and mores. America looks to Michelle Obama’s fashion in a time when our country faces an economic recession. Her clothing choices for herself and her daughters suggest someone who mutes styles inappropriate to hard times such as these, thus conveying that sartorial modesty is a marker




of style. Michelle Obama’s notable outfits are available at a mall rather than at high-end boutiques, and for her inaugural gown she selected an unknown young designer rather than an elite, established one, which has caused analysts to speculate whether her attire will increase clothing sales and reinvigorate a declining fashion market. In the twenty-first century when societal change is not as overt as the time when freedom riders, Panther party members, civil rights activists, and feminist protestors fought battles every day, we must listen to beauty culture as it reveals much about what people value, reject, and rebel against. We, too, must use beauty culture as a space in which we can evoke change. While it is not the floor of Congress or the front lines of a war, it is a place where social change can and will continue to happen, as Michelle Obama demonstrates by posing for magazines as a way to showcase her body as a sign of black power and beauty. It is virtually impossible to escape beauty culture, so we must criticize it, engage with it, and learn from it, for it is a powerful construction with real ramifications for race and gender relations in America in the twenty-first century. Notes 1. The time period of the Black Arts Movement opened up an arena for underrepresented groups to stake a claim within beauty culture. Markers of skin tone, hair texture, and body shape served great purpose during the period of 1965 to 1975 when beauty interweaved with social campaigns like the “Black is beautiful” movement. Beauty culture includes the production, advertising, and consumption of products that enhance or claim to enhance one’s body, which became crucial during a time period when people manipulated their bodies in order either to make a radical statement or to assimilate within mainstream white beauty culture. 2. Within the all-encompassing umbrella of beauty culture is “mainstream beauty culture,” which refers to the dominant culture’s system of symbols and meanings that creates a hegemonic beauty ideal. Throughout the twentieth century, “mainstream beauty culture” refers largely to societal activities and signs of whiteness and is often a product of middle-class values. Beauty culture, as a whole, consists of discourses, such as magazine ads, beauty enhancement products, and newspaper articles, that can establish a particular aesthetic that mainstream beauty culture either marginalizes or embraces. Mainstream beauty culture seems unchanging, especially when one group’s ideology dominates for an extended time; however, it changes just as American culture changes through shifts in power. Ideologies outside the dominant power can manipulate and change mainstream beauty culture. While whiteness has dominated America for decades, our ever-changing multicultural




3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

society impacts images within mainstream beauty culture, thus revealing how mainstream beauty culture is a set of often contradictory signs and impulses as it constantly reinvents itself based on shifting power relations. After researching the distribution and content of many magazines, I selected Good Housekeeping as a comparison to Ebony because of its similarity in terms of advertising and circulation. Ebony, first circulated in 1945, was the premier magazine for black culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Ebony became the largest circulated black publication in the world and the first black magazine to be audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (Johnson and Bennett 166). Being “audited” by the ABC means that an independent accrediting agency verifies information about circulation that ultimately helps magazines to gain credibility with advertisers. In 1969, Ebony had a circulation of 1,012,000. Both Good Housekeeping and Ebony cost $5 for the monthly subscription per year. Good Housekeeping’s circulation was 5,750,000 in 1969 (Katz and Gargal 341). Obviously, this is a larger circulation than Ebony and arguably, no ideal comparator exists (especially considering the variety and specificity of mainstream white magazines), but Good Housekeeping, due to its cost, monthly circulation, and target middle-class audience makes it a suitable comparator. Both magazines target women as part of their readership, which is important in terms of analyzing beauty product ads. While Life might seem like an appropriate comparator to Ebony, because of the range of specialty magazines for a white readership, Life contains very few beauty product ads, unlike Good Housekeeping. For more on Burns’s experience, see Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism (Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1996). At the bottom of the ad, text further describes the product, and although much of the wording is similar, there are some differences, including the description of the colors available. In the Good Housekeeping ad, it reads, “Colors range from blonde to new Natural Black” and in the Ebony ad, it reads, “Choose the tone most like your own, from eleven shades ranging to this new Natural Black,” thus focusing on tones rather than colors in order to appeal to the African American community. Clairol continued their Loving Care duplicate ads with various black and white models throughout 1965 (These ads also appear in Ebony May 1965 and Good Housekeeping March and May 1965). Essence released its first issue in May 1970. While beauty culture seems to be divided along lines of race, I must acknowledge that race as a category becomes problematic in the context of my argument since race within the discursive field of beauty culture is largely the product of physical markers constructed through a social historical process. With a wide range of socially constructed markers associated with “blackness” and “whiteness,” the categories become multiple and unstable. Despite this instability, dominant ideals of beauty become defined dichotomously in black and white terms. Beauty culture functions in a unique way because of how these physical markers become socially constructed in a way that forces race to appear rigid and seemingly defined by certain traits. While mainstream beauty culture seems to remain static and monolithic, it changes as it absorbs




8.

9.

10.

11.

new ideals of beauty that challenge its permanence. The dissonance between mainstream beauty culture’s ability to seem fixed while actually changing and adapting to culture has been described by many researchers as a myth. Duplicate advertising continued in July 1975 with Clairol’s Loving Care line of hair lotion, designed to “wash away” gray hair, which appeared in both Ebony and Good Housekeeping. Clairol replicates the same text in each ad and only changes the small headshot at the bottom of the ad. For more on how political leaders supported equal rights on the local level and black nationalism on the national level, see Matthew Countryman’s Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Avant-garde advertising strategies like Nadinola’s paved the way for future marketing like the current Dove campaign for “real beauty,” which uses real women instead of models to show the many shades and shapes of beauty. For more on the historical, political, and social ramifications of the Afro, see Chapter 4. Also, Susannah Walker discusses the commodification of the Afro in her text, Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920– 1975. She argues, “Ultimately the Afro had a symbolic power and a material influence on African American women’s style and beauty standards that went beyond the narrow meanings commodification gave it” (203).

Works Cited Burns, Ben. Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. Print. Chambers, Jason. “Presenting the Black Middle Class: John H. Johnson and Ebony Magazine, 1945–1974.” Historicizing Lifestyle: Mediating Taste, Consumption and Identity from the 1900s to 1970s. Ed. David Bell and Joanne Hollows. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. 54–69. Print. Clairol. Advertisement. Ebony. Jan. 1965. Print. Clairol. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping. Jan. 1965. Print. Countryman, Matthew J. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Print. “Have Black Models Really Made It?” Ebony. May 1970. Print. Johnson, John, and Lerone Bennett, Jr. Succeeding Against the Odds. New York: Warner, 1989. Print. Katz, Bill, and Berry Gargal, eds. Magazines for Libraries. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1969. Print. Maybelline. Advertisement. Ebony. May 1975. Print. Maybelline. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping. Nov. 1975. Print. Nadinola. Advertisement. Ebony. May 1969. Print. Summers, Barbara. Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models. New York: Amistad, 1998. Print. Walker, Susannah. Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2007. Print.




Four Women, For Women Black Women—All Grown Up Debra A. Powell-Wright

I am wearing my womanhood from the inside out cause I met myself through the eyes of my ancestors my beige-bamboo to tree-bark dark daughters my sisters who mothered me, smothered me with the eyes of let there be peace . . . —Debra Powell-Wright, “Woman . . . Just Be”

Black Women: Reflections Eternal

I

n her essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” bell hooks writes, “Bombarded with images representing black female bodies as expendable, black women have either passively absorbed this thinking or vehemently resisted it” (65). Unlike Nina Simone’s 1966 first-person rendition of “Four Women,” in reaction to the unbridled racism and white supremacy of the civil rights era, Talib Kweli’s twenty-first-century third-person voice, in tribute to Simone, positions these same four black women— Aunt Sarah, Siffronia, Sweet Thang, and Peaches—squarely within the cultural iconography of today’s contemporary urban environment. And while his lyric is specific to each character’s individual physicality as written by Simone, different than her sparse yet powerful lyric, Kweli locates each of them to a particular encounter that he may have had in his role as a young, lyrically gifted black male. Same song; different use



6

of language, music, and vocality; different approach to addressing the imagery around the black female stereotype. The son of an English professor mother and a sociology professor father, Brooklyn-born Kweli has been labeled a conscious rapper, a political rapper, a righteous-voiced hip-hop artist and skillful lyricist in tune with and a product of urban America’s social and cultural issues. Long before the hip-hop era lay claim as the worldwide dominant voice of the disenfranchised urban community, there was Nina Simone, High Priestess of Soul, singing “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” And a generation after Simone, there was Talib Kweli, along with DJ Hi-Tek, together known as Reflections Eternal, with their October 2000 debut CD featuring “For Women” as the final cut. Interviewed a few years later by 50 Cent for hip-hop magazine XXL, Kweli is quoted: I discovered Nina in high school. I got sent away to boarding school and in order to keep myself clean, really—whenever I would go home, I would take my father’s old records and listen to them. I had a little turntable and Nina Simone records. The reason that she touched me is, when she came out she wasn’t a traditional singer . . . And she didn’t have the look of, like a Billie Holiday. She was a lot more African looking . . . She chose to speak about issues that affect poor people and issues that affect Black people. And you know, she was ostracized for it, but she kept doing it. Her career path speaks to me because I don’t feel like I do this naturally . . . And with me, I feel more in touch with Nina Simone . . . But I didn’t feel the effect she had on me until she passed. (102–8)

In her 1992 biography, I Put A Spell on You, Simone states on writing “Four Women,” “The women in the song are black, but the skin tones range from light to dark and their ideas of beauty and their own importance are deeply influenced by that. All the song did was tell what entered the minds of most black women in American when they thought about themselves; Their complexions, their hair—straight, kinky, natural, which?—and what other women thought of them” (Simone and Cleary 117). Although it is not known whether Simone heard Kweli’s version, she did not share his appreciation for the art form that would serve as the foundation for him to give voice to issues of oppression and racism. Simone is reported to have said of rap, “I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping” (Brainy Quote). Despite Simone’s reaction to rap, she and Kweli, each in their own time, have suffered from a creative economy that has valued commercialism and capitalism over



110 Debra A. Powell-Wright

consciousness raising and combating societal ills. Simone states in her biography, “When ‘Four Women’ was released in 1966 some black radio stations banned DJs from playing it because they said it ‘insulted’ black women . . . The song told a truth that many people in the USA—especially black men—simply weren’t ready to acknowledge at that time” (Simone and Cleary 117). Talib Kweli is not the only hip-hop lyricist who has sampled Nina Simone’s work or acknowledged her forthrightness and cultural observations as being a profound influence on their work as vocal, visual, literal, and musical artists. Iconic lyricists from folk singers to gospel musicians, a range of musical talents from Cat Stevens and Donny Hathaway to Lauryn Hill and Aretha Franklin, have covered Simone’s numerous hits. To date, however, Kweli is the only hip-hop artist of renown who has reutilized the entirety of Simone’s 1966 release to voice the perspective of this generation’s familiarity with the song’s four historically stereotypical female caricatures—Mammy, Tragic Mulatto, Jezebel, and Sapphire. In his essay “To Be or Not to Be Eaten: The Survival of Traditional Storytelling,” Jack Zipes writes in regard to David Gross’s book, The Past in Ruins, “According to Gross, there were at least two types of refunctioning or reutilizing . . . the second kind takes possession of an entire tradition and imbues it with new layers of signification and social tasks” (22). Kweli, then, has done just that; he has taken possession of Simone’s “Four Women,” and starting with the change in song title, has given us a perspective of his “For Women” that feels more empathic and less angry, albeit no less impactful, as it examines the subtleties of textures and tones of black female representation. Aunt Sarah: Bulletproof Diva They told me the truth of healing my hurt When my soul spoke wounds of perceived love lost They let me know that wishing won’t wake me up, Shake me loose or, let my spirit flow Showed me the shape of faith, the face of courage, and The body of wisdom which would make me whole like them . . . —Debra Powell-Wright

The Jim Crow era’s mammy caricature, the “most well known and enduring racial caricature of African American women” was “deliberately constructed to suggest ugliness. Mammy was portrayed as dark-skinned,



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often pitch black, in a society that regarded black skin as ugly, tainted” (Jim Crow Museum). As further stated on the Jim Crow Museum Web site, the mammy caricature, unlike the black domestic worker or house servant was “black, fat with huge breasts, and head covered with a kerchief to hide her nappy hair, strong, kind, loyal, sexless, religious and superstitious.” Although Simone’s lyrics succinctly employ characteristics attributable to the mammy character, her ending declaration of being called “Aunt Sarah” suggests a restrained yet vocal intensity that is the antithesis of the mammy who has been said to have been contented, even happy, to have been enslaved. Simone’s tone takes on a slightly prideful, head-held-high-in-spite-of-the-difficulties quality, different from the acquiescent persona mammy was said to possess. Simone could have taken her cue from historian Catherine Clinton, who claimed that the real antebellum mammies were rare. Clinton writes: “The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the antebellum period” (Clinton 201–2, qtd. in Jim Crow Museum). Still, the slavery era gave birth to a number of fictional mammies and aunties in literature, cinema, and song: Aunt Chloe in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Aunt Delilah, played by Louise Beavers in the movie Imitation of Life; and Al Jolson in the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, singing mammy lyrics in blackface. Generations later, this history has not been forgotten. Writer Lisa Jones, daughter of Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones, has not forgotten. In her 1994 collection, Bulletproof Diva, self-described “daughter of a black nationalist and a Jewish intellectual,” writes in her “Never Auntie” essay: “The perverted love letter from Jim Crow American that unnerves me most was White folks’ fondness for calling mature black women ‘aunties,’ a keepsake from slavery days” (21). Her essay goes on to speak of her favorite aunt Cora, of whom she said, “You couldn’t put a red bandanna . . . on aunt Cora, with a ten-foot pole, or for that matter have her suckle Massa or brats . . . Whatever auntie was, historical reality or figment of white folks’ imaginations, Cora has never been . . . At a time when portraits in American entertainment of black women as caretakers of white folks have resurfaced with creepy popularity, it’s worth repeating: My aunt has never been your auntie. I will never be your auntie. Auntie yourself ” (22).




Kweli’s lyrics demonstrate his understanding of this history coupled with a sense of pride upon “meeting” Aunt Sarah. In a lengthy lyric that more fully describes the Aunt Sarah he encounters and his impression of her, Kweli relays in a traditional rap–rhyme pattern that he had met a woman of 107 years old as he got off the number two train in Brooklyn. He describes her head-wrapped dreads as being antennae that gave her a sense of direction. He claims her to be an angel sent to him; he is grateful for her presence, as he pauses to assist her up the stairs. Kweli goes on to include some of the exact lyrics in Simone’s characterization, embellishing them with a sense of due respect for all that Aunt Sarah endured. Instead of only saying that her skin was black, he continues with “it was packed with melanin.” He likens her strength and courage to that of Harriett Tubman. She is “far from a vagabond.” And despite the physical pain that been inflicted upon her, she went forward with life by loving her children, presumably biological and cultural. Those children, in turn, called her Aunt Sarah. In the storytelling lyricism and vocal delivery by Simone and Kweli, one can observe that the listener is informed of the artists’ perspective by the use of historical references, codified language, and specific imagery to place the four women within the context of the time period in which the lyric was written. Kweli’s account of Aunt Sarah is perhaps, similar to Lisa Jones’s experience with her own Aunt Cora. Jones described her aunt at age 65 as “tailored to the nines, the coif always in place.” Just as Kweli’s Aunt Sarah had the “strength of her memories,” and for Kweli seemed to be an angel, Jones states that Cora “is among God’s children who will never forget the African Holocaust” (22). Aunt Sarah and Aunt Cora had been through much trial and tribulation, yet, through Kweli’s reutilization, a new generation perceives the strength of character they exhibit, which has little to do with the negativity of the mammy character. What Simone’s and Kweli’s versions of Aunt Sarah reveal in their own distinct ways, in both lyrics and delivery, is that although the imagery created by the dominant society has remained, neither real nor imagined aunts or members of their families need adopt mammy as the defining caricature of the culture and the people it purports to describe. However, as stated earlier, the difficulty, even in that the imagery has been reutilized, in this case by Kweli, commercialism and capitalism can weigh more heavily than principle and self-empowerment.





So now, I hear myself speaking my Mother’s Tongue Hear myself saying, “I am a Chosen One” Hear myself breathing in my branded bones Hear myself knowing that I am now home Cause Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley are chanting my name And I am singing: Ashe’ Ashe I mean, I am belting out my womb woman blues . . . —Debra Powell-Wright

The Tragic Mulatto, particularly in literary and cinematic portrayals, “emphasized her personal pathologies: self-hatred, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and suicide attempts being the most common. If light enough to pass as White, she did, but passing led to deeper selfloathing. She pitied or despised blacks and the ‘blackness’ in herself; she hated or feared Whites yet desperately sought their approval. In a racebased society, the tragic mulatto found peace only in death. She evoked pity or scorn, not sympathy” (Jim Crow Museum). Because Simone’s account of Siffronia is without the heaviness of the pathologies ascribed to the tragic mulatto—specifically, being the offspring of a white slaveholder and a black female slave—her particular verse is necessarily tied to an understanding of past history that was part and parcel of the civil rights movement. That historical understanding allows the sparsely written verse to carry the weight of the injustices and tragedies of that time, without using the words “racism” and “rape.” Simone suggests a matter-of-factness about Siffronia’s life status that is neither self-deprecating nor boastful. Even in her vocal delivery, the near monotone envisages an uncertainty about Siffronia’s path, evidenced by her declaration of belonging between two worlds. And despite her physicality in terms of complexion and hair length (which presumes a specific texture), still coveted among many across the African and African-descended culture, it is not enough. While Siffronia’s challenge is the perception that she is privileged because of the way she looks, Simone portrays her as very sad. In her verse, Simone’s characterization of Siffronia is so entrenched in the dominant understanding of what happens when there is a mixedrace woman who has supposedly benefited from the one-drop rule that makes yellow skin and long hair, the listener needs no additional



Siffronia: Two-Toned Tragedy

imagery to explain the depth of the character’s emotions or to point to the caricature herself. The Jim Crow Museum Web site indicates that the most likely familiar tragic mulatto in the media is Peola, the very light, nearly whitecomplexioned daughter of a black woman in the 1934 version of the movie Imitation of Life. The Peola character was portrayed by Fredi Washington, a black actress “light enough to pass for White. She had sharply defined features; long, dark, and straight hair, and green eyes. She could not play mammy roles, and though she looked White, no acknowledged Black was allowed to play a White person from the 1930s through the 1950s” (Jim Crow Museum). Previously referenced author Lisa Jones writes about Imitation of Life in her introduction to Bulletproof Diva: This is a book of tales . . . Or, more likely, it’s a continuous reenactment of my defining moment as experienced in a movie theater in London, England, during a Saturday matinee of Imitation of Life, the 1934 version. The year is 1983 and I have just turned twenty-two. I sit in the back of the dark theater thrilled because I am about to see, for the first time, a big-screen version of myself and her name will be Peola. But as the film progresses, I notice that this Peola isn’t me at all, she’s a remake of Frankenmulatta, that character from The Octoroon Concubine of Frankenstein, one of Mary Shelley’s lost sequels. These are funeral rites for the Tragic Mulatto. (1)

Although Jones pronounces the tragic mulatto as deceased, Kweli resurrects her in his verse about the Siffronia who is pronounced to be beautiful, yet suffering from the difficulty of determining how to “get in where she fit in” because of her dual racial identity, and “people askin her what she’ll do when it comes time to choose sides.” As he did with Aunt Sarah, Kweli sets the scene by describing what he knows specifically about Siffronia’s life circumstances. He does that while also hinting at the historic reference and revelation to come, and with no mincing of words he says that her white father, while “still livin with his wife,” raped her mother. He goes on to repeatedly chant, as if he has now embodied her persona, “Don’t, don’t, Don’t hurt me again / Don’t, don’t, Don’t hurt me again.” Though this “new generation” Siffronia was not likely referred to as a Peola during the coming of hip-hop, it is generally understood that a woman of mixed race and the outcome of rape was still often ostracized within her peer group merely for her physical appearance. But by the time Kweli wrote his lyrics, rather than passing for white




or succumbing to a label that paints tragic mulattos as suicide-prone mongrels, a wider range of peoples has embraced what are defined as multicultural or multiethnic categories—a kinder and gentler definition of their racial background and cultural heritage. Today, the Black Power movement has helped them to choose sides, and their collective legacy is to endure a microscopic examination of the psychological effects imposed by racism and sexual abuse, during a process of healing and self-empowerment. Sweet Thang: Blackberry Wine And I see myself jitterbug-jumping outta my skinny See myself showing off my Harlem shimmy See myself struttin down Striver’s Row See myself on the A-train that stops at my door Cause I’m shaking loose my boogaloo caboose— I’m flyin and dippin, slidin and slippin right back into my flow I mean, I am dancing my jazz off on my good foot . . . —Debra Powell-Wright

Simone’s and Kweli’s Sweet Thing is the Jezebel; she is confident about her sexuality. With the hip-hop era’s venturing into the music video, the Jezebel was ready to play the role that in some ways legitimized her sexuality in its acceptance of her caricature as a woman taking care of her business. Technology ushered Internet porn and phone sex into open discussion, and as a means to make even faster money. Along came the 1980s and hip-hop, with its range of sociopolitical lyrics. Rap, often described by aficionados as portraying the realities of urban life, and by its critics as promoting promiscuity, misogyny, and rape as badges of honor, was an offshoot of the protest songs of the 1960s. It used its stance as the voice of the community to use the language, quickly evolving into “slackness” or vulgarity, to talk about issues of importance and relevance to youth, such as sexual and drug abuse, crime and degradation in urban America. In a collection of essays titled Rap on Rap: Straight-Up Talk on Hip-Hop Culture, Mark Naison writes in his essay “Why Does Rap Dis Romance?”, “The rap format has become a battleground of conflicting persons, from artists promoting black unity and empowerment to those bragging of sexual exploits and acts of violence. So completely has this music captured the imagination of black teenagers that anyone seeking to communicate with them only has to employ




it. Rappers with fat gold chains are challenged by those with African medallions, ‘gangsta’ rappers are denounced by those opposing drugs and gang violence, and rappers celebrating rape and sexual degradation are ‘dissed’ by those with a feminist message” (130). Kweli evidences this stanza as representing the Jezebel stereotype by rapping about Sweet Thing’s father dead from crack and her mother dead from AIDS. Her story is further complicated by teen pregnancy, miseducation, and her decision to make financial ends meet by selling her body. Again, Kweli uses Simone’s description of Sweet Thing’s physicality in a much more visual way so as to leave no question to the imagination as to her emotional state as she accepts her lot in life. Audre Lorde, in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” states, “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling . . . We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence” (53). Although this is not necessarily the case with Sweet Thing, rather than make the Jezebel a sweeping symbol of the dissipation of sexual morality, Lorde has shown that there is more than one way to view the sexual explorations of women who may make a choice of accepting or embracing their sexuality. Peaches . . . and Cream And I feel myself rising in the omnipresence of Rah Of Jah, Yahweh, Oshun, Allah Feel my liquefied fire becoming solid and whole Feel myself being born beautiful, powerful, bold Feel myself holding on tight to my She Feel myself loving myself—being me . . . —Debra Powell-Wright

This leaves Peaches as Sapphire, the sexy seductress of Jezebel with a mean streak. Peaches is the bad girl; she is the sassy woman who takes no shit and will tell you so. She has no qualms about getting in your




face and getting what she wants. She is fearless, determined to stand her ground, to be noticed. The Boston Globe’s Vanessa E. Jones wrote of today’s Sapphires,“Then there’s Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth of ‘The Apprentice,’ who rode the angry-black-woman stereotype to the covers of People and TV Guide magazines even as she made fellow AfricanAmerican Business women wince” (qtd. in Jim Crow Museum). When black women speak up about indignities, they are Sapphires. When black women stand up for their rights, they are Sapphires. When black women are direct and in charge without being flustered, they are Sapphires. And sometimes, when black women merely have an opinion, they are labeled Sapphires. But that doesn’t mean they are without compassion or without a spiritual centeredness. In contrast, Kweli’s Peaches is imbued with a somewhat tempered anger. In this final verse, instead of a present-day account, Kweli reflects back to telling the story of a Georgia woman who flees the plantation after she “sees” a sign from God. As she escapes, he raps, “She’d rather kill her babies than let the master get to ’em,” and that the next baby she has will be born free from slavery. He then allows the presumed daughter of the Georgia woman to “speak” in a brief free flow of thought about what otherwise could have been the collective plight of black women had they not escaped slavery. They could end up “being maids, cleaning ladies, maybe teachers or college graduates / nurses, housewives, prostitutes or drug addicts.” Then, in keeping with Simone’s description of brown skin and tough, bitter manner, Kweli continues in the first-person voice, softened by the possibilities of the hope derived from caring for her children. Less vehemently than Simone’s, the Peaches in Kweli’s version says with resignation, “Folks round there call me Peaches. I guess that’s my name.” And Then There’s the First Lady I mean, my She is alive and free cause I met myself Through the eyes of my ancestors and, I am a whole woman Today —Debra Powell-Wright

Today, if left up to the dominant forms of media—obviously not controlled by people of color—Michelle Obama would be Sapphire or, in today’s lingo, the Angry Black Woman. Before the Obama presidency, the New Yorker wasted no ink in portraying now First Lady Obama with




an oversized Afro, machine gun tucked under her arm, ammunition slung over her shoulders, and fatigues à la former Black Panther Angela Davis. The worldwide black community, in fact the white community, knows no such First Lady, she of brown skin, beautician-coiffed hair, and colorful sleeveless shifts displaying lovely gym-fit arms. If the white media wants to say that First Lady Obama is the Angry Black Woman, then maybe in the same way that Kweli has reutilized the language and imagery of Simone’s “Four Women” to effectuate a new way of thinking about the same story, we can embrace the sentiment of the Angry Black Woman by giving her a more correct name, like Strong Black Woman, or Righteous Black Woman, or Conscientious Black Woman. In her collection of essays, Women, Culture & Politics, Davis stated in her “Imagining the Future” speech to the 1983 Berkeley High School graduating class, “Now, it is your turn to imagine a more humane future—a future of justice, equality, and peace. And if you wish to fulfill your dreams, which remain the dreams of my generation as well, you must also stand up and speak out against war, against joblessness, and against racism” (172). We, the writers, the lyricists, the musicians, the artists, have the ability to name ourselves another name, create ourselves another image that is honest and speaks to the possibility of empowerment. In the anthology by Quinn Eli, Many Strong and Beautiful Voices, bell hooks is quoted as having said, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible” (18). Today, people of color who desire to be the storytellers in literature, cinema, and the various arts are faced with the need to balance corrective imaginings with economic viability in a society that, by virtue of capitalism, values sensationalism over truth, divisiveness over unity, and pain over prosperity. Like Simone, Kweli, and so many other artists before, after, and in between, we can choose to be that new voice, imagining the possibilities of recreating how society sees our best selves. Works Cited Blitt, Barry. “The Politics of Fear.” New Yorker. July 2009, cover. Print. Brainy Quote. Web. . Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Print. Davis, Angela. “Imagining the Future.” Women, Culture & Politics. New York: Random House, 1989. 171–78. Print.




Eli, Quinn. “Creativity.” Many Strong and Beautiful Voices: Quotations from Africans Throughout the Diaspora. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1997. 15–48. Print. hooks, bell. “Selling Hot Pussy.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End, 1992. 61–77. Print. Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. Web. . Jones, Lisa. Bulletproof Diva. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Print. Jones, Vanessa E. “The Angry Black Woman: Tart-Tongued or Driven and NoNonsense, She Is a Stereotype That Amuses Some and Offends Others.” Boston Globe. 20 Apr. 2004. Web. Kweli, Talib. Interview with 50 Cent. XXL Magazine. Aug. 2003. Web. Kweli, Talib, and Hi Tek. “For Women.” Reflection Eternal: Train of Thought. Los Angeles: Priority Records, 2000. Print. Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1998. 53–59. Print. Naison, Mark. “Why Does Rap Dis Romance?” Rap on Rap: Straight-Up Talk on Hiphop Culture. Ed. Adam Sexton. New York: Dell, 1995. 129–31. Print. Powell-Wright, Debra. “Woman . . . Just Be.” 2001. Simone, Nina. “Four Women.” Wild Is the Wind. New York: Phillips Records, 1966. Audio. Simone, Nina, and Stephen Cleary. I Put a Spell on You. New York: Da Capo, 1993. Print. Zipes, Jack. “To Be or Not to Be Eaten: The Survival of Traditional Storytelling.” Storytelling, Self, Society. 2005 (fall): 1–20. Print.





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The Lower Stratum of History The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker Julie Burrell

T

he late 1990s were watershed years for two young African American artists—one a celebrated playwright, and the other a critically acclaimed visual artist—who employ and rework racist stereotypes in their work. In 1996, Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre. The following year, Kara Walker won a MacArthur Fellowship and had her work chosen for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, among other high-profile exhibitions during that time. Their rise to prominence and ensuing successes, however, were marked by controversy surrounding their work’s incorporation of grotesque stereotypes, a debate that still reverberates in discussions of their art. In a 1997 article, Jean Young accused Parks of the “re-objectification and re-commodification” of Venus’s historical antecedent, Saartjie Baartman. The same year, The International Review of African American Art charged Walker with repackaging damaging stereotypes and selling them to white audiences. Amid dismay at “offensive” images, a Walker piece was pulled from a show at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1999 (Newkirk 45). The women were part of a postmodern resurgence of minstrelsy (insofar as it ever went away), a trend that Spike Lee was to take advantage of in his film Bamboozled (2000). This cultural moment—Shawn-Marie Garrett has termed it the “return of the



7

repressed”—saw a host of painful stereotypes reemerging from the cultural depths. Critical components of this resurrection, the works of Parks and Walker handle stereotypes through a strikingly similar approach—the invocation of the grotesque. Like many stereotypes of black bodies, those found in Parks, specifically in Venus, and Walker, especially in her silhouettes, conform to the grotesque in its common sense of comically distorted or ugly imagery. The character of The Venus, for instance, with her “great heathen buttocks” and nonnormative beauty, is said to be “Thuh Missing Link” (Parks, Venus 43). Their use of the stereotype also aligns with some of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories, whose grotesque imagery is centered on the eating, defecating, urinating, and decaying body. Thus, the grotesque body counters “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level” (Bakhtin 19). It is true that Parks and Walker supply a less inclusive vision of the carnival than did Bakhtin (in fact, he notes that truly inclusive carnivals declined after the Renaissance). The artists’ work nevertheless marries a sense of carnival, comic topsy-turviness (and in Parks’s case, an actual carnival sideshow) to the grotesque stereotype. In the “Overture” of Venus, the audience is inaugurated into the grotesque sideshow and the abject spectatorship Parks has been criticized for: “thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead,” we are told, “There wont b inny show tonite,” as the title character rotates to display her body (3). This overture serves as both sexual come-on and initiation to Parks’s musical refrains, such as the sexually charged “Hubba-hubba-hubbahubba,” a remark frequently made by the chorus when looking at The Venus (6). Jean Young views such focus on spectacle as an updated, but no less damaging, objectification of the black female body. In Parks’s portrayal, The Venus’s backside and genitals are viewed as excessive, and doom her to a lifetime of exhibition as a freak in a sideshow, and later as a scientific specimen representative of a lower rung in the Great Chain of Being, a specious evolutionary theory. While many scenes in Venus take place in a literal sideshow—barker, freaks, and all—any such distinctions between the real and the figurative carnival are dubious at best, as the anatomists grope her in the manner of sideshow spectators. All the world’s a cruel carnival for The Venus, constantly watched. In an arresting resonance with Venus, the highly theatrical, grotesque carnival has become a Kara Walker trademark. Her large-scale, fauxhistorical silhouettes are replete with a phantasmagoric yet beautiful grotesque that simultaneously invokes antebellum plantation scenes,



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covers of romance novels, cartoons, minstrel shows, and the racist kitsch termed “black memorabilia,” to name but a portion of her cultural lexicon. Characters1 engage in all manner of carnivalesque mischief. Even with their simple black-and-white clarity of line, the silhouettes echo the abundance and chaos of Hieronymus Bosch’s carnivalesque depiction of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Walker’s bawdy carnivals have earned her rebukes because they contain depictions of sexual abuse and lewd acts married to black stereotypes. Beyond superficial convergences, there is at the core of these artists’ work a crucial ethical engagement in the representation of African Americans. Their work points to the ways in which Black Power opposition gives way to a recognition of the need for artists to confront grotesque and painful stereotypes, especially because Walker’s Uncle Toms and Topsys and The Venus’s excessive rear still have the power to hurt, shame, or even please and amuse. The opprobrium generated by Parks’s and Walker’s use of grotesque and abject stereotypes also reveals the vital ethical imperative taken up by critics who argue that such images are only ever damaging. These artworks ask their audiences to consider what stereotypes mean, how they come to mean what they do, and whether or not grotesque black stereotypes can work toward an antiracist agenda or if they “solely [fuel] the racist imagination” (Carpio 15). This chapter will engage such questions by putting Venus and Walker’s silhouettes, as well as the disapproval these works have incurred, into a conversation investigating their resonances and divergences. I argue that these works provocatively revisit a carnival realm in which blacks serve as the embodiment of the grotesque Other. Instead of merely subverting racist representation or turning it into a Utopian carnival, however, Parks and Walker mire us in the margins of the carnival. The artworks, though they use discrete strategies and different media to achieve these aims, finally insist on the negative, the abject, and the grotesque and, in so doing, force their audiences to face how their spectatorship necessarily involves them in such representation. Criticism of Walker’s and Parks’s work has often been articulated as a claim of betrayal to African American history and African Americans themselves. Academic articles on Venus, for instance, will usually include a recapitulation of the true story of Baartman, and a judgment of how accurately Parks has depicted Baartman, how far she has strayed from the real story, or how badly she has betrayed or elided the historical figure. The playwright has also been critiqued for recommodifying the historic Baartman, while Richard Foreman’s premier production at Yale



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Rep was reproached for costuming The Venus in pads to exaggerate her buttocks and breasts. Young’s critique is the most searing indictment of Venus’s betrayal of history, accusing the playwright of exploiting and silencing Baartman’s voice through the “re-objectification” of the historical personage. In subsequent years, however, the verdict on Parks’s accuracy has been more favorable. Jennifer Larson argues that Parks is perhaps more historically accurate than previously regarded precisely because she portrays The Venus struggling with circumscribed choice and not independent agency, akin to Harriet Jacobs’s limited choices in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (207). A presupposition in such discussions of Venus is that Parks should be historically accurate, and yet most of these critics also recognize one of the playwright’s prevailing themes is the crisis that historical representation and historiography engenders.2 Parks does claim for her art a sort of historiographical function, saying that she attempts to “create ‘new’ historical events” through the “incubator” of the theatre, and, “as in the case of artificial insemination, the baby is no less human” (The America Play 4–5). Rather than depicting Saartjie Baartman to standards of historical accuracy, however, Parks examines the difficulties in rendering any history on stage, in Venus and throughout her body of work. For instance, The Negro Resurrectionist reads “Footnotes” and “Historical Extracts” throughout, based on real records, such as Baartman’s anatomical features and her baptism certificate—documents that serve only to widen the gulf between what we know of Baartman and what her actual life might have been. Walker has been chided in still harsher notes than Parks for an alleged commodification of stereotypes, a criticism that has occasionally strayed into the personal.3 In 1997, The International Review of African American Art (IRAAA) titled an issue “Stereotypes Subverted? Or for Sale?” in order to deliberate over “the resurrection of stereotypical black figures in American arts and popular culture” (3). Despite the inclusion of images by controversial artists who employ racial stereotypes, like Michael Ray Charles, what follows is an editorial dedicated almost exclusively to Walker. A conspicuous component of the article is the intimate tone in which editor Juliette Bowles addresses the artist. Since Walker uses “autobiographical elements,” Bowles believes some points that might be of interest include Walker’s white husband and hair extensions (“Extreme Times” 7). As a response to Walker’s written protest, Bowles writes to “Kara” in a subsequent issue, “There was also a



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big sister type motive behind the hair call: ‘Baby sister, those extensions are tired. Discover your own beauty!’” (“Stereotypes Subverted?” 50). While it may be within the purview of the IRAAA to nurture African American artists, whether or not they are doing so equitably is questionable. Charles’s personal life is excluded beyond this telling mention: “Leading an upstanding life as a professor of art at the University of Texas, Austin, Michael Ray Charles only attracts criticism for his work and his defense of it” (Bowles, “Extreme Times” 7). The issue could be looked at as balanced—included is a defense by Henry Louis Gates Jr.—however, the editors make it clear where their sympathies rest. Betye Saar’s 1997 assemblage Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Busy Bee dons the cover of the IRAAA’s “Stereotypes” issue. An acclaimed artist and one of Walker’s most vocal critics, Saar initiated a letter-writing campaign to “spread awareness about the negative images produced by the young African American artist, Kara Walker,” after Walker won the MacArthur Fellowship. Saar has also argued that Walker’s success in a white art establishment has come about by dealing in images that fuel racism. She has alleged, “Kara is selling us down the river” (Bowles, “Extreme Times” 4). Bowles’s and Saar’s ostensible intimacy with Walker—manifest in their addresses “Kara” and “Baby sister,” as well as Saar’s collective pronoun—functions as a reminder that Walker is included in, and so beholden to, a larger African American community. Herman S. Gray, illustrating the cultural politics of Walker’s reception, cites Ishmael Reed’s metaphor of “airing dirty laundry” and the tension that results when “conflicts and debates over blackness” drift from controlled media within African American communities to other, potentially hostile audiences (121). A consideration of audience reception is central in the debates about Parks’s and Walker’s work because of art’s implication in meaning making. Ron Eyerman argues that representation is central to creating a collective African American memory, since it is through narratives, art, oral tradition, and other media that this memory is kept alive. Collective memory may be distinguished from history, however, since the former “makes reference to historical events,” but “the meaning of such events is interpreted from the perspective of the group’s needs and interests” (7). Because of the cultural trauma of slavery, Eyerman notes, this meaning making takes on an especially important function. Fundamentally different from individual physical or psychical trauma, cultural trauma “refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved




some degree of cohesion. In this sense, the trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any or all. While it may be necessary to establish some event as the significant ‘cause,’ its traumatic meaning must be established and accepted, a process which requires time, as well as mediation and representation” (2). How a wide audience may interpret the stereotypes if they do not see the “anti-racist parody” that Gates claims for them is a critical issue (qtd. in Bowles, “Stereotypes Subverted” 5). Viewed through the lens of cultural trauma, the ethical ramifications of the artists’ work are of tremendous significance. The ethical question, and crisis, at the center of debates around Parks and Walker is how is art to speak truthfully of African American experience when this history is fraught with stereotypes? Insofar as grotesque stereotypes have often occluded actual lives, they are, of course, not historically precise; yet compositions by Walker and Parks problematize any such consideration of accuracy by illustrating how African American history comprises, among other elements, stereotypical representation. What we know of Saartjie Baartman, for instance, is mediated through the narrative and representative conventions of her time. Further, even when we “hear” her voice in historical documents, it is recorded by someone else. As Sara L. Warner notes, a court transcript in which Baartman expresses the desire to remain in Europe “is the only extant document that records anything close to her voice, her feelings, her desires” (192). Though critics may agree that Parks should be true to history, we may ask to what or whose history should she be true? The struggle over ethical representation does not indicate, however, that stereotypes are always off limits—at least according to the arbiters in Walker’s case. After all, Saar herself achieved fame by reworking stereotypical images of African Americans into liberatory ones. Saar uses grotesque images in a deliberately provocative manner, reinterpreting tools of shame through assemblages that invoke Black Power and African heritage. She began using a mammy figure in her 1972 mixed-media assemblage series The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, wishing to transform stereotypical images “into a positive thing” (qtd. in Carpenter 43). One such work portrays Aunt Jemima with a broom in one hand and a shotgun in the other, positioned above a Black Power fist and a piece of kente cloth. There exists, however, a fundamental disparity in Saar’s and Walker’s use of the stereotype: a clear oppositional position against a white supremacist ideology in the former and a vagueness about who or



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what is the target in the latter. Saar deploys a potent, satiric critique of the passive mammy stereotype; Walker’s satiric aim is less clear. The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (Figure 7.1), first installed in 1995, prefigures the motifs with which she has continued to work: a naked child plays the tambourine, trailing piles of excrement; in the background, a character dashes from his slave cabin to an outhouse; an Uncle Tom figure “births” a baby, the umbilical cord trailing from his anus; Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby box in the lower-right corner. Through the artist’s scissor-wielding hands, the once genteel genre of the silhouette runs amok.4 This piece sends up racist conventions of whites’ depiction of blacks, but it may also be seen to critique black characters in its skewering of the man in the title. The earnestly devout Uncle Tom turns to an apparently absent God rather than face his grotesque birth or join the carnival. Even pious Eva is included in Walker’s carnival: as she attempts to bring an axe down on a small boy, the audience gains pleasure from realizing the weapon points instead at her own skull. The lack of sincerity in Walker’s work, or, rather, the kitschy mix of the earnest with the vulgar, further removes it from the frank resistance of Saar. Walker has said, “In a way my work is about the sincere attempt to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and winding up with Mandingo instead” (qtd. in Armstrong 107). The meaning of the comic5 in Walker’s silhouettes is slippery and unclear, since nearly everyone and everything in her works are potential targets. The very titles of her work announce their vacillating aims: The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven parodies nineteenth-century handbills; it puns on “the end of Uncle Tom,” which may refer to his rear end, his demise, or the infant he appears to be excreting; it creates ironic distance between its “Grand” theme and its abject content; and it establishes the work’s appropriation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its legacy of stereotypical representation mixed with abolitionist intentions. In some ways, the silhouettes beg to be read as sincere, satirical revenge for a history of racist representation: note the grouping in The End of Uncle Tom in which Topsy appears to be getting revenge on Eva by placing a sharpened stick under her rear. Whatever schadenfreude the audience might experience, though, takes a more devious turn when we notice Eva is perhaps attempting to harm a small slave boy. If so, the tree stump that she stands by becomes a cruel pun, referring to potentially severed limbs.





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Figure 7.1 Kara Walker, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, 1995. Cut paper and adhesive on wall, 13 × 35 feet. Photo by Gene Pittman/The Walker Art Center, 2007. Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Despite what are essentially comic structures, then, Walker’s carnival is incredibly sinister and violent. Her carnival is not Bakhtin’s temporarily Utopian “realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (9). Particularly when the jokes target black characters, her vicious satire becomes less funny, loaded as it is with grotesque stereotypes. In World’s Exposition (1997), Walker’s ambiguous comic is revealed in the figure of an animalistic black woman hanging by her tail in a tree, painting scenery, and excreting onto the scene below her. We may read subversion in such a character, since excretion may be looked at as a celebratory joke on the characters below, a theme I will take up later in this chapter. Further, the character might be read as a stand-in for the African American female artist, portrayed as an “exceptional species whose primal instincts and creative talents are intended to amuse and delight bourgeois audiences,” a notion reinforced by the man with an erect penis below her (Raymond 361). Whatever the irony of the composition, though, the baldness of the stereotype is hard to ignore, as it is evocative of a painful history of racist portrayals of blacks as animalistic hybrids. Indeed, Leonard Cassuto asserts that hybridity is at the center of the racial grotesque: “Tugged in the competing directions of ‘human’ and ‘not human,’ the victims of this objectifying treatment” are “in-between, in flux” (xv). This crisis of category, a ghastly inability to define or be defined, creates the grotesque, thus keeping racist representations of blacks in the realm of the not quite human. Venus likewise relies on ambiguous comic strategies for its poignancy, as it parodies colonial institutions of the law and science by juxtaposing them with a carnival sideshow. When The Venus is arrested for her indecent display, the Chorus of the Court’s lines read, “HubbaHubba-Hubba-Hubba. / (Order-order-order-order),” the parentheses marking sotto voce speech (Parks, Venus 75). The combination of “Hubba-Hubba,” an outburst of lustfulness, with “Order-order,” a courtroom method of containing such flare-ups, affirms that the law is merely a pretense for gawking at The Venus. Essentially the same as the freak show, the law pretends to keep order by chiding her for participating in the show. The sideshow is thus turned into the play’s guiding metaphor. Still, it is far from clear cut who or what is the target of the parody, since The Venus is not exactly an innocent victim in Parks’s portrayal. What are we to make of The Venus’s request to stay in England and try “to make a mint” in her sideshow, or her remark, “I came here black. Give me the chance to leave here white” (75, 76)? While the latter statement might simply seem to equate whiteness with power and




wealth, as Lisa Anderson posits (71), this section of the play implicates The Venus in her own oppression, as she naively buys into colonial fantasies that promise wealth and power. Like Walker’s refusal to simply transform negative images of blacks into oppositional ones, Parks denies an audience the moral unfussiness of reversing the black victim–white victimizer binary. Part of her project is to ask, “Can a White person be present onstage and not be an oppressor? Can a Black person be onstage and be other than oppressed?” (The America Play 21). Bowles asserts, “An important part of an influential person’s ability to help exorcise the ‘exaggerated black body’ from the ‘contemporary imagination,’ is clear, direct communication” (50). With their ambiguous comic strategies, however, Venus and Walker’s silhouettes are indeed provocative, but far from directly communicative of a particular message. Saar’s politically and aesthetically remarkable “Liberation” series is firmly rooted in a Black Power, oppositional stance against white supremacy; however, both Parks’s and Walker’s work must come to terms with a post–Black Power era ethics, in which a stark black–white antagonism may no longer be the most productive way to figure race relations. Without a didactic authorial position, there is risk involved in an audience’s interpretation, especially when grotesque black stereotypes are married to the comic. As Herman Gray has it, with a no longer exclusively African American audience, race-based jokes “do not seem funny in quite the same way” (123). In their ambiguous confluence of pain and comedy, the artwork of Parks and Walker reminds us that these two phenomena have in common a focus on the body (think of a pratfall, for instance); however, this conjunction engenders anxiety when we recall that these are the bodies of racial Others.6 While for Bakhtin, carnival was essentially universal, a time that “does not know footlights” that would separate actors and audience, Parks’s and Walker’s revision of the carnival is less inclusive (Bakhtin 7). Factoring race into carnival prompts an interrogation of how pleasure comes at the expense of someone else’s pain. It is arguable that all carnival pleasure happens at the expense of others, which is a tension that inheres in Bakhtin’s theories but is never acknowledged by him. He equates “negroes and moors” with “a grotesque deviation from the bodily norm,” without questioning the basis for such a comparison (230). Carnival is an inclusive society, but one that, paradoxically, depends on the exclusion of all those who are nonnormative. Similar concerns have been cited by Bakhtin’s feminist critics specific to gender, prompted by his reliance on the maternal body and female sexuality



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to gird his theoretical constructs. For Bakhtin, the image of a laughing pregnant hag represents the ambivalent nature of carnival itself—full of life and by the same token decaying; in the process of being formed, yet dying. For feminist theorists, however, “this image of the pregnant hag . . . is loaded with all of the connotations of fear and loathing around the biological processes of reproduction and aging” (Russo 63). Walker and Parks expose the complicated nexus of pain inherent in pleasure, and vice versa, gained at the expense of racial Others. The comic elements in Venus or Walker’s silhouettes do not bring a joyous wholeness with them, contrary to Bakhtin’s conception of the true carnival spirit, for his theory “has little comfort to offer the individual body in pain” (Vice 168). The Venus dies “chained like a dog,” venereal diseases speeding her demise, the carnival laughter that she was once a part of, or the object of, a distant memory (146). In Walker’s surreal parade, Virginia’s Lynch Mob (1998), a slave leads himself by a noose; nearby a little girl grasps a Klan hood. In both women’s art, we cannot escape the particularly racial nature of pain (or the painful way in which race manifests itself in this art), for which laughter offers little comfort. Bakhtin does deal with the image of a rent body, but beatings have a positive and symbolic function: “thrashings and abuse are not a personal chastisement but are symbolic actions directed at something on a higher level, at the king” (197). Essentially ambivalent, abuse represents not only the death of the old but also rebirth in “the new year, new youth, and a new spring” (Bakhtin 198). In the works I discuss here, however, it is more difficult to perceive the bodies of black people as mere symbols, particularly as these bodies invoke slavery, lynching, and the whole history of African Americans’ bodily and psychic trauma. If such grotesque comic stereotypes are resurrected in Parks and Walker, bringing with them the specters of the racialized fear and loathing redolent of their origins, they might be more accurately looked at as abject rather than strictly grotesque. For while in Bakhtin’s carnival all are included in a joyous wholeness, abjection has exclusion as one of its central characteristics. So, for instance, the characters in the play can laugh at The Venus, but she is precluded from joining the pleasure; after all, their carnival exists because of her exclusion from their society. Julia Kristeva defines the abject as what we “permanently thrust aside in order to live”—the feces, corpses, body fluids, and so on, from which we must separate ourselves to maintain a coherent, independent subjectivity, so that we may both distinguish ourselves from the other and deny our inevitable death (3).




Sue Vice formulates an explicit connection between the grotesque and the abject. Following Bakhtin, who posits a timeline in which grotesque realism becomes negative and individual, Vice argues, “Abjection is the grotesque of modernity” (166). Whatever access the artwork I have been discussing has to the carnivalesque, then, it is via a postmodern abject. In Walker’s work, bodies are made abject through lynching, beheading, and grotesque births, to name just some examples. In The End of Uncle Tom, for instance, see the foregrounded feces or Tom’s excretion and birthing. The Venus’s smell is a marker of her difference; the Mother-Showman derides her for “the stench of yr shit in this pen” and exclaims “Jesus! Yr an animal!” (89, emphasis original). In the oeuvres of these artists, the abject finds its most pointed expression through the black female body itself and related capitalization on fear of the maternal. While for Bakhtin, the maternal body is the site of ambivalent decay and birth, for Kristeva, it is a primal site of horror. She defines the abject as the lack of borders between self and other, repudiated when an infant distinguishes itself as a subject independent of the mother. But the mother, in whose body the subject existed, constantly threatens the subjectivity of the child who resists “falling under the sway” of maternal power (13). In Parks’s body of work, maternal horror is married to the fear of black women’s fecundity. The Venus, upon informing her lover of her pregnancy, is twice persuaded to have an abortion. With In the Blood, Parks faces the stereotype of the “welfare queen,” sexually exploited by the same characters who condemn her for bearing children out of wedlock (Red Letter Plays). In Parks’s The America Play, the very setting is the abject maternal: The Great Hole of History—a grave and womb—which transfers the abject from the site of the individual body to the sphere of American history. Walker’s work, meanwhile, compounds the horror of the maternal in the conflation of defecation and reproduction, such as Uncle Tom’s horror at the newborn dangling by its umbilical cord, trailing from his anus.7 In Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress (2001), this association is made yet more explicit in the depiction of a slave man excreting a brown fetus. In this equation, black people and excrement are literally one. In the struggle over slavery’s meaning in representation, what role do such examples of the abject stereotype play? Even though the stereotypes are not repurposed in the clearly oppositional way that Saar’s artwork is, Parks’s and Walker’s use of stereotypes might yet be productively antiracist, not despite their focus on negativity and abjection



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but because of it. Instead of rehashing a formulation in which negative images are merely transformed into positive ones—a binary that could just as easily be reversed—their art forces an audience to dwell in the negative, in the lower stratum as it were, and emerge not newly empowered but scathed. Black is often not beautiful in these works. Stereotypes are maddeningly hardy, and their resistance to subversion underpins the artwork.8 In her discussion of black memorabilia, Tavia Nyong’o suggests that “yet newer formulations of pride” are unproductive in dealing with such objects because “oppositional spectatorship . . . inevitably reinscribe[s] the object as a target for hatred and scorn” (388–89). Shame, she argues, is more helpful in examining spectatorship’s place in racist representation. In positioning affective response as the site of critique rather than something to repress, shame serves to reaffirm viewers’ humanity. Likewise, I argue that an examination of the abject as it appears in Parks’s and Walker’s work opens up a way for us to consider their use of a productive abject. The two aforementioned instances of the abject and their intersections—horror of the black maternal and the equation of black people with feces—are particularly important in the recurring material of Parks and Walker and, I contend, expressive of how the abject may reconfigure audience and viewers’ relationship to stereotypical imagery. Bakhtin views excrement as “both joyous and sobering matter, at the same time debasing and tender; it combined the grave and birth in their lightest, most comic, least terrifying form” (175–76). While excrement is less unequivocally positive in Walker than in Bakhtin’s view, her employment of it references the history of carnivalesque art, wherein excrement was symbolic of “a kind of dirty protest” (Hyman 32). Arguing in a similar vein, Yasmil Raymond puts forth, “Walker’s scatological images can be interpreted as symbolizing slaves’ resistance to absolute domination” (364). Placed as it is in the context of black (re)production, feces also hold a potentially productive function. Under slavery, children were born into the mother’s condition, so the issue from black bodies belonged to a white master from birth. In Walker’s configuration, dung is the stand-in for black propagation and becomes a rebellious act, a sort of antiproduction, which the Master can lay claim to, but the joke’s on him. See, for instance, the figure shaking a tambourine and trailing dung behind her in The End of Uncle Tom. Her expansive depositing of feces is celebratory and subversive even if it fails to mitigate the system of racial oppression.




In Bakhtin’s carnivalesque aesthetics, the body is everywhere, even in the holes and hills of the earth. In the case of Parks’s work, this grotesque topography is manifest in The America Play’s great hole, a “bodily creative grave” (Bakhtin 370). The great hole is a reconstruction of a reconstruction, “an exact replica of The Great Hole of History,” which was a historical theme park (The America Play 159). This repetitive chain of history stretches back further and further into nothingness; there is no original Truth. The replica was built by The Foundling Father, a Lincoln impersonator, whose wife and son spend their time digging in the hole for historical artifacts. The Foundling Father reappears in Act 2, but this time on television, renewing his “Lincoln Act,” in which tourists pay to shoot him. The great hole is a space of forgetting as well as commercialized, mediatized remembering, where characters bury the past only to dig it up again. Greg Miller has also noted the recurrent “small, dark, smelly spaces” in Venus, which call to mind the grotto in the etymology of grotesque (131). Like The America Play’s great hole and Venus’s cavelike spaces, the topography of Walker’s silhouettes is also a regenerative and degenerative lower stratum of history. The stratum that both defecates and gives birth, reproduces and degenerates, is a vital theme for Bakhtin, who asserts that the topsy-turvy world of carnival turns all that is “high” to “low.” Walker’s world, then, is down South, a carnival underworld satirizing idyllic depictions of antebellum plantations. The South has been figured as a “female body to be penetrated,” as well as the lower stratum Harriet Beecher Stowe uses in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to “construct her sinning South” in opposition to the classical Northern mind in the United States’ topographical body (Roberts 27). Unlike Stowe, who ostensibly referred to a real time and place, Walker exhibits a South of historical memory that “calls forth the ghosts from our collective psyche” (DuBois Shaw 43). Her South is yet another link in history’s endless chain of replication, as the artist captures “history” by reanimating mediatized images of grotesque blacks. Walker satirizes white nostalgia for the saccharine South of Gone with the Wind, a false history that nevertheless threatens to obliterate more truthful histories. Paradoxically, through their exaggeration and shocking grotesqueries, Walker’s pieces may access a kind of truth, if only because they reinforce the fictions of history. Additionally, as both Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Glenda R. Carpio observe, Walker makes us aware of what is elided in slave narratives through her outsized depictions of horrors, the occurrences such as rape and sexual abuse that could



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not be recounted in such narratives as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Walker’s South is a fiction that nonetheless calls our attention to the truth of the manmade nature of all history. As the topographies of their work take the shape of a carnivalesque body, so do Walker’s and Parks’s forms become an extension of the grotesque. Bakhtin’s body-text expands into the world, so that seeking the heart of a Rabelais text is analogous to “gnawing a bone, finding the marrow and eating it” (171). We may also locate the grotesque in Parks’s and Walker’s formal strategies. Russo argues that the grotesque is found not in content alone but in “excessive” narrative strategies that open up “a bodily space of possibility and repetition” (181). For Russo, carnivalesque repetition has feminist possibilities when it uncovers the political, such as in feminist parodies of canonical male texts (161). In Walker’s silhouettes, there is an excess of potential stories, grotesque in their narrative excess. Rather than conveying coherent narratives, the silhouettes signify upon stories, whether through allusion to an exterior narrative (e.g., Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby), or through whatever pictographic narrative viewers might infer (for example, Slavery! Slavery! [Figure 7.2], a 1997 cyclorama, depicts a cyclical pseudonarrative of characters both escaping from and returning to slavery). Walker’s formal excesses, each work having scores of allusions and narratives, make hers an intrinsically grotesque body of work. The dizzying quantity of potential narratives in Walker’s work also marks it as an intertextual grotesque. Kristeva describes intertextuality as “the ‘passage from one sign system to another’—the way in which one signifying practice is transposed into another” (McAfee 26, emphasis original). Walker’s work not only interpolates but also transposes signs into her imaginary realm, exceeding the bounds of a closed work. This aligns with Bakhtin and Kristeva’s view of the text as anticlassical, open, and unfinished. Vice contends, “processes of dialogism and intertextuality both act like a lower bodily stratum, to undermine the idea of a sleek, classical text, ruled by an upper stratum of a single author whose word is truth” (164). Parks employs an excessive, repetitive strategy in one of her signature maneuvers, Repetition and Revision (Rep & Rev), in which meanings are revised over the course of a play like a jazz riff.9 Such a formal strategy, executed most often through Parks’s puns and subtle changes in language and phrasing, evokes Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of Signifyin(g). This “literal incorporation of the past” breaks the traditional Aristotelian plot arc, posing a challenge to linear history (Parks,





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Figure 7.2 Kara Walker, Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life).” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause (detail), 1997. Cut paper on wall, 11 × 85 feet. Installation view, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2007. Photo: Dave Sweeney.

The America Play 10). A poignant example of Rep & Rev occurs when The Venus asks: “Do I have a choice?” at crucial turning points in the play. When asked if she wants to leave South Africa to “make a mint” by displaying herself in England, she poses the question (17). When The Baron Docteur proposes to take her to France and be her lover and anatomist, she again asks, “Do I have a choice?” (87). The Baron Docteur, as he is plotting The Venus’s destruction, echoes her now uncannily familiar question, “Do I have a choice?” (142). This haunting refrain functions to interrogate concepts of freedom and agency. Though The Venus is told yes, she does have a choice, her continued questioning reveals a woman so severely circumscribed in her liberty that her limited agency allows only a choice between one type of entrapment and the other. As for The Baron Docteur, though his entrapment is vastly different, the refrain works to uncover the contours of a white supremacist system so engrained that even if he does love The Venus, he can no longer think beyond its confines or escape it. Carnivalesque parody becomes negative and tragic in these repetitions, but a negativity that nonetheless effectively exposes the seams of a racist power structure. However exposed, the white supremacist power structure offers The Venus no way out. By the conclusion of Venus, the audience is mired in the abject. The Venus has, as promised at the start, died and been “pickled in Sciences Hall” (9). By remaining in the realm of the abject, the play staunchly refuses a neat subversion of the beauty binary that forges The Venus as grotesque opposite. Noël Carroll argues that, since beauty functions as “the perfect realization of the concept of human being,” then “nonbeauty, the antithesis (or the family of antitheses) to beauty, is somehow an inadequate instantiation of the concept of human being” (37). Using Sara Cohen Shabot’s intersubjective “grotesque philosophy,” I want to argue that the play itself may offer a way to productively figure racial abjection in its insistence that The Venus remain excluded. Cohen Shabot posits a redemptive quality centered on the body in her grotesque philosophy “of difference and intersubjectivity”: “A grotesque thinking, as I would like to formulate it, uses multiple characteristics to present the subject as necessarily embodied, with a non-hierarchical, non-binary relation to the other. The subject’s relation to the other is based on heterogeneity and difference, without clear boundaries between the essential and the marginal. Consequently, hierarchical relations, which usually precede dominant relations, cannot be definitively established or imposed” (64).




The philosophy of the grotesque is perhaps impossibly Utopian in practice. It nevertheless offers a theoretical framework for Parks’s deployment of grotesque stereotypes, one that allows us to view the stereotypes in Venus as more than either an iteration of racist imagery or a parody of such imagery. Warner contends that the play makes a claim on “our sensuality, in our fleshy communion with one another,” evinced in The Venus’s final lines, a repeated “Kiss me” (199). The play’s audience cannot entirely escape the reach of the abject, since weighing the proposal to kiss her necessitates the consideration of our own bodily needs, our own expansion and communion with another. Venus is not carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense, but rather offers a productive grotesque and a way to formulate our subjectivity through and with an acknowledgment of the Other. If Venus offers us a way to consider how we may be part of the grotesque with an intersubjective kiss, Walker’s work reveals that we are integral to the process of racialized meaning making. Her excessive formal strategies extend to another of the silhouettes’ stylistic hallmarks: the ambiguous condensation of many images. A closer look at almost anything in a Kara Walker silhouette will reveal it to be something else or something more—her work transfigures before our eyes. In the grouping of the master with sword, to the right of center in The End of Uncle Tom, there is an absurd surfeit of condensed phallic symbols: his peg leg, his sword (fatally penetrating an infant), his third leg that doubles as a slave he is sodomizing or leaning on, and the cornstalk the slave is grasping, which invokes a pun for anal sex, “cornholing” (DuBois Shaw 56). In a relatively sparse 1998 work, Consume, a black woman wears a skirt of bananas/phalluses, one of which a small white boy is nursing from, fellating, or eating. Carpio further unpacks the work by remarking on its relationship to Josephine Baker’s use of a banana skirt to comment on “colonial fetishization” (177). The work’s shifting meanings demands the audience’s interpretive labor. This might mean that, like an optical illusion, the viewer either chooses which image to see at one time or perceives multiple meanings at once, comparing them metaphorically—for example, a sword is a penis. For an active viewer, Walker’s ambiguous images are readable yet retain the sort of ambivalence that Homi Bhabha maintains is central to the stereotype. Contrary to its perceived fixity in colonial discourse, the stereotype is a “complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive” (22). In colonialism’s “regime of truth,” the colonized is produced as “a fixed reality,” simultaneously



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knowable and yet fashioned as an Other (Bhabha 23). We might view Walker’s ambivalence as a mode of uncovering the shifting nature of stereotypical images that, as Bhabha asserts, rely on “a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes,” echoed in the visual condensation of images in Walker’s associative, representative chain (calling to mind Venus’s Great Chain of Being; Bhabha 29). The condensation of images—the leg is a slave is a phallus is all three at once—becomes a repetitive chain from which we cannot break out. Put another way, the image represents the master’s reliance on slaves for his very standing—the figurative becomes literal through Walker’s characteristic punning—as well as for his sexual gratification. Two common stereotypes are invoked: on the one hand, the docile slave who enjoys, benefits from patriarchal protection from his or her beloved master, and on the other, the lascivious slave who enjoys, gains pleasure from sexual liaisons with the master. Eyerman notes, “cultural trauma always engages a ‘meaning struggle,’ a grappling with an event” (3). Illustrating the very process of this meaning struggle, rather than its result, The End of Uncle Tom demonstrates the potential usefulness of depicting stereotypes in a comically ambivalent manner. Just as Bhabha called on postcolonial theory to shift its focus from the nature of the represented stereotype to the manner in which this stereotype is actively produced, Walker’s work calls our attention to how images are actively made. Unlike frankly oppositional political art, she hands the responsibility of deciphering an image over to the viewer. We, her audience, must forge morality and meaning for ourselves in any given Walker silhouette, for there is no absolute right or wrong, no didactic position from which they speak to us. There is always the risk that Parks’s and Walker’s ambivalence will not achieve antiracist ends, that the audience won’t get the joke. The debate about the artists’ use of the stereotype may be viewed as a step in the process by which a community confronts cultural trauma, in this case entailing a fundamental disagreement regarding the “process of ‘we’ formation” (Eyerman 14). The artwork of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker demonstrates that productive confrontation of the stereotype must take advantage of, rather than merely subvert, the power of the grotesque and abject. To be human is to be sullied, their art reminds us, and to deal with history humanely is to allow it to reach us with its perhaps polluting touch.




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1. In a reversal of terminology, Parks prefers that her characters be called “figures,” while Walker prefers her figures be called “characters.” 2. This theme is also taken up by Lydia R. Diamond in her play Voyeurs de Venus, which shares with Parks the saga of Saartjie Baartman as subject matter. As of this writing, I am unable to find a published copy of the play. I saw the 2008 Boston production by Company One, directed by Summer L. Williams. 3. See DuBois Shaw for a sustained discussion of the controversy surrounding Walker. 4. Knight reminds us that visual artist Lari Pittman, often overlooked in discussions of Walker, “began incorporating pre-Victorian silhouette motifs into his queer-themed work as early as 1985, and by 1990 they were prominent” (2). 5. I will follow the convention of using the term “comic” as the umbrella rubric for wit, humor, and comedy, while “comedy” will be used to refer to either a specific genre or to formal elements within a work (e.g., satire, farce, parody). 6. For more on the link between pain and comedy, see Morris, who considers all comedy to be based on pain or the threat of pain. He asserts that even intellectual comedy wounds with words. Walker King extends Morris’s thesis in an examination of Black pain. 7. As Carpio notes, Walker also examines the stereotype of the dangerously fertile “welfare queen,” conflating it with that of the grotesque mammy, in her 1998 piece Queen Bee (Carpio 167). 8. Ellen Gallagher and Hank Willis Thomas are two contemporary African American artists who also engage in revising stereotypical images, with notable similarities to Walker. 9. See Bernard for an examination of the “musicality” of Parks’s language.

Works Cited Anderson, Lisa M. Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2008. Print. Armstrong, Elizabeth. “Kara Walker Interviewed by Liz Armstrong.” No Place (Like Home). Ed. Elizabeth Armstrong. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1997. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1984. Print. Bernard, Louise. “The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” African American Review 31 (1997): 687–99. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. “The Other Question—the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.” Screen 24.6 (1983): 18–36. Print. Bowles, Juliette. “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes.” International Review of African American Art 14.3 (1997): 3–16. Print. ———. “Stereotypes Subverted? The Debate Continues.” International Review of African American Art 15.2 (1998): 44–51. Print.



Notes

Carpenter, Jane H., and Betye Saar. Betye Saar. Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2003. Print. Carpio, Glenda R. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Carroll, Noël. “Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetorics of Horror and Humor.” Beauty Matters. Ed. Peg Zeglin Brand. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. 37–56. Print. Cassuto, Leonard. The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print. Cohen Shabot, Sara. “The Grotesque Body: Fleshing Out the Subject.” The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities. Ed. Silke Horstkotte and Esther Peeren. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 57–68. Print. DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Print. Elam, Harry, Jr., and Alice Rayner. “Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks.” Staging Resistance. Ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998. 265–82. Print. Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Garrett, Shawn-Marie. “Return of the Repressed.” Theater 32.2 (2002): 26–43. Print. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Gray, Herman S. Cultural Moves. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Print. Hyman, Timothy, and Roger Malbert. Carnivalesque. London: Hayward Gallery, 2000. Print. King, Debra Walker. African Americans and the Culture of Pain. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2008. Print. Knight, Christopher. “Walker’s Rich Palette: Black and White.” Los Angeles Times 5 Mar. 2008, home ed., sec E:1. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on the Abject. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Larson, Jennifer. “With Deliberate Calculation”: Money, Sex, and the Black Playwright in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” Reading Contemporary African American Drama. Ed. Trudier Harris. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 203–23. Print. McAfee, Noëlle. Julia Kristeva. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Miller, Greg. “The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” Modern Drama 45.1 (2002): 125–37. Print. Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print. Newkirk, Pamela. “Controversial Silhouette.” ARTNews Sept. 1999, 45. Print. Nyong’o, Tavia. “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance.” Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2 (2002): 371–91. Print. Parks, Suzan-Lori. The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Print. ———. Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. Print. ———. Venus. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997. Print.




Raymond, Yasmil. “Maladies of Power: A Kara Walker Lexicon.” Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007. 347–69. Print. Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Vice, Sue. “Bakhtin and Kristeva: Grotesque Body, Abject Self.” Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West. Ed. Carol Adlam et al. Sheffield, England: Sheffield, 1997. 160–74. Print. Warner, Sara L. “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinterment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus.” Theatre Journal 60 (2008): 181–99. Print. Young, Jean. “The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” African American Review 31 (1997): 699–709. Print.



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Navel-Erasing Androgyny and Self-Making in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother Stacie Selmon McCormick

I have never met a man more impressive than my mother. —Jamaica Kincaid, from “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid” by Kay Bonetti Black women slaves in this country were not, by and large, domestics in the house, with the headrag . . . There was no question of ‘You can’t haul this sack, you can’t cut down this tree, you can’t ride this mule,’ because women were laborers first and their labor is what was important . . . A woman had a role as important as the man’s, and not in any way subservient to his, and he didn’t feel threatened by it, he needed her. —Toni Morrison, from “Toni Morrison” by Charles Ruas

A

s the above quotes demonstrate, Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid highlight the ways in which black women, specifically throughout their history in the West, have been engaged in transgressing boundaries of gender and challenging traditional gender roles. These sensibilities are translated into their fictive works where representations of gender and the black female body are fluid, ambiguous, and unstable. Offering further insight into the nature of this instability,



8

Kincaid theorizes about negotiating the fluidity of her postcolonial identity in a 1991 interview with Kay Bonetti. She says, “All of this [reading of British literature] has left me very uncomfortable with ambiguity. Within the life of an English person there was always clarity, and within an English culture there was always clarity, but within my life and culture was ambiguity . . . I was taught to think of ambiguity as magic, a shadiness and an illegitimacy, not the real thing of Western civilization” (128–29). She goes on to say, “I am illegitimate. I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim the right to ambiguity and the right to clarity” (129). Kincaid finds power in claiming illegitimacy and ambiguity; her movement between ambiguity and clarity is also illustrative of her navigation between various states of being. The significance of Kincaid’s identification and its transgressive nature is well represented in her work The Autobiography of My Mother where the novel’s central character, Xuela, enacts a similar refusal of categorization because she does not allow herself to be circumscribed by narrow constructs of race, gender, and class. By extension, we can also look to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as another work that explores ideas of ambiguity, with her iconic character Pilate Dead, who challenges similar limitations. In many respects, Kincaid presents a framework through which we can read how the black female body is depicted in both novels. We can see notions of ambiguity and the transgressing of boundaries through their representations of Pilate’s and Xuela’s bodies in particular. Therefore, Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother inspire a rethinking of what it means to write (or write about) the black female body. By creating figures that elude definition and categorization, both writers imagine black womanhood in a way that places notions of black female bodies and identity outside of generally accepted ideology of race and gender. This creates a sense of boundarylessness that allows for various movements, particularly between male and female, self and other, even life and death.1 The notion of transgressed boundaries and their relationship to the body also corresponds with Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality, and Feminism, particularly her discussion of “navel-erasing” versus “navel-gazing” (28). Minh-Ha argues that navel-erasing is an act of forgetting without annihilating, using the context of one’s history in order to envision a different kind of future and not be circumscribed by past methodology. Implicit in its meaning, then, is a sense of movement between understanding the role history



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plays in shaping the self, yet existing in a way that is not encumbered by the weight of that history. Minh-Ha then goes on to encourage women writers to write the body and write through the body in order to reappropriate femininity in a way that removes it from the traditional ideas of womanhood initiated and sustained in large part by men (36). Additionally, she suggests that this writing and thinking about the body “must be different from man’s abstractions. Different from man’s androgenization. Man’s fragmentation” (39); 2 rather, there should be a return to one’s center (the tantien or the hara), which is located below the navel. This center radiates life, “directs vital movement and allows one to relate to the world with instinctual intimacy” (40). In Minh-Ha’s work, notions of the navel take on multiple representations, but what is most central is the connection between the body (symbolized by the navel) and self-expression, a theme that is integral to Song of Solomon and Autobiography of My Mother. While we see various considerations of the navel and its connection to understanding the self and relating to the world in Minh-Ha’s work, Song of Solomon and Autobiography of My Mother present us with yet another view for understanding these concepts, particularly in terms of black women in the West emerging from postslavery and postcolonial eras. Morrison’s and Kincaid’s work corresponds with MinhHa’s central notion of balancing history with the present in order to understand the self; however, the act of navel-erasing takes on a more complex dimension in Morrison’s and Kincaid’s work because it accentuates the lack of a navel (inherently the lack of a center) as a space for freedom of movement between clarity and ambiguity. This movement also expands Minh-Ha’s conception of what it means to write or write about the female body and the role of androgyny in that endeavor. For Morrison and Kincaid, androgyny isn’t only represented as movement between male and female but becomes a larger representation of freedom of movement in general. The collapsing of the male–female dichotomy is but one significant representation of the overall transgressing of boundaries available to these characters. Navel-erasing is literally embodied with Morrison’s character Pilate Dead, who is born with no navel and whose mother dies at the moment of her birth. On discussing her choice to portray Pilate in this way, Morrison relates, “She was not born anyway—she gave birth to herself ” (McKay 146). By disassociating Pilate from being a child born of a mother,3 Morrison emphasizes Pilate’s self-creation and self-birthing in order to highlight the extent to which Pilate is of unique design.



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Because Pilate is not “born” in a traditional sense, she is able to fashion herself according to her own ideology, which is removed from any influence of tradition in the context of heteronormativity. Judith Butler is helpful in reinforcing the significance of this. In her work Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Butler concerns herself with rethinking notions of sex and how the body comes to be conceived as gendered in addition to the role this plays in the formation of the self. She argues, The process of that sedimentation [of the self] or what we might call materialization will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being through the citing of power, a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power and the formation of the “I.” In this sense, the agency denoted by the performativity of “sex” will be directly counter to any notion of a volunatrist subject who exists quite apart from the regulatory norms which she/he opposes. The paradox of subjectivation (assujettissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. (15)

Butler highlights the inherent contradictions that exist for individuals attempting to articulate a self outside regulatory norms, in light of the fact that such norms are foundational to the formation of the self. Pilate, in this sense, represents a figure not encumbered by such contradiction because her untraditional birth and absence of a navel place her outside the kinds of regulatory norms that Butler references. In terms of Pilate’s existence outside of social norms, she certainly has an otherworldly and mythical persona in the text, as numerous critics have noted. Her outsider position allows her the freedom to move between various spaces and states of being. Early in her life, she has to learn to function as an outcast. She is characterized by others in the novel as physically deformed and abject because of the absence of a navel. Butler is particularly relevant here with regard to the role the abject plays in securing normative ideals around sex and the specificity of the body. She says, “The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of ‘sex,’ and this identification takes place through a repudiation which creates the valence of ‘abjection’ and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre” (3). Butler sets up a dichotomy between the normative idea of sex and the abject, a dichotomy that is necessary to those who desire to reify sexual norms. Pilate is of course uniquely positioned because she never has to repudiate abjection. She functions as the body that needs to be expelled and




repudiated. The community of pickers that Pilate joins after her father’s death casts her off because of the absence of her navel. They refer to her as “something God never made” (144). When she questions what a navel is for, a root worker, who takes her in, tells her that “It’s for . . . it’s for people who were born natural” (143) and the root worker, in turn, demands that she leave. The emphasis on Pilate inhabiting an “unnatural” body allows Morrison to envision different possibilities for Pilate’s life and selfhood. Pilate’s physical difference provides an opportunity for the development of a fluid identity and existence. When she is cast off from all the communities that she attempts to join, she decides to cut off her hair and throw away “every assumption she had learned and [begin] at zero” (149). The reshaping of her physical appearance in tandem with the reshaping of the mind demonstrates how Pilate frees herself of the strictures of gender identification. Indeed, representations of her body as androgynous serve as central to Morrison’s exploration of the notion of self-definition and the productive aspects of ambiguity in the text. Morrison compounds the absence of Pilate’s navel with a degree of physical strength, where in one sense she exists as an outsider, vulnerable and unprotected, and in another sense she is so strong that she is often in the position of protecting others. There are obvious nods to Pilate’s masculine characteristics: her father gives her the masculine name Pilate from the Bible; when Milkman meets her for the first time, he is awestruck by her height and the fact that she is wearing unlaced men’s shoes (38); and she protects Reba from a male suitor’s attack by overpowering him and calling herself (and women in general) weak at the same time (94–95). In these instances, we see Pilate’s feminine and masculine characteristics in the service of increasing her agency and her ability to perform multiple roles in her family. This is reminiscent of Morrison’s earlier statement about slave women’s roles in their homes and families presented at the opening of this chapter. Pilate, through her management of multiple roles in the family, reflects a merging of past and present understandings of womanhood. Another significant example of Pilate’s movement away from confinement is her living space. This space is a central expression of her existence outside of normative frameworks of domestic life and women’s roles within the home. Her house is on the outskirts of town and is unmarked, again reflecting the difficulty of locating or defining her. The physical difference of the house is highlighted when Milkman observes that one of the central rooms looked both “barren and cluttered. A



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moss green sack hung from the ceiling. Candles were stuck in bottles everywhere; newspaper articles and magazine pictures were nailed to the walls. But other than a rocking chair, two straight-backed chairs, a large table, a sink and stove, there was no furniture” (39). Although to Milkman, the environment lacks a sense of structure and balance, it is a place where he and his father, Macon Dead, find a great degree of comfort. On Milkman’s first visit to Pilate’s home, he reflects that it was “the first time in his life that he remembered being completely happy” (47). Additionally, when Macon passes Pilate’s home one night, he cannot resist observing her, Reba, and Hagar, who are singing: “Near the window, hidden by the dark, he felt the irritability of the day drain from him and he relished in the effortless beauty of the women singing in the candlelight . . . As Macon felt himself softening under the weight of memory and music, the song died down. The air was quiet and yet Macon Dead could not leave. He liked looking at them freely this way” (30). The peaceful domestic life of Pilate and her daughters sharply contrasts the coldness within Macon’s own home. He lacks the capacity to create such a space in his home because he is thoroughly intertwined in the politics of masculinity and power, borne out of his own status as an orphan as well. Although Pilate’s living space has its limitations,4 it certainly allows her and those who enter her home a sense of freedom from the strictures of society. Pilate’s ability to create an alternative domestic space for herself and her offspring, along with her ability to transform herself in various ways, is certainly an act of freedom. However, there are other instances where Pilate uses her body to negotiate her identity as a black woman, as exhibited in her encounters with the white world, particularly the police. When Pilate has to help Milkman and Guitar get out of jail after their attempted robbery of her home for what they think is a sack of her gold, Milkman is ashamed of Pilate’s act in front of the policemen. In describing the scene to Macon, Milkman says, “She came in there like Louise Beaver and Butterfly McQueen all rolled up in one. ‘Yassuh, boss. Yassuh, boss . . .’” to which Macon replies, “I told you she was a snake. Drop her skin in a split second” (205). Certainly an act of masking, here Pilate uses her ability to perform as a humble southern woman in order to retrieve her father’s bones (although she is unaware that the bones are his at the time). She even changes her physical presence in order to appear less intimidating. Milkman recalls, “She didn’t even look the same. She looked short. Short and pitiful” (205). Pilate transforming her body to become nonthreatening demonstrates that




just as she transgresses boundaries between male and female, she also crosses boundaries of self and other. She is able to make herself a stereotypical “other” at will, which not only harkens back to notions of masking but also represents the fluidity of Pilate’s body and identity. Although the very fact that Pilate has to perform such a role illustrates the limitations of her power, she uses this power to alter her body and perform in order to achieve her objectives. This also reinforces the Foucaultian notion that power is shared and negotiated rather than held by one person or entity. One final place where we can see Pilate’s fluidity and the transgression of boundaries is through her death. Throughout the text, the line between the dead and the living is not a definitive one. Pilate learns before she is killed that she has actually been carrying the bones of her deceased father. She also gives Milkman a box that contains Hagar’s hair. Carrying pieces of dead bodies, Milkman and Pilate merge pieces of the bodies of the dead with their own lives, memorializing yet also allowing the individuals to “live” in the present. Even at Pilate’s death Milkman laments, “There’s got to be at least one more woman like you” (337). Milkman’s desire for Pilate to live on through another woman demonstrates Morrison’s troubling of the line between life and death. Sharon Patricia Holland’s Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity elucidates further how for black Americans, particularly slaves, the line between the living and the dead is not a finite one.5 She cites Orlando Patterson who argues that “enslaved peoples experienced varying degrees of ‘social death’” (Holland 13). Holland relates, “For Patterson enslaved subjects are genealogical isolates because they are denied access to the social heritage of their ancestors. Although it is outside the scope of this project [her work] to ascertain the commitment of enslaved peoples to their own religions or kinfolk, it is possible to interpret the ‘social death’ in slavery as continually plagued by tacit and sometimes overt manifestations of ancestral strength and/or recognition that punctured the rigid boundary between freed and enslaved subjectivity” (14). Holland concludes by saying, “It is the dead, present as ancestors, who make the complete social death [a living death] of the slave, and therefore the categories of freed and enslaved are unstable at best” (14). She then makes connections between notions of social death and the slave and how those ideas are reflective of the present day.6 If we consider how Pilate experiences a social death because of the presence of her ancestor, demonstrated by the carrying of her father’s bones, we can read the moment that Pilate is actually killed as a second death



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The best of that which is female and the best of that which is male, and that balance is disturbed if not nurtured, and if it is not nurtured, and if it is not counted on, and if it is not reproduced. That is the disability we must be on guard against for the future—the female who produces the female who produces the female. You know there are a lot of people who talk about the position that men hold as of primary importance, but actually it is if we don’t keep in touch with the ancestor that we are, in fact, lost. (202)

For Morrison, Pilate embodies the male and female in order to maintain balance and to connect those in the text to multiple aspects of the past. The malleability of Pilate’s body is then reflective of Morrison’s sentiment as well. Taking Morrison and Holland together, Milkman’s continuation of Pilate’s song at the end of the novel represents a connection with the past as well as a form of empowerment for Pilate, something Holland cites as occurring for black women who gain agency after death. Holland argues that allowing black women (particularly female slaves) to live on after death endows them with a personhood status, particularly as woman and mother. This represents a kind of tragic empowerment for black women (Holland 7). Milkman’s continuation of Pilate’s song is what Holland describes as a “discourse of margins [that] comes together to create a space where there was none before; where multilayered discourse can exist; where physical bodies and the disembodied speak” (64).7 In this way, Pilate’s persona moves from margin to center. There is also the potential for Pilate to remain a presence in Milkman’s life in the same way that her father remained a presence in hers. It is with this notion of the dead existing alongside the living that we can look to Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. The work explores various forms of navel erasure and the balancing of multiple states of being. The title of the work immediately invokes a presence of the dead because of the nature of autobiography and its very definition; thus, along with Xuela’s voice, the mother’s voice also inhabits the text. There is already a sense of negotiating the space between life and death. Like Pilate, Xuela is born at the moment of her mother’s death. This then becomes the framework through which Xuela views her existence. Kathryn Morris also cites Minh-Ha’s concept of navel erasure when discussing Xuela and her motherless position. She says,



but not a finite one. Morrison explains in her essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” that Pilate is the ancestor in the text (201). Morrison notes that Pilate is

“Navel-erasing is appropriately applied to Xuela since the loss of the mother is fashioned in the text as an incomprehensible disappearance or vanishing and it re-presents the space that the mother marks on the daughter at birth—the navel. This space is the battleground upon which Xuela attempts to erase the traces left on her body by her mother during childbirth. She attempts a birthing of herself, independent of the mother, in order to distance herself from her mother’s fate as a vanquished subject” (955). Morris astutely points to the body as the site where Xuela desires to erase her mother’s presence and the memory of her tragic fate as a kind of lifesaving act. Continuing Morris’s discussion here, it is useful to return to Minh-Ha’s description of navel erasure as an act of forgetting without annihilating. Xuela’s attempts at erasure are carried out in an ambivalent manner throughout the text, and we can see her constantly negotiating the space between the history she often rejects and the self she ambivalently tries to cultivate. The title in and of itself sends a clear message that although Xuela attempts acts of erasure of her history, there is also an attempt at preservation, embodied in the telling of her story and, by extension, her mother’s and father’s stories. Like Pilate, Xuela’s existence is framed in the context of her marginality because of her untraditional birth. She is rendered abject when her father “delivers” her, motherless, to his laundry woman, Ma Eunice, in the same way that he would deliver his clothes to her. Xuela notes this abjection and the collapsing of the distinction between a living child and soiled clothing. She says, “It is possible that he emphasized to her the difference between the two bundles: one was his child, not his only child in the world but the only child he had with the only woman he had married so far; the other was his soiled clothes . . . He would have handled one more gently than the other . . . he would have expected better care for one than the other, but which one I do not know” (4). The juxtaposition of Xuela’s infant body and her father’s clothes places her in the context of a thing, abject in the sense that she is motherless and fatherless. It is also reflective of her status within her postcolonial culture. Because her father is a jailer and associated with the patriarchal governmental structures that continue to dominate the less powerful (well after the colonial era), we can also read the association of her body with a “thing” reflective of “thingification,” which Aimé Césaire explains is a consequence of colonization. He makes the point that “Between the colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape . . . No human contact,



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but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production” (42). Not only is Xuela made a “thing” by the absence of her mother, but she is also rendered an orphan because she is unable to affiliate with her father in light of his position within the society. The fact that her father embodies the notion of the colonizing man demonstrates the extent to which the colonial influence is still present. This also casts Xuela as an oppressed indigenous subject, who represents an “instrument of production,” which will be discussed at length momentarily. Xuela, like Pilate, is an outcast, driven from most places that she attempts to integrate. After she learns to write letters at the age of seven, she begins writing unsent letters to her father relating how poorly she is treated at school and within Ma Eunice’s home. She writes to him, “My dear Papa, you are the only person I have left in the world, no one loves me, only you can, I am beaten with words, I am beaten with sticks, I am beaten with stones, I love you more than anything, only you can save me” (19). Xuela reflects on this time in her life and acknowledges the transgression of the boundary of class and gender with her letter writing. She says, “It was well known that a person in the position that I was expected to occupy—the position of a woman and a poor one—would have no need whatsoever to write a letter” (18). Here we see an early example of Xuela venturing beyond the space in which she is defined. She understands the multiple levels of her oppression as a young, poor, and virtually orphaned woman. The fact that she uses the power of writing to express various levels of physical and emotional pain is representative of her resistance to being confined or fixed in a specific place. This of course has the consequence of further alienating her from her immediate community, specifically the school. Eventually, one of her teachers is made aware of the letters and sends them to Xuela’s father. While the teacher does not directly drive Xuela away, she ostracizes her by scolding her in front of the class for writing the letters and calls her a liar. Upon receiving the letters, her father comes to take her to live with him, but instead of “saving” her from poor treatment and alienation, he merely transfers her to a different kind, located within his home. Xuela’s future alienation within that space is foreshadowed by the fact that he picks her up wearing a jailer’s uniform (22). Referring back to Césaire, this reinforces his presence in Xuela’s life as an oppressive force, reminiscent of British colonialism.




In her father’s home, Xuela’s stepmother treats her as abject and a threat to her home because she was unable to bear children of her own at the time. Xuela’s presence then represents something her stepmother cannot provide for her husband. The stepmother’s antipathy is so great that she attempts to expel Xuela from the home (Xuela suspects that her stepmother attempted to poison her; 34–35). In further efforts to alienate Xuela from the family, her stepmother tells her directly, as Xuela recalls, “that I could not be his [her father’s] child because I did not look like him, and it was true that I did not have any of his physical characteristics” (52). Xuela identifies more with her mother’s Carib heritage and shares more of her mother’s physical features, but these affiliations are tenuous in light of the fact that her mother’s people are extinct and her mother is dead (197). Again we can see Xuela collapsing the line between life and death through her identification with the Carib people. Although Kathryn Morris suggests early in her essay that Xuela desires to erase any trace of the mother from her body, she highlights the significance of Xuela identifying with her Carib ancestors. Morris writes, “Though the absence or remoteness of the Carib ancestor is still very much an issue, Kincaid investigates that remoteness in new and important ways. Kincaid aspires not to remedy the remoteness but to expose it and remove it from its historical vacuum. She writes a syncretic Caribbean identity by going to the root of a colonial fantasy—rewrites her, giving her limited though powerful selfauthorizing agency. We may deduce that this novel also attempts to revive the Carib heritage as a founding discourse for Carib(bean) identity” (956). Morris’s analysis corresponds with Sharon Patricia Holland’s notion that by giving the dead power to speak in the present, we can see an emergent “discourse of margins, where multilayered discourse can exist” (64). Rewriting the history of the extinct Carib is an act that not only empowers them but also subordinates the English influence on Caribbean identity. It is also significant for Xuela, who is empowered through the identification with her ancestors in spite of her stepmother’s attempts to render her abject, alienate her from her father, and expel her from her home. The writing of the letters and claiming kinship with her Carib ancestors are illustrations of how Xuela resists containment in many ways. Further depiction of this resistance of containment is her stay in Rouseau with the LaBattes. Jacques and Lise LaBatte are wealthy and wellconnected friends of her father. One salient example of this wealth is that Jacques LaBatte has a room that he dedicates to counting sums



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of his money (70). Although Xuela’s father brings her to the LaBattes in order to save her from the threat posed by his wife and to give her an opportunity for further education, he merely passes her from himself to a man of greater status and power. Xuela is repeatedly sexually abused by Monsieur LaBatte, and this act always happens in the room in which he counts his money. Again, we see Xuela’s body conflated with a thing. In the same way that Monsieur LaBatte obsesses over his money for pleasure, he uses Xuela’s body as an instrument of pleasure. Ultimately, that pleasure acquires a different kind of use-value because Xuela becomes pregnant with his child, something Madame LaBatte had hoped for because she herself could not bear children. However, in this instance of “thingification,” Xuela refuses to be complicit in becoming an instrument of production for the LaBattes and has an abortion.8 By laying claim to her body and her right to determine when she will bear children, Xuela signals that she will not participate in the use of her body as an instrument in the reproduction of patriarchy. Xuela comes to see having children, in general, as an encumbrance on her mobility. She reflects that if she were to bear children she would “never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine” (97). It is in this way that Xuela takes on a sentiment more reflective of the privileges of mobility often granted men.9 Because Xuela does not have the responsibility of children, she is free to move about as she pleases, exploring her identity and existing on her own terms. Once Xuela leaves the LaBattes’ home, she begins the active process of defining herself. The transitional moment where she initiates this process is with her work sifting sand for a road being built between Loubière and Giraudel. Reminiscent of Pilate, Xuela cuts off her hair in the style of a man’s. She also purchases the clothes of a dead man and wears them to her job as a laborer (96, 98–99). Not only is Xuela negotiating the space between notions of male and female, but she also is again straddling the line between life and death by wearing a dead man’s clothing. In their totality, these acts represent Xuela’s larger resistance to categorization; thus, the androgyny involved in inhabiting the clothes of a man becomes a larger representation of refusal of definition or containment in general. Xuela says that she lived “not [as] a man, not as a woman, not anything, not gathering, only living through my past, sifting it, trying to forget some things and never succeeding, trying to keep the memory of others more strongly alive and never




succeeding” (102). Here Xuela links her ambiguous identity with a sense of suspension in time, a living through the past, a space of fluid movement. She is attempting to express her own marginalized voice through engaging the past marginalized voices that will be potentially liberated through the telling of her story. The suspension between man and woman is a facilitator of this kind of exploration. It is an act of freeing herself from the strictures of society that attempt to limit her on the basis of womanhood. Androgyny also provides an opening for Xuela in exploring various other questions of her identity. She says, “I came to know myself, and this frightened me. To rid myself of this fear, I began to look at a reflection of my face in every surface I could find” (99). By constantly gazing at her reflection, Xuela begins the process of knowing herself with an examination of her physical body, thus inextricably linking understanding of the self with an understanding of the body. Xuela’s confrontation with her body through constant examination of her face symbolizes an act of power in which Xuela redirects the gaze and becomes the central eye of the gaze rather than patriarchal figures like Monsieur LaBatte or those like her stepmother, who are taught to view Xuela with contempt because of her dark skin, “illegitimacy,” and by extension, class status. Xuela continues the exploration of the self in contemplating her identity and the multiple implications of her gendered and racialized body. When she asks, “Who was I?” her body would shrink and expand in longing to conceive and in mourning her decision to never bear children. She elaborates, “I refused to belong to a race, I refused to accept a nation. I wanted only, and still do want to observe the people who do so. The crime of these identities, which I know now more than ever, I do not have the courage to bear. Am I nothing then? I do not believe so but if nothing is a condemnation, then I would love to be condemned” (226). The contentment with existing as “nothing,” even if it means condemnation or further repudiation, represents the place where Xuela has come in the journey to define herself on her own terms. While Xuela’s viewpoint can be interpreted as fatalist or defeatist, Nicole Matos reads Xuela’s actions as something of a symbolic victory.10 She explains that the refusal of definition is not uncharacteristic of colonized people’s acts of power and resistance. Matos cites Julia Kristeva and postcolonial critic Michael Dash who argue that “colonized peoples may choose to celebrate the domain of the body in their literature as a refusal of ‘corporeal determinism’ [24], that is, as a declaration of self-rule. In such literature, the unencumbered body functions as an emblem of



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‘revolutionary potential’” (Matos 865). We see Xuela tap into this revolutionary potential in several ways throughout the text. Her defiance certainly functions as empowering for her, especially as she attempts to construct an identity outside of the restrictive paradigms of race and gender. Xuela’s and Pilate’s bodies take on various states of being as we witness these characters’ evolution over the course of the texts. Primarily, their bodies are sites for exploration and representations of the possibilities for enhanced definitions of the female self. Their movement between various states—self and other, male and female, and life and death—all represent a kind of ambiguity that is productive and clarifying not only for these characters but also for those connected to them. Because of these representations, Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother are offering new ways of thinking about black women’s bodies and what it means to write those bodies.11 Notes 1. It is important to note that Morrison’s and Kincaid’s works exist along a continuum of black women and black women writers who have destabilized the female body in order to enable different possibilities for black women’s identities. Among them are figures in literature such as Clotel in William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Ellen Craft, both of whom passed as white men in order to escape slavery. Robert Reid Pharr’s Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American explores this subject matter. Additionally, Aida Overton Walker performed as a man during the minstrel era (as did other female performers), and writers such as Nella Larsen offer novels on passing that provide space for exploration of black female identity and sexuality. 2. Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s interpretation of androgyny stands in contradistinction to Morrison’s and Kincaid’s representation of it here. Minh-ha warns about the use of androgyny for women as simply a yielding to masculinity (39). However, Morrison and Kincaid don’t represent androgyny in this way. Rather than it being depicted as a default to masculine ways of thinking and existing, both writers use the act of androgyny as a vehicle for release from societal expectations based on gender, race, and class. 3. While a discussion on motherhood in both novels would certainly be appropriate, it is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the following works are effective places to begin further exploration of the topic: Michelle Pagni Stewart’s “Moynihan’s ‘Tangle of Pathology’: Toni Morrison’s Legacy of Motherhood”; Edith Frampton’s “‘You Just Can’t Fly on Off and Leave a Body’: The Intercorporeal Breastfeeding Subject of Toni Morrison’s Fiction”; and H. Adlai Murdoch’s “Severing the (M)other Connection: The Representation of Cultural Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.”




4. For all the theoretical success Pilate has in self-definition and overturning conceptions of the domestic sphere, we must acknowledge its limits. Her home environment is not necessarily productive for Reba (who validates herself through the love of men) and Hagar (whose cooptation into the beauty industry after being rejected by a man leads to her demise). Therefore, Morrison, as she does with all her characters, creates within them flaws that complicate attempts at characterization. 5. Sharon Patricia Holland notes, “Black women occupy a category like no other self in literature or in reality. We are so malleable, so brilliantly represented as a constant within our stubborn inconsistency that we can be manipulated by remaining simultaneously resistant to all attempts at regulation” (42). Her statement reflects much of the sentiment of this chapter and is reflective of the history of black women rejecting categorization, under the weight of the history of slavery and subsequent oppression, and defining themselves on their own terms. 6. Holland looks at contemporary narratives from the “gangster film” genre as reflective of the continuation of the notion of social death of blacks in America, particularly for young black men. 7. This quote is based on Holland’s analysis of Beloved, where she explains this “discourse of margins” occurring when Sethe, Denver, and Beloved tell “her story.” 8. While Xuela’s “thingification” by Jacques LaBatte is clear, Lise LaBatte’s participation in the exploitation of Xuela’s body has larger implications as well. Lise is not only complicit in her husband’s sexual abuse of Xuela, but she also betrays her because she is as close to a nurturing figure as Xuela has known in life. 9. Toni Morrison discusses this notion as a part of her thinking in the development of Song of Solomon. She says, “black men travel, they split, they get on trains, they walk they move” (Watkins 46). While Pilate’s movement early on in Song of Solomon is significant, Xuela’s resistance to being fixed in a particular place by children reflects much of Morrison’s concept here. Additionally, Guillermina DeFerrari notes in Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction, “Women are the counterforce that sustains a patriarchal society, and the constant erasure of the womb brings with it the impossibility of a mere change of hands of the old plantation system through the acquisition of capital by the emerging black bourgeoisie . . . Xuela empowers herself by refusing to become an instrument of the history reconstruction project” (175). In this way, Xuela’s rejection of motherhood bears personal and political implications. 10. Joanne Gass acknowledges this as well, but primarily frames Xuela’s actions in the context of loss. She says, “Xuela, by becoming the ‘designated crier,’ the one ‘who repeats over and over [the] list of violations, the bad deeds committed,’ gives voice to her defeated and nearly annihilated people, the Caribs, and to her mother, for her mother’s voice is her voice. Xuela’s victory is, of course, a bitter one, for in order to win, she must lose. She has



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made herself sterile; therefore, she will not perpetuate the subjugation she and her people continue to suffer. Her victory lies in saying ‘No’” (75). 11. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Carol Henderson for offering such insightful thoughts on this work. Also, I want to express thanks to my mentors Barbara Webb, Robert Reid-Pharr, and James DeJongh for their enduring support of my scholarship. Many thanks also go to Karen Gaffney, Joanna Mansbridge, and Nimu Njoya for reading drafts and exchanging ideas on this work. Finally, thanks to my family and friends for your encouragement and love.

Works Cited Bonetti, Kay. “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Missouri Review 15.2 (1992): 124– 42. Print. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Print. DeFerrari, Guillermina. Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007. Print. Frampton, Edith. “‘You Just Can’t Fly on Off and Leave a Body’: The Intercorporeal Breastfeeding Subject of Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Women: A Cultural Review 16.2 (2005): 141–63. Print. Gass, Joanne. “The Autobiography of My Mother: Jamaica Kincaid’s Revision of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2006: 63–78. Print. Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Print. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Plume, 1996. Print. Matos, Nicole C. “‘The Difference Between the Two Bundles’: Body and Cloth in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid.” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 844–56. Print. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Print. Morris, Kathryn E. “Jamaica Kincaid’s Voracious Bodies: Engendering a Carib(bean) Woman.” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 954–68. Print. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” African American Literary Criticism 1773–2000. Ed. Hazel Arnett Ervin. New York: Twayne, 1999. 198–202. Print. ———. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume, 1987. Print. Murdoch, H. Adlai. “Severing the (M)other Connection: The Representation of Cultural Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Callaloo 13.2 (1990): 325– 40. Print. Reid-Pharr, Robert. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.




Ruas, Charles. “Toni Morrison.” Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danielle Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994, 93–118. Print. Stewart, Michelle Pagni. “Moynihan’s ‘Tangle of Pathology’: Toni Morrison’s Legacy of Motherhood.” Family Matters in the British and American Novel. Ed. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera et al. Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 1997, 237–53. Print. Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. Print.



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“If Rigor Is Our Dream” The Re-Membering of Violence by Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance Zetta Elliott

One three centuries removed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What is Africa to me? —Countee Cullen, “Heritage”

I

t is interesting to consider—and, I think, worth sharing—the uncertainty that attended my decision to alter these oft-quoted lines. My first concern was with rhythm; I worried that the absent lines would present themselves in the reader’s mind, completing the poem’s familiar unity and resisting the metric rupture I wanted very much to have heard. I then began to question my intent; if I couldn’t prevent the function of memory, what could my gesture effect? Eventually I determined that I was concerned as much with technically presenting the absence for the reader to see as I was with absenting the middle lines from the reading process. Thus, being able to make the reader “obey” my directive became equal to my ability to signify an omission, to effect recognition that a deliberate and significant change had been made. I offer this introduction as a kind of metaphor for the larger project I am about to undertake, which is the restitution of black women’s



9

experiences and memories of historic physical pain. The exercise of restructuring Cullen’s verse is in some ways comparable to the greater task at hand, for both require the manipulation of absences and substitutions in order to disrupt a familiar narrative flow. It is remarkably easy to disorder poetry; by inserting a row of spaced periods, I am able to indicate that one or more lines have been removed from the poem, lines that, according to my subjective reasoning, are irrelevant or immaterial. In its altered form, the poem excerpt more fully approximates the abrupt, disjointed nature of a historical narrative of black women’s pain. This new heritage should be read, I believe, as a story originating and oriented in the temporally distant act of forcible, physical removal from Africa (“One three centuries removed”), and not (or not solely) as an expression of the subject’s subject’s psychic alienation from her homeland. The line of spaced periods may then be read as both an absence and a substitution, with the traditional and familiar (though not fully known) African male’s experience of enslavement absented and replaced by a symbol that signifies the immaterial—in this sense, that which is of the utmost relevance but which has “no physical substance” because it is not known: the female African captive’s specific brutalization. The verse would then conclude with the question, “What is Africa to me?” asked differently by this black woman interrogator, of differently located subjects: black women who for centuries have been unable, disallowed, or unasked to recount their memories of violence, terror, and pain. Against the apparent silence that has preceded and followed this question, I would further ask: can the subject remember, return, or speak to “Africa” without first traversing (and performing these same functions upon) the missing Middle Passage? Looking for (What) Remains? But people do not talk like that anymore—it is “embarrassing,” just as the retrieval of mutilated female bodies will likely be “backward” for some people. Neither the shameface of the embarrassed, nor the not-looking-back of the self-assured is of much interest to us, and will not help at all if rigor is our dream. —Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”



164 Zetta Elliott

In her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), Hortense Spillers issues a mandate calling for the “retrieval of mutilated female bodies” that lie strewn across the terrain of African American history. This is, in part, a response to that call. For although Spillers’s project differs somewhat from my own, her critical imagining of the physical trauma sustained by enslaved African women has enormous significance for my work. My aim is to examine manifestations of violence in the writing of three women of the Harlem Renaissance: Marita Bonner, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. I intend to argue, however, that these literary representations of black women suffering psychic and physical pain are rooted in that larger and largely unwritten narrative of violence that began at the moment of enslavement, did not end with emancipation, and has continued to the present day, with the violence repeating endlessly in disguised but equally debilitating forms. My analysis will involve close readings of the material, with consideration given to the role of critical imagination and the authors’ consciousness of their participation in this complex narrative continuum. Most important, this chapter will consider the problem of absence and substitution, addressing if not answering in full the critical question put to us by Spillers: “[whether] this phenomenon of marking and branding [the enslaved individual] actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments?” (67, emphasis original). Silence, Substitution, and the Spaces in Between

Use of one’s critical imagination is essential to this project of restitution, for in our search for “truth(s),” the possibilities are endless, yet few are coupled with delimiting probabilities or documented realities. “Realistic dreams” must therefore be used to envision the “unreal”—to see, hear, and believe what has not been recorded or rendered material in a photo, text, or recognized discourse. Used intelligently and, when necessary, indulgently, imagination can restore the ruptured flow of black women’s history, bringing together the disparate moments of experience that have suffered from inattention and (paradoxically) centuries of relentless, biased scrutiny. The role of imagination in this project and its particular use in this chapter will be discussed in more detail as the fictional material is introduced.



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Although women writers of the Harlem Renaissance were not always able to write directly or explicitly about their sexuality, they often depicted or made reference to lynching in their work. Interestingly, the public discourse surrounding lynching enabled black women writers of the time to broach other sensitive topics subtly and with discretion; for instance, writing about black male lynching victims may have allowed women writers to engage in a concurrent subtextual discussion about the rape of black women, the difficulties of being a black mother, or the limitations placed against the desires of women in a violently racist and sexist country. Plum Bun (1928), a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Blue Blood (1927), a play by Georgia Douglas Johnson, are not specifically “about” lynching, but both texts focus on the constellation of issues confronting the black woman, and in a way create interior narratives about the historical violence of rape and lynching. This chapter will also consider the short stories of Marita Bonner, and will draw on Spillers’s theory of “symbolic substitutions”—echoes of black women’s historical victimization that leave no visible wound upon the body but nonetheless produce emotional agony and psychic injury. Although women were lynched much less frequently than men, the violence enacted upon black female bodies was just as terrible. Indeed, these records indicate that black women were lynched with or in lieu of their husbands and sons.1 They were hanged, burnt, dismembered, and disemboweled; their bodies were riddled with bullets, and their remains prized as souvenirs. Yet the scant assortment of accounts2 I was able to uncover also suggests that specific forms of torture were reserved for female victims. Accounts printed in the black press confirm that black women were gang-raped prior to their murder, and the investigative reports of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Walter White3 confirm that a fetus was not safe in a black mother’s womb. Motherhood figures quite prominently in these accounts: the one photograph of a female lynch victim is of a mother, Laura Nelson, who was raped and then hanged from a bridge alongside her teenage son. Obviously, white American “gentlemen” did not respect the sanctity of (black) motherhood, and too often, as in slavery, the condition of the child followed the condition of the mother. Sympathetic accounts published in black newspapers consistently invoke female victims’ status as (expectant) mothers, thereby emphasizing the fact that the most vulnerable members of a patriarchal society—women and children—were both directly assaulted and denied the protection of (their) men. Indeed, many women seem to have been murdered precisely



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because they attempted to shield or defend their wrongly accused husbands and sons. Were these black women lynched as punishment for this double transgression, for defying white male authority and assuming the role of protector within the family? When viewed against the panorama of black male lynching victims, black women appear as an absence or aberration. Unlike the rape of black women, which during Reconstruction was so common as to be “an old saying by now,”4 the lynching of black women is infrequent enough to warrant commentary. Yet these female victims have instead been regarded as unremarkable, in part because they have not truly been regarded—seen in the same way as black male victims. Images of lynched black men have circulated in U.S. society in such a way that they are at once recognizable, even familiar, and against this familiarity, black female victims fail even to register as victims. They appear, instead, as anomalies, persons killed incidentally, not purposely. Although rape is generally understood to be a terrorist weapon directed specifically at women, the frequency of sexual assault renders it unexceptional and mundane—so common that it cannot be designated as “an event outside the range of human experience” and therefore cannot officially be recognized as traumatic (L. Brown, 100).5 Psychiatrist Laura Brown argues that women and men experience trauma differently; incest, rape, and sexual harassment “are experiences to which women accommodate; potentials for which women make room in their lives and their psyches. They are private events, sometimes known only to the victim and the perpetrator” (101). By contrast, recognized traumatic incidents are “public events, visible to all, rarely themselves harbingers of stigma for their victims, things that can and do happen to men—all of these constitute trauma in the official lexicon,” and such victims “are rarely blamed for these events” (102). This definition, Brown contends, has devastating consequences: What purposes are served when we formally define a traumatic stressor as an event outside of normal human experience and, by inference, exclude those events that occur at a high enough base rate in the lives of certain groups that such events are in fact, normative, “normal” in a statistical sense? I would argue that such parameters function so as to create a social discourse on “normal” life that then imputes psychopathology to the everyday lives of those who cannot protect themselves from these high base-rate events and who respond to these events with evidence of psychic pain. Such a discourse defines a human being as one who is not subject to such high base-rate events and conveniently consigns the rest of us to the category of less than human, less than deserving of fair treatment. (103)




Indeed, black women have been pathologized as sexual deviants and denied status as equal victims of racial terror; their “private, secret, insidious traumas” historically have been dismissed because “‘real’ trauma is often only that form of trauma in which the dominant group can participate as a victim rather than as the perpetrator” (L. Brown 102). In Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Trudier Harris performs a comparative gender analysis of fiction written by African Americans on the historical phenomenon of lynching. Importantly, Harris provides readers with a detailed historical survey of extralegal mob activity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including statistical data on women victims, not ordinarily found in treatments of the subject: “Between 1882 and 1927, an estimated 4,951 persons were lynched in the United States. Of that number 3,513 were black and 76 of those were black women” (7, emphasis added). Although (according to these statistics) black women constitute only 2 percent of the total number of recorded lynch victims, Harris’s recognition of these women represents a significant historiographic move. Regrettably, Harris does not examine the gender-specific forms of torture these women endured before their deaths (for instance, the cutting open of the womb); this information instead is used by Harris to justify the privileging of black male writers and black male subjectivity. Harris quickly moves away from statistics into a realm of familiar, unsubstantiated assumptions, such as that “black males have felt more acutely the powerless conditions under which black people have been forced to live in this country. Writers among that group, therefore, have been equally conscious of that shared burden and the symbolic emasculation it represents. Their literary creations are thus in general more reactive to the conditions of black people in America than are those of black female writers” (188). Linking her interpretation of the African American female experience to the production of black women writers, Harris surmises that “it is a rare occasion on which black women writers present violence, either lynchings or otherwise, with the same degree of detail and at the same length” as their literary brethren. She concludes, “Whether the violence is rape or murder, black women writers seem less inclined to dwell upon it” (192–93). Harris is far from the only scholar to have neglected to give equal consideration to black women’s experience of violence and their resulting trauma.6 Rather, her work falls in line with a pattern of scholarship that uses the lack of recognized forms of documentary evidence7 as an



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excuse not to study black women at all, or to consider them “lesser” historical subjects who suffered only and minimally during slavery, and certainly to a lesser degree than their male counterparts.8 This problem of historiography is expertly articulated by Hortense Spillers in her aforementioned essay, which examines the relation between African women’s captivity and “the dynamics of naming and valuation” (68). In a rare and enormously significant moment, Spillers critiques the work of feminist scholars who, for political reasons have failed to realize, that the African female subject, under these historic conditions, is not only the target of rape—in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind—but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflicted by [and upon] other males. A female body strung from a tree limb, or bleeding from the breast on any given day of field work because the “overseer,” standing the length of a whip, has popped her flesh open, adds a lexical and living dimension to the narratives of women in culture and society. (67–68)

Harris’s work replicates many of the faulty assumptions that have by this point become “normalized” as methodology in the treatment of black women’s history.9 Unlike Harris, Spillers thoroughly interrogates the valid complaint that scant evidence exists to document the conditions encountered by female slaves, leaving their responses as captives in Africa and aboard slave ships during the Middle Passage largely unknown: “Indeed, across the spate of discourse that I examined for this writing, the acts of enslavement and responses to it comprise a more or less agonistic engagement of confrontational hostilities among males. The visual and historical evidence betrays the dominant discourse on the matter as incomplete, but counter-evidence is inadequate as well: the sexual violation of captive females and their own express rage against their oppressors did not constitute events that captains and their crews rushed to record in letters to their sponsoring companies, or sons on board in letters home to their New England mamas” (73, emphasis added). In this passage, Spillers touches upon two very important related ideas. The first is that documentation from the early slavery period tends to have been created by males (predominantly European but also African) who were willfully preoccupied with recording their oppositional encounters with other men. These narrators generally make no mention of African women, but, as Spillers keenly observes, it is hardly surprising that white men would not write about women whom they supposedly




despised as inferior and yet knew intimately through violent acts of sexual assault and rape. It is crucial that the sexual exploitation of African women be kept in the foreground of any examination of their experiences in captivity and their relation to others within subsequent systems of domination and oppression. Harris’s analysis of lynching minimizes the significance of black women’s sexuality and thereby distorts their involvement in the dynamics of racially and sexually motivated mob violence, as well as black women writers’ investment in the portrayal of those dynamics. In her essay “The Last Taboo” (1992), historian Paula Giddings asserts the centrality of black women in the lynching phenomenon, noting that the violence “was also a woman’s issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race” (561). Giddings also corrects misperceptions about the origins and progression of sexual tension between whites and blacks, which culminated in the lynching of black women, children, and men: As the epitome of the immorality, pathology, and impurity of the age, Black women were seen in dualistic opposition to their upper-class, pure, and passionless white sisters. It was this binary opposition of women (Black men’s sex drives were not seen as inherently different from those of white men, only less controlled) that was the linchpin of race, class, and even gender difference. It was this opposition, furthermore, that also led to lynching. For it was the white women’s qualities, so profoundly missing in Black women, that made Black men find white women irresistible, and “strangely alluring and seductive.” (564)

Although her text was groundbreaking in many ways, Harris’s argument remains flawed in several respects. From the preface on, she claims the lynching phenomenon as the exclusive domain of black men, both as historical experience and in relation to the formation of a literary aesthetic. Harris then concludes her discussion of the lesser consequences of rape by insisting that the experience of such pain for black women, though horrific, was not comparable to “actual” (male) lynchings because the trauma did not result in “personal annihilation” (188). At the end of the nineteenth century, when lynching violence reached its peak, one particular black woman writer was directly involved in the graphic depiction of mob violence. In her pioneering work, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), black woman journalist and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells importantly refuted and statistically



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disproved the general perception that black men were lynched because of their sexual attacks on innocent white womanhood. Harris later concedes this point, noting that “the primary motivation for the ritualistic lynchings depicted by black [male] writers centers upon crimes allegedly committed by black men against the persons of white women” in spite of the fact that “the number of black men lynched or burned for [alleged] rape between 1882 and 1903 comprises only 34 percent of the total” (7). Harris’s point, then, is not only that black women writers have not written about violence,10 but that they have not been inordinately preoccupied, as have black male writers, by specific aspects of that violence. This remark upon black women writers’ exercise of their creative agency presents an interesting opportunity for further consideration of the role of critical imagination in the recuperation of black women’s history. Harris’s argument seems to suggest that there are limited acceptable ways of imagining violence, and that legitimate representations of violence must be graphic, involve physical dismemberment, and ultimately end in death; black women writers, then, do not (cannot) write about violence because they are physically whole and have lived to (not) tell the tale. Their pain was something less than death, concludes Harris, which is why “black women writers have been more willing to let some portions of their history be” (194–95). Sandra Gunning’s 1996 book, Race, Rape, and Lynching, serves as an excellent antidote to the problematic assumptions in Harris’s text. Gunning warns against exclusive interpretations of lynching narratives, and insists upon the important contribution of black and white women writers whose “angle of vision” and “very mode of address would necessarily have been different from those of their men” (11). She expertly assesses the damaging repercussions in her introduction: If we limited our reading to literature on lynching, often by black and white men, we might be left with the linked “plots” of black rape and white lynching as the basis for a homosocial, interracial triangle of desire in which the body of the white female victim mediates between the oppositional pairing of the black beast and the white protector. But like the stereotype of the rapist, such a view obscures other issues and distracts from more meaningful analyses. For one thing, we tend to ignore automatically the very different manner of participation engaged in by black and white women writers when they approached the subject of lynching. Indeed, the very figuration of black women in relationship to white, within the ideology supporting white racial violence gets lost in the shuffle over black and white male articulations. (9)




Gunning’s brilliant analysis of texts by Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Pauline Hopkins substantiates her theory that women experience, respond to, and represent violence in particular ways; rather than focusing on “male access to citizenship and property,” Gunning finds that women writers are concerned instead (or also) with “the problem of establishing female subjectivity within a public debate whose terms are universally established by men; with the political and personal consequences of rape; with the attraction and repulsion of fantasies of sexual desire; and with the need for sexual recovery.” Her conclusion supports the central aim of this chapter, for Gunning asserts that “we must reimagine the discourse on racial violence as including not just men and women writing, but men and women writing in different tonalities, with different strategies, and with different concerns” (11). Something More Than Silence, Something Other Than Death

In her remarkable 1925 essay, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,” Marita Bonner describes the anguish of a young, middleclass black woman whose dreams are shattered by the social restraints imposed upon her because of her age, gender, and race. Though the young woman initially understands her desires and believes they can be realized, she soon learns that duty to her racial community, and the racism and sexism of the larger society, will not allow her to fulfill her dreams. As a young woman, Bonner writes, “You know what you want life to give you. A career as fixed and as calmly brilliant as the North Star. The one real thing that money buys. Time. Time to do things . . . And of course, a husband you can look up to without looking down on yourself ” (3). These desires must be set aside, however, as the young woman submits to social pressure within the black community, which requires her to participate in the “uplift” of the race. The young woman thus returns to the fold in order to pay “the debt you owe ‘Your People’ because you have managed to have the things they have not largely had” (Bonner 3). Bonner’s essay provides interesting insight into the psyche of a class of black women that has often been portrayed as living materially luxurious and emotionally satisfying lives within spheres untouched by the deprivation and violence that afflicted so many blacks living in American cities. Bonner describes the social rituals of her class, but stresses the emptiness of parties and card games, and the devastation a woman



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feels when she realizes she cannot escape this world of pretenses and superficiality. “Strange longing seizes hold of you,” she writes, but a young black woman cannot explore or attempt to fulfill her desire, for she is immobilized within the city by sexism and racial segregation, and the continued currency of Victorian moral codes which paint the city as a veritable den of iniquity: You decide that the next train will take you there. You decide the next second that that train will not take you, nor the next—nor the next for some time to come. For you know that—being a woman—you cannot twice a month or twice a year, for that matter, break away to see or hear anything in a city that is supposed to see and hear too much. That’s being a woman. A woman of any color. (5)

Bonner further laments not only the racial discrimination of whites, but also their indiscriminate labeling of all black women as “a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled,” or as “a feminine Caliban craving to pass for Ariel” (5). Left immobile, without the power to define herself either within the black community or without, the young black woman retreats into herself in order to preserve some aspect of her humanity. Devalued, and denied full participation in society, unable to apply her own “wisdom” and “understanding” to the problems of the day, and left unfulfilled by the material “things” whites grudgingly permit her to acquire, the young black woman feels herself beginning to change: Every part of you becomes bitter. But—“In Heaven’s name, do not grow bitter. Be bigger than they are”— exhort white friends who have never had to draw breath in a Jim-Crow train. Who have never had petty putrid insult dragged over them—drawing blood—like pebbled sand on your body where the skin is tenderest. On your body where the skin is thinnest and tenderest. You long to explode and hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly. But you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder even if you can manage a smile around your eyes—without getting steely and brittle and losing the softness that makes you a woman. (Bonner 6)

In order to preserve this “softness,”11 women seal themselves off from the world, Bonner writes, absorbing the force of external pressures without revealing any outward manifestation of the shock caused by that absorption:




So—being a woman—you can wait. You must sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden—and weighted as if your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty. But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha—who brown like I am—sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing . . . Motionless on the outside. But on the inside? Silent. Still . . . “Perhaps Buddha is a woman.” So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life will flow into and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding to yourself. (7)

The silence posited by Bonner in this essay appears to be coupled with passivity. The young black woman is advised to “sit quietly,” without exhibiting an external trace of any of the chaotic emotions she might reasonably experience as a powerless woman of color living out a traumatic history that began with slavery. She must maintain the semblance of peace, Bonner writes—“motionless” on the outside and “silent” within. There is need, however, in this passage to understand silence not only as an absence, or a negation of true, live feeling, but as a protective and potentially empowering strategy whereby a woman may transform her anger, fear, bitterness, and “nervous uncertainty” into a peaceful, trancelike state similar to those adopted by Buddhist nuns. Although Audre Lorde, writing fifty years later, would warn her sister of the toxicity of her silence and urge her to transform it into language and action, Bonner determines to transform the negativity of her existence into a patient, Christ-like resignation; her inner Self relinquishes any desire to influence or overcome the conditions that oppress, and opts instead to quietly “draw understanding” to itself while awaiting eventual divine intervention. Christian influences recur throughout Bonner’s writing, almost matching her use of graphic, violent metaphors. It appears that Bonner believed in a moderate form of asceticism, which required the rejection of “worldly” materialism as an inadequate comfort for the suffering of life. For Bonner, a black woman’s inner Self was a safe and sacred space, a holy inner sanctum within which a woman could commune with God. Bonner equated the violation of that sanctuary with intense physical pain, and the writings collected in Frye Street and Environs are filled with metaphors of torture meant to symbolize psychic,



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emotional, and spiritual suffering. In one of her later short stories, Bonner writes of a middle-class black woman who has survived one failed marriage and fears she is becoming estranged from her current partner. Lee, the heroine of “Hate Is Nothing” (1938), witnesses the marriage of a reckless, loveless young couple and immediately thinks of her first marriage to a wealthy but alcoholic doctor: “Lee could feel that old tangle of barbed wire eating into her flesh. Her first marriage . . . Drunken fingers gripping tight—eating down into the flesh of her arms the way barbed wire does when it is settling for a grip. Settling for a grip that always digs a scar too deep for eternity to ever fill again” (Bonner 161). When she informs him that she is filing for divorce, her husband confusedly questions her reasons for leaving. Bonner uses parentheses to insert alongside her husband’s words Lee’s interpretation of his behavior toward her: “I am good to you, Lee! Why can’t you stay?” he had pleaded at first. (Good to you, Lee! Good because I never knocked you down! Never bruised or hurt you with my fists! But I say nothing of the blows I have hammered on YOU!) “Why can’t you stay Lee?” (Stay and blot out more of your real SELF every time we quarrel and curse each other! Stay and blot out your Self! See if I can’t make you and God lose each other!) (161)

Although never injured physically, Lee believes her first husband cruelly abused her, intending to penetrate the inner space—her Self— where she keeps her true feelings and identity, an intimate interior space where she feels close to and can commune with God. When her husband’s behavior threatens to violate that space, Lee removes herself from the relationship, determined to preserve the sanctity of her inner Self. Though Bonner’s middle-class characters, like Lee, attempt to shield themselves from the unpleasantness of daily existence with luxurious objects, they inevitably fail. After battling with her manipulative mother-in-law, Lee withdraws to her beautifully appointed bedroom, hoping that “the touch of elegance will take my mind off of things” (173). Lee’s conclusion, however, confirms those found in many of Bonner’s stories, which is that “ugliness” cannot be avoided or left behind: “It had to be seen through—and lived through—or fought through— like her own troubles” (165). In her essay and short stories, Bonner describes an existence that closely resembles a living death. Circumscribed by age, race, and gender,




Bonner reveals the pain black women feel as they watch their early desires and impulses die, smothered beneath the falsely calm demeanor required of all women by a racist and sexist bourgeois society. Bonner’s work is important for the violence of its emotion, and for the author’s use of metaphors of physical torture to describe the psychic trauma that black women experience when forced to repress their desire to live without restraints. Such containment, Bonner concludes, results in an empty existence for black women, unfeminine hardness, and an indiscriminate fury against all things white. Importantly, Bonner describes suffering as an internal and external experience; the reference to her subject’s tender skin recalls memories of black women exposed, stripped naked by overseers, and whipped—certainly until blood was drawn, possibly beyond until death. Interestingly, when Bonner’s work is read in conjunction with Spillers’s, one is struck by the similarity of language used to describe what appear to be two separate and historically distant experiences: the suffering of the black woman within slavery and that of her postemancipation, twentieth-century counterpart. To Spillers, the relation between the two is much more than coincidental; commenting on William Goodell’s contemporaneous account of early slave conditions, she notes, “The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose—eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet . . . We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments?” (Spillers 67, emphasis original). It is possible, then, to read Bonner’s essay as a narrative of containment and captivity that echoes historical accounts of the experiences of enslaved Africans. As Spillers suggests, across time and space successive generations of dispersed Africans may continue to live as captives, trapped within “the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (68). Bonner would undoubtedly agree, judging from the sense of entrapment expressed in her essay, but it is interesting also to consider how the “new” African female captive is both bound by the repetition and, in one sense, liberated linguistically by her ability



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to wield these same metaphors in defense of her person—or at least to describe her torturous existence and thereby accuse those who ever were and still are responsible. Bonner’s essay is unique and thus important for its explicit images of captivity and physical torment. But perhaps what is most useful is the resolution she finds in silence. In her concluding paragraphs, Bonner advises women to continue living, resisting impulses toward violence and despair by adopting a patient, passive demeanor until the moment of true emancipation—enlightenment?—arrives. The black woman of the 1920s, like the female African slave who suffered three hundred years before, decides early on, says Bonner, “that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes; that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears and throat. Somehow all wrong” (5). Yet she proposes that women remain where and as they are: “Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life will flow into you and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding to yourself ” (7). Putting It in Print: “The Sacrifice of a Sister”

Within a system of captivity, “the customary lexis of sexuality, including ‘reproduction,’ ‘motherhood,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘desire’ are thrown into unrelieved crisis” (Spillers 76). It is useful to begin with this statement, for the three women writers under consideration employ these related categories to remember and/or imagine black women’s experiences of violence. Although women of the Harlem Renaissance were not always able to write directly or explicitly about their sexuality, they often depicted or made reference to lynching in their work. Such depictions were generally applauded as artistic activism, and likely were used to sustain public support for the NAACP’s campaign for federal antilynching legislation after a bill raised in 1917 by Missouri Congressman Leonidus Dyer was effectively smothered by the Senate in 1920 after passing in the House the previous year (Gaines 216). Interestingly, the problematized “lexis” identified by Spillers may have enabled black women, through modern captivity narratives, to write about sensitive topics subtly and with discretion; for instance, writing a story about black male lynching victims may have allowed women writers to engage in a concurrent subtextual discussion about the rape of black women, the difficulties of being a black mother, and/or the limitations placed against the desires of the individual in a violently racist and




sexist country. The texts under consideration are not “about” lynching, at least not directly, but both focus on this constellation of issues confronting the black woman, and each in its way presents the historical violence of rape and lynching. Georgia Douglas Johnson’s play Blue Blood (1927) is an ideal starting point for this discussion, as it attempts to deal with these precise issues: the rape of black women, the lynching of black men, the futile efforts of black mothers to arrest or erase this history, and the inability of the individual black female subject to extricate herself from its grasp.12 The play represents a retrospective approach possibly used by Johnson to suggest, despite proof to the contrary, that the worst racial violence had been left behind, in the last century and in the South. Blue Blood is set in Georgia during Reconstruction, a time when many blacks were still rooted to the soil on which they had slaved and were generally still hopeful about the promise of a better future as citizens of the reunited states. Although Johnson’s play is largely a critique of intraracial class and color divisions, the tension between her characters is rooted in the historical reality of the sexual exploitation of black women by white men, which continued long after slavery officially ended. The play addresses its social issues through the marriage of two “lights,” May Bush and John Temple, who have different class backgrounds but share a similarity of appearance; as May’s mother reveals to a disappointed dark-skinned suitor, Randolph Strong, she fears the match is “onlucky,” for the couple are “jest exactly the same color . . . hair . . . and eyes alike too” and thus have gone against the African American mating adage that “dark should marry light” (Johnson 39). The wedding is disrupted when the couple’s mothers discover, in the course of petty competition, that their children are in fact siblings, related through the white rapist and father, Winfield McCallister, a prominent local banker and former captain in the Confederate army. When the upper-class Mrs. Temple suggests that May should consider herself lucky to be making such an advantageous match with her son, Mrs. Bush responds by flaunting her daughter’s full parentage and the blue (white) blood she derives from her father, “that ’ristocrat uv ’ristocrats,” Captain McCallister. With obvious pride Mrs. Bush declares that May, the captain’s unrecognized (but, to her eyes, recognizable) child, “walks jest like him—throws her head like him—an’ she’s got eyes, nose and mouth jest like him. She’s his living image” (41). Despite these similarities, however, May is not McCallister’s “heir apparent,” for as Hortense Spillers notes, “under conditions of captivity,



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the offspring of the female does not ‘belong’ to the Mother, nor is s/ he ‘related’ to the ‘owner,’ though the latter ‘possesses’ it, and in the African-American instance, often fathered it, and, as often, without whatever benefit of patrimony” (74, emphasis original). Interestingly, though the official “conditions of captivity” have ended by the time of the play, Johnson leaves unclear the circumstances surrounding May’s conception; it is not known whether or not Mrs. Bush was a slave before the recently concluded Civil War, and no information is given regarding the circumstances of contact between this uneducated black woman and a prominent white citizen. Mrs. Temple, by contrast, is allowed an opportunity to explain all the details of her rape, and from her story we are able to determine that she was a free black woman, educated, and a teacher in a rural school, saving her earnings to pay for her upcoming marriage. It is Mrs. Temple’s professional status that leads to her contact with McCallister: he assists her at the bank where she is keeping her savings, and later expresses his sexual interest in her through letters until at last he bribes her landlady and rapes her in her home. Mrs. Temple recounts, “I cried out. There wasn’t anyone there that cared enough to help me,” and then successfully solicits sympathy from Mrs. Bush, who emphatically agrees that there is “little chance for women like us, in the South, to get justice or redress when these things happen” (43). Importantly, the young Mrs. Temple follows the advice given to her by her mother, another black woman who was clearly all too familiar with the reality of sexual assault. Unable to reverse her daughter’s horrific violation, the black mother, seeking to keep her child from further pain, counsels against formally charging McCallister with the assault: “She said I’d be the one . . . that would suffer.” Mrs. Temple does tell her fiancé of her rape but withholds the name of her attacker, fearing to trigger the violent reaction that would follow any black man’s attempt to defend a woman he loved and who was, in a patriarchal sense, his “property”: “I knew he would have tried to kill [McCallister], and then they’d have killed him” (43). Johnson thus skillfully constructs a narrative in which three generations of black women share their understanding of the racial and sexual dynamics that so often led to extreme acts of violence, primarily in the South. Survival skills are passed from mother to daughter in anticipation of the violation they are powerless to prevent—regardless of skin tone or class position—and the matrilineal code of silence is necessarily adopted against the certain loss (subtraction) of their beloved men.




Although, when she is apprised of the situation, May mourns the loss of her innocence (“Oh, God—I’ve kept out of their clutches myself, but now it’s through you, Ma, that they’ve got me anyway. Oh, what’s the use . . .”), in the end she too submits to her mother’s advice regarding her fiancé and half-brother, John, whom she must “jilt”: “Keep it from him. It’s the black women that have got to protect their men from the white men by not telling on ’em” (46). The play ends with the patricidal murder of McCallister and the lynching of John averted; May agrees to elope with the handily available Randolph Strong, and the two mothers are left to explain the resultant social catastrophe to the rest of the wedding party. No blood has been spilt, and the notion of privilege attached to the possession of “blue blood” is, at least in this instance, proven untrue. A concern with “blood” recurs throughout all three of the pieces under consideration in this chapter. In her essay “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Hazel Carby examines the philosophical contributions made by three prominent nineteenth-century black feminists: Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Hopkins, and Ida B. Wells. In her discussion of A Voice From the South (1892), she notes that Cooper “saw that the manipulative power of the South was embodied in the southern patriarch,” but interestingly described the southern “concern with ‘blood,’ inheritance, and heritage in entirely female terms and as a preoccupation that was transmitted from the South to the North and perpetuated by white women”: “If your own father was a pirate, a robber, a murderer, his hands are dyed in red blood, and you don’t say very much about it. But if your great great great grandfather’s grandfather stole and pillaged and slew, and you can prove it, your blood has become blue and you are at great pains to establish the relationship” (306). As Johnson suggests in her play, some black women seem to have adopted this perverse idea of tracing nobility through ignoble acts, yet the transmission of this blood through childbearing alters black women’s relation to the so-called American aristocrats. Carby concludes her analysis of Cooper’s text with the suggestion that “the juxtaposition of ‘red’ with ‘blue’ blood reveals the hidden history of national and nationalist heritage to be based on the principles of murder and theft—piracy” (306). For our purposes, her statement might have ended with a number of different but equally reprehensible crimes: rape, racial/sexual terrorism, enslavement—the theft of actual persons.



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Under such circumstances, one might ask how anyone—particularly black women, who have been raped and are the product of such violent relations—could be so anxious to trace her lineage back to such a corrupt source? This question cannot fully be answered if one considers blood only as a metaphor for violence; as the act of rape; a violation; the forced infusion of a tainted, unwanted substance into an otherwise pristine pool. Yet “blood” means much more to these black women writers. It becomes a trope, a way to discuss the intimate and most basic biological connection established through birth between a mother and her children, the only recognized relation within slavery (for economic and ownership purposes) and beyond, so long as the captivity metaphor remains in place: “Partus sequitur ventrem: the condition of the slave mother is ‘forever entailed on all her remotest posterity’” (Spillers 79). The emotional attachment of the black mother to her child is then read against the difficulty of sustaining kinship ties and loyalty to one’s race (or races); “blood” becomes a symbolic substitution for the chains of slavery that once bound one slave to another and all to a dominant master; “blood” becomes the shackle that cannot be thrown off, a tie so strong that only the severance of one’s skin, the violent spilling of blood, can effect a complete and lasting separation. Blood represents the violence of an attachment and association that the individual cannot safely deny nor live selfishly within; the burden of race becomes the burden of “blood,” and “blood” repeats the sticky history in which the black female subject is mired. The artist’s invocation of “blood” then becomes a means of figuring the violence experienced by black women—within slavery and beyond—that informs every aspect of their existence. The quality of blood is a question considered by Angela Murray, the protagonist in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novel, Plum Bun (1929). Very light skinned like her mother and thus able to pass for white, Angela leaves her home and her younger, darker-skinned sister behind and moves to New York City. There, after the initial thrill of her new identity wears into doubtful solitude, Angela begins to think about her deceased mother, her abandoned sister, and the opposite qualities that seem to be attributable to “white” and “black” blood, unequal quantities of which she feels battling in her veins. On several occasions, Angela rejects opportunities to align herself with her family and race, preferring to exist in isolation within a white world that accepts her only because it cannot detect her “black blood,” except through her intimate association with other visible blacks. When her sister, Ginny, arrives in New




York, Angela, in a critical moment, refuses to recognize their relation in order to preserve her standing with Roger Fielding, a wealthy white playboy whom she hopes will marry her someday. After the snub, Ginny reflects upon the differences between her sister and herself, comparing their new relationship to the perverse relations of the old slave system: “Even his arrogance had failed to bring Angela to her senses, and suddenly she remembered that it had been possible in slavery times for white men and women to mistreat their mulatto relations, their own flesh and blood, selling them into deeper slavery in the far South or standing by and watching them beaten, almost, if not completely, to death. Perhaps there was something fundamentally different between white and coloured blood after all” (167–68). Unlike her sister, Ginny coolly assesses the situation and exposes the self-interest that motivates Angela to such cruelty; their familial bond must be severed, she concludes, for maintaining it in secrecy is dangerous and simply illogical: “‘We’ve just got to face the fact that you and I are two separate people and we’ve got to live our lives apart, not like the Siamese twins . . . After all, in a negative way, merely by saying nothing, you’re disclaiming your black blood in a country where it is an inconvenience . . . it certainly can shut you out of things. So why shouldn’t you disclaim a living manifestation of that blood?” (171). Angela would never have admitted to herself that she considers (her relation to) Ginny a liability, just as she compares her blackness to a wound, a healed scar from an act of dismemberment; Angela only sees that she is “alone, possessed of a handicap which if guessed at would have been as disabling as a game leg or an atrophied body” (207). Throughout the novel Angela wavers, weighing the value of her gains achieved through “passing” against the high price of her new social and economic freedom: “Surely no ambition, no pinnacle of safety was supposed to call for the sacrifice of a sister” (159). And indeed, Angela is not safe, for Fielding, rather than marry her, ironically uses her sexually as he might any unprotected black woman toward whom white men have never had any recognized obligation. Still, Angela struggles against the pressure of familiar “ideals and inevitable sacrifices for the race,” refusing to submit her body, her whiteness, and her desire for luxury and personal security as a representative “burnt-offering of individualism for some dimly glimpsed racial whole” (117). In her isolation, Angela frequently reflects on her early home life and the anxieties confronted by her parents and neighbors. Though passing for white, unmarried, and childless, Angela carries the memory



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of black domesticity with her and regrets her white lover’s inability to understand its import: “She could not explain to him the picture which she saw in her mind of men and women at her father’s home in Opal Street—the men talking painfully of rents, of lynchings, of building and loan associations; the women of childbearing and the sacrifices which must be made to put Gertie through school, to educate Howard. ‘I don’t mean for any of my children to go through what I did’” (116). Angela has taken this sentiment to its furthest degree, short of determining not to become a mother at all (an option presented in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem “Black Woman”); disbelieving the ability of any black woman to protect her child—women discuss the sacrifice of money while men discuss the sacrifice of flesh—Angela opts for the safety of whiteness (which, interestingly, is not a surety; her “black blood,” though invisible, is not remote). Admittedly, the black mother sought to do more for her child than preserve its life; she was concerned also with improving the condition of that life, and often reconciled herself to the small change she could effect, reducing exposure to potentially violent or exploitative situations such as domestic work. As Spillers suggests, however, within the metaphor and reality of captivity, ultimately the child does not “belong” to its mother; and as Bonner states in her essay, black women are devalued objects in a world of “things” that whites indiscriminately acquire, discard, and ultimately control. This fact does not diminish the black mother’s fervor to protect her child to the best of her ability, as Mrs. Bush attests to in Blue Blood: “I don’t keer who it hurts . . . I’m not agoin’ see May suffer . . . not ef I kin help it!” (Johnson 43). Fauset, like Johnson, connects the experience of motherhood to the threat of violence levied against black women and men. She first introduces the racial and sexual dynamics behind lynching when Mattie Murray is hospitalized and her dark-skinned husband, Junius, must act as her servant in order to be admitted to see her. When she is finally released, the emotional Mattie recklessly throws her arms around her “servant,” causing the shocked intern to return to the hospital, “raging about these damn white women and their nigger servants. Such women ought to be placed in a psycho-pathic ward and the niggers burned” (Fauset 60). The suggestion that white women who engage in consensual interracial relationships are suffering from madness is repeated in Anthony Cruz’s retrospective tale of the lynching of his black father, which, like Johnson’s scene of violence, occurs in the South. Importantly, Fauset places Anthony’s mother, a fair-skinned Brazilian “with




the blood of many races in her veins,” in the center of the dilemma; her brown-skinned husband and his father are killed after she defends herself against the sexual advances of a white man, Tom Haley, the town magistrate’s son: “Before nightfall the mob came to teach this man their opinion of a nigger who hadn’t taught his wife her duty toward white men . . . Haley opened fire. The body fell over the railing, dead before it could touch the ground, murdered by the bullets from twenty pistols. Souvenir hunters cut off fingers, toes, his ears . . . [Those who found the body] said it was unlike anything they had ever seen before, totally dehumanized” (289). Following the lynching Maria Cruz is described by her son as “a madwoman,” living “all the rest of her life haunted by a terrible fear.” Traumatized by the violence directed against her husband on account of the color of his skin, Maria avails herself of her (and her son’s) apparent whiteness and marries a foreign white man, choosing not to align herself with a people so “cursed . . . so abused, so hounded” (Fauset 290). Of course, the average wife of a lynching victim could not choose to remove herself from the horrific incident by “passing” for white. The apparently black widow would be forced to continue alone, still vulnerable to white assaults on herself and her home, and responsible for keeping her family together and safe with only the support of other members of a frightened community. The alternative, for those who could afford the venture, was to leave. As Jacob Lawrence indicates in his visual narrative of the early twentieth-century Great Migration, the survivors of a lynching (depicted in one panel as a black woman slumped forlornly over a kitchen table) often took little time to mourn before leaving the region and heading north. Angela’s options differ from those of the typical black lynching widow, for she is already in the North and already passing as white. She is able to accomplish a sort of healing by reclaiming her black identity, which she does by enacting a gesture of solidarity with the dark-skinned Miss Powell. This move marks an important moment in her struggle to resolve the tension between her ability to achieve her goals by “passing,” and her need to recognize those black women who cannot use a face/ or facade of whiteness to escape discrimination and abuse. After years of having observed Miss Powell and all blacks “objectively, doubly so, once with her natural remoteness and once with the remoteness of her new estate” (Fauset 97), Angela chooses to “return,” pronouncing her blackness and reuniting herself with her severed member: “After all, this girl was one of her own. A whim of fate had set their paths far apart but just the same they were more than ‘sisters under the skin.’ They were really



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closely connected in blood, in racial condition, in common suffering” (Fauset 340–41). Here “blood” is metonymically associated with the historical violence directed against black people, so that it simultaneously functions both as a critical imaginative figuration of that violence and as a bond of solidarity between Angela and Miss Powell. While “blood,” as it is used here, represents a more subtle evocation of racial violence, the graphic means by which Fauset depicts the rituals involved in the lynching of black victims is important, for they suggest both her own knowledge of the phenomenon and her determination to remind her readers of the violent history that was ongoing in the South, which may have differed but was not separate from the racial violence of the North. Lynchings like the one constructed by Fauset were made known to northern urban dwellers through black publications such as The New York Age or The Chicago Defender. Unlike accounts printed in white publications, black newspapers tended to include a greater degree of detail, and wrote with a bias that was more palatable to black readers who needed no convincing of white southerners’ weakly reasoned brutality. Conclusion

The issue of victimization provides an appropriate topic on which to conclude. Paula Giddings, who has completed extensive research into the life and work of Ida B. Wells, notes that Wells’s repudiation of racist mythologies served the interests of black women as well as black men: “Her meticulously documented findings would not only challenge the assumption of rape—which also exonerated black women to a significant extent—but also included findings about the lynching of black women, as well as their sexual exploitation at the hands of whites. It was black women who needed protection, Wells insisted, as ‘the rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, still continued without reproof from church, state, or press,’ thus changing their representation to that of victims” (565, emphasis added). But what exactly is the value of victim status that it should have been desired, and how has it affected black women writers’ ability to represent their black female subjects as historic(al) casualties and survivors? Having examined some of the different depictions of violence in the work of women writers of the Harlem Renaissance, I would answer that black women writers found in their articulations of pain a way to counter the negative implications of the black “superwoman” myth that prevailed




as much during the Harlem Renaissance as it does today; by writing of black women’s pain and historical victimization, these authors deconstructed the outward semblance of strength that has marked black women’s ongoing resistance to their brutalization in a violently racist and sexist society. The texts examined in this chapter reveal a determination among women writers of the Harlem Renaissance to balance the myth and reality of their stolid endurance of suffering with evidence of the rationale behind their actions, including their ability to reason and make the best choices for their lives, even in the face of violence and extreme societal pressure. It is important to recognize that victimhood does not automatically preclude the possibility of positive agency; for black women, it has meant the opportunity to admit and articulate their pain without censure or shame, a chance to expose their wounded flesh as an act of healing and restitution, a taking back of the terms that have defined their pain and degradation. Most important, the writing/righting of violent episodes in black women’s history enables the black female subject to operate as a conscious agent, one who is aware of her past and the wounds that are no longer visible upon her skin but that are inflicted endlessly by a system of oppression that reveals itself only in subtle, symbolic substitutions. To recognize and name this “new” torture in its altered form, black women must recall their memories of that initial moment of removal and trace a path back to the present, collecting and creating bodies of knowledge along the way that will replace the line of symbolic absence with what Spillers calls “a revised public discourse [that] would both undo and reveal.”13 Notes 1. In Eradicating This Evil, Mary Jane Brown notes that “the proportionately few female victims were usually lynched for murder or for their connection to a male suspect—some being lynched as a surrogate for a fugitive male relative who was the actual target of the lynchers’ manhunt, while others were lynched along with an alleged male criminal as an accomplice to his supposed crimes” (3). 2. For accounts of the lynching of black women see Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. 3. See White’s account of the lynching of Mary Turner in Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, pp. 26–27.



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4. Part of the testimony of Essic Harris, given to the Senate Committee investigating the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. Taken from Brown 112n8. Brown argues that violence against women is “one of the most neglected areas of Reconstruction history and of African American history in general.” She further contends that the persistent perception that black women resisted white domination with impunity reflects “both the emphasis on lynching as the major form of racial violence, and the limited historical attention [given] to the black women who were lynched (at least fifteen between 1889 and 1898; at least seventy-six between 1882 and 1927).” 5. Laura S. Brown explains how the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual defines trauma in a problematic way: “‘Human experience’ as referred to in our diagnostic manuals, and as the subject for much of the important writing on trauma, often means ‘male human experience’ or, at the least, an experience common to both women and men. The range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual in the lives of men of the dominant class; white, young, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, Christian men. Trauma is thus that which disrupts these particular human lives, but no other. War and genocide, which are the work of men and male-dominated culture, are agreed-upon traumas; so are natural disasters, vehicle crashes, boats sinking in the freezing ocean” (101). 6. A text like Ronald Takaki’s Violence in the Black Imagination misleads the reader, for it is limited to a consideration of violent fantasies in the work of three black male authors: Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany. Not surprisingly, the preface begins with a quotation from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and though Takaki defines his project as a necessary attempt “to explore the ways blacks as individuals perceived and experienced their oppression,” his myopic focus on the experiences and perceptions of black men obscures the specificity of gender as a determining factor in the ways violence is both enacted and imagined (10). In American Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman acknowledges the fact that black women “were routinely lynched, burned, and summarily mutilated,” and argues that “a critical exploration of lynching that does not foreground the violences leveled against black female bodies might seem to risk, at the very least, political irresponsibility” (84). Wiegman’s analysis, however, is primarily concerned with the discursive coupling of black men and white women, and in some ways her approach ultimately replicates “the mechanisms through which the corporeal violence attending black female bodies has been expulsed from public view” (77). 7. To assist in the navigation of the “black holes” in African American women’s history, black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins argues for a methodological model that incorporates the nontraditional media through which black women have documented their lives. In her essay “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,” Collins insists upon the significance of such sources, noting they often reveal perspectives and motivations central to an understanding of black women’s valuation and experience




8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

of motherhood and sexuality. She urges scholars to consider “personal narratives, autobiographical statements, poetry, fiction, and other personalized statements,” which have been used by women of color “to express self-defined standpoints” on areas of experience that have been treated inadequately using only traditional forms of inquiry. “Such knowledge,” asserts Collins, “reflects the authentic standpoint of subordinated groups”; when these sources are positioned strategically in the “center” of research projects rather than at the periphery, and are supplemented with “statistics, historical material, and other knowledge produced to justify the interests of ruling elites,” scholarship will begin to produce “new themes and angles of vision” (60). See Angela Davis, “The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood,” in Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 3–29. In The Other Reconstruction, Ericka Miller similarly concludes that “Harris’s work says little about the relationship between white men and white women and less about that between white and black women in the lynching dynamic. Her study privileges works on mob violence by African American male writers, which . . . accounts for this absence” (xvii). It is not always apparent when or how women have participated in what historian Darlene Clark Hine has termed “a culture of dissemblance,” whereby “the behavior and attitudes of Black women . . . created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.” See Clark. Fellow historian Deborah Gray White jointly argues that black women not only have maintained a public silence on their sexuality, but have privately destroyed material evidence (diaries, letters, etc.) in which they recorded their thoughts and experiences of a sexuality that was (and still is) highly publicized and dehumanized. See White. I believe Bonner intends “softness” here to represent a woman’s capacity for tenderness and compassion, and not (only) a stereotypical female docility. Bonner addresses the paradoxical nature of the “softness” that was required of her gender in the short story “The Prison-Bound”; the male character in the story defines the quality thus: “Women were not supposed to be so soft. Supposed to be soft, but not so soft you could knock a rock through them without their saying a word” (67). The husband in this story is unable to appreciate his wife’s silence (which is assumed to avoid offending him) because it changes the level of her vulnerability from one that is desirable to one that is despicable. Although Blue Blood is not included in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching, one could argue that it nonetheless qualifies as “a lynching drama.” According to the editor, Judith L. Stephens, in such a play “the threat or occurrence of a lynching, past or present, has major impact on the dramatic action” (3).

Works Cited Bonner, Marita. Frye Street and Environs. Ed. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Print.



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Brown, Elsa Barkely. “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom.” The Black Public Sphere. Ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 111–50. Print. Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 100–112. Print. Brown, Mary Jane. Eradicating This Evil: Women in the American Anti-Lynching Movement, 1892–1940. New York: Garland, 2000. Print. Carby, Hazel. “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 301–315. Print. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood.” Representations of Motherhood. Ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994. 56–74. Print. Cullen, Countee. “Heritage.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1311–14. Print. Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. Print. Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral. 1928. Boston: Beacon, 1990. Print. Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Print. Giddings, Paula. “The Last Taboo.” Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon, 1992. 441–65. Print. Ginzburg, Ralph. 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore: Black Classic, 1988. Print. Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Harris, Trudier. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Print. Hine, Darlene Clark. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.4 (1989): 916–21. Print. Johnson, Georgia Douglas. Blue Blood. Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950. Ed. Kathy A. Perkins. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Print. Miller, Ericka M. The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Wells-Barnett, Grimke, and Larsen. New York: Garland, 1995. Print. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. 1919. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Print. Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Print.




Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. “Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.” Black American Literature Forum 21.1–2 (Spring– Summer 1987): 165–83. Print. Spillers, Hortense. “Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 249–61. Print. ———. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics (Summer 1987): 65–81. Print. Takaki, Ronald T. Violence in the Black Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. White, Deborah Gray. “Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women’s History.” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 237–42. Print. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Print.



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“You . . . You Remind Me of . . .” A Black Feminist’s Rejection of the White Imagination Maria del Guadalupe Davidson

As interposed opaque bodies, black females partially emerge from doublepaned obscurity because of their “reflection” of others—generally whites or black males. Even in space devoid of light, mainstream Americans see the distorted figure of the “mammy” who in combative stance transforms into her stereotypical antithesis, the “sapphire.” Projecting either inferiority, maternal domesticity, or animalistic hostility, American culture inscribes upon black females their appearance as shadows . . . These projections haunt the public and private lives of black females. —Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representation of Black Feminist Politics

T

he title of this afterword—“You . . . You Remind Me of . . .”—refers to all the times that I have been told that I “remind” someone, usually a white person, of Whoopi Goldberg. These occasions range from “friendly” conversations at a grocery store (always started by the other) where the person (usually white) simply “must” mention that, “by the way, you really look like . . .” to loud comments at the mall, “Hey, there goes Whoopi Goldberg.” Perhaps the most disturbing occurrences were those times when my body felt as though it was no longer my own. White people (strangers) have touched me and told



Afterword

me that I look like Whoopi Goldberg, as if in touching me they were touching her and as if I no longer looked like but rather was her—in cases like this my being is not only disrupted but also put in jeopardy. To illustrate this point, a crazed white “frat” boy once grabbed and shook me, while screaming, “Whoopi, Whoopi, Whoopi!” into my face. After his assault ended, he pushed me aside and walked off laughing with his friends. He has probably never thought of that moment again, but I have relived it several times. It was as if in shaking me he was trying to physically dislodge Lupe and substitute his version of Whoopi in her place. I have even been called Whoopi in my professional life, when, during a lecture in class, a white male student observed, “You know, you really look like Whoopi Goldberg.” These recurrent experiences have led me to wonder about what they really mean and why they continue to happen, not just to me but to many others as well. When white people say that I remind them of Whoopi Goldberg, what is it that they think they know about me? Is it really the perception of a physical similarity or not? And how does their claim to know me affect their encounter with me, and more broadly, how does it affect their encounter with black women as a whole? Is it an attempt to reach out and build a relationship or to disrupt power relations and close off a relationship? Is it an expression of admiration or an attempt to reduce me to the level of the comedic? Since these repeated experiences, which, again, I do not believe to be unique to me, have surprised, perplexed, and frustrated me for many years, here I want to examine them more deeply and understand what role they serve in the white imagination. A number of black male scholars, such as Frantz Fanon, Charles Johnson, and George Yancy, have theorized the white gaze and its impact on the black male body in a way that combines the personal and the theoretical. In their work, they draw from their own experiences to show how their own embodiment as black and as male is affected by the white gaze.1 From these experiences, they go on to show how, in spite of who they are or what they do, the white gaze ensnares them. Johnson, in “A Phenomenology of the Black Body” for instance, focuses on the change that occurs when he enters a bar filled with white customers. While he may have entered the bar pondering intellectual problems in logic, the customers’ gazes return him to his embodiment and the characteristics associated with it in the white imagination, such as violence, virility, savagery, etc. In a similar vein, Yancy has described what he terms the “elevator effect.” This refers to his entrance onto an



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elevator, and his realization that a white female occupant “sees” him and moves away as if to make room for him. In reality, however, this occurs because the white woman on the elevator has not been conditioned to see that he is well dressed and headed to work but that he is a threat. Here Yancy observes, “The corporeal integrity of my Black body undergoes an onslaught as the white imaginary, which centuries of white hegemony have structured and shaped, ruminates over my dark flesh and vomits me out in a form not in accordance with how I see myself. From the context of my lived experience, I feel external . . . to my body, delivered and sealed in white lies” (2). The underlying structure of these experiences, as they show, is one in which the white imagination assumes the position of the norm, while the black body is assigned the status of a problem, or a deviation from the norm. “The Black body,” as Yancy observes, has been “historically marked, disciplined, and scripted and materially, psychologically, and morally invested in order to ensure both white supremacy and the illusory construction of the white subject” (1). But while much can be learned from the experiences of black men and their efforts to understand them, still their experiences are not my experiences, and their voice does not represent the black female experience. This becomes apparent, for instance, in Charles Johnson’s 1993 postscript to “A Phenomenology of the Black Body,” where he provides a litany of words used to describe the black male body including: “Negro beast,” “irresponsible,” and “stupid.” He then goes on to observe that none of these words is associated with the black female body: “In an amazing and revolutionary feat of cultural reconstruction, contemporary black women have been made dominant the profile of the female body as, first and foremost, spiritual: a communal-body of politically progressive, long suffering women who are responsible, hard-working and compassionate, who support each other in all ways, protect and nurture their children and live meaningful lives without black male assistance” (233). Now, based on my own embodied experience as a black female, Johnson’s claim about black women comes as quite a surprise. In my own experiences and those of other black females, the white gaze returns our blackness and femaleness to us in a way that is no less distorted, no less unrecognizable, and no less negated than for the black male body. The young white male who verbally, physically, and psychologically assaulted me did not call me “long suffering,” “hard working,” or “compassionate”—he called me “Whoopi.” So, in what follows, I will provide the black female counterpoint to the excellent



“You . . . You Remind Me of . . .” 193

work done by recent black male scholars and show that similar, though different, difficulties are encountered in the black female experience, namely the white imagination and its construction of that experience. Through the framework provided by Patricia Hill Collins’s account of “controlling images,” I will show that the white imagination suffers from a fundamental blindness with regard to black women. The white imagination, I will argue, is unable to see the black woman as an individual; instead it typically sees black women through the lenses of certain general “images” or “archetypes.” These “archetypes”—presently embodied in media celebrities like Oprah, Whoopi Goldberg, or New York2—come to represent the entirety of the black female experience. Collins’s discussion of “controlling images” helps us to appreciate that what goes on here is not so much a perceptual failure as a failure of the imagination, leading the individual lives and experiences of real black women to be erased from the white imagination. Here the status of black women within the white imagination parallels the status of black men described above. The construction of black female identity, like that of black male identity, is the product of a one-way street in which the white imagination uncritically creates and identifies a problem of its own making. Once this role of “controlling images” is better understood, the trajectory of black feminism will be directed toward the tasks of resisting the images imposed on us by the white imagination and of finding ways to reimagine and give voice to the radical plurality of the black female experience. Images That Control

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins’s brilliant analysis of “controlling images” explains the status of black women in the white imagination as paradoxically invisible and yet hypervisible at the same time. Black women, placed under “controlling images,” become invisible because they are no longer known as individuals but as general types or images. Yet through these very same images, it is also the case that black women become hypervisible. That is to say that “controlling images” render black female existence entirely transparent to white society, thereby making it possible for white men and women to claim full knowledge of the black female experience—an experience that is not their own. Importantly, this type of knowledge does not serve only to construct an image or understanding of black female existence; it also translates into power. In this context, Hortense Spillers has observed,




“Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches,’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ . . . or ‘Black Woman at the Podium.’ I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” (65). What Spillers, like Collins, adroitly perceives is that black women are a problem that “would have to be invented” by white society. That is to say that such images of black women are necessary to the continued functioning of white society. In order for white society to perceive itself as the norm, then black society must be perceived as deviant from the norm. As such, “controlling images” become tools to control black women socially, economically, and psychologically. Images of this kind are thus not value neutral; to the contrary, they are constructed by white society in order to perpetuate white dominance and black subservience. In what follows, this insight will be developed through an examination of four dominant controlling images identified by Collins: the Mammy, the Matriarch, the Welfare Mother, and the Jezebel. The Mammy, with her unusually large breasts and round glowing face, dresses in clothing that signifies work, not play. She is epitomized by actress Hattie McDaniel, who is most often remembered for her portrayal of “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind. During most of her career (which ended too soon due to breast cancer), McDaniel went on to play the dramatic role of the black servant to many white families in movies including In This Our Life (1942), The Male Animal (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944). The image of the happy black servant who dutifully cares for her white family more than she does her own, as Phil Patton explains, has a specific social function: “Mammy’s legend was created in answer to critics of slavery and Jim Crow; her reality was to become an ambivalent, often haunting register of the complexities of guilt and love white Americans felt. The mythology was created, according to scholars, before the Civil War, as a Southern rebuttal to Northern charges of sexual predation on black women—she was a counterbalance to the octoroon mistress” (78). The icon of the mammy, Patton adds, was created by “white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attacks from the North” (78). What is perhaps most interesting here is Patton’s claim that the Mammy figure operates as the counterbalance to black women of mixed racial lineage, since Mammy’s




physical characteristics render her undesirable as a sexual object. In the attempt to desexualize black women, it is clear that the image of both the Mammy and the octoroon are exploited. They play key roles in the larger social narrative constructed by the white imagination, where the octoroon is the object of sexual exploitation and the dark-skinned, sexless Mammy is the servant. In an effort to understand the normative function of the Mammy image, Collins explains that the Mammy image really exists to justify the economic exploitation of black women in domestic labor. The Mammy who dutifully serves her white family establishes the “normative yardstick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior” (72). In the white imagination, good black women were domestics who loved their “white family” better than their own family, assuming that they had families of their own. As such, the “mammy symbolizes the dominant group’s perceptions of the ideal Black female relationship to elite white male power” (Collins 72). The image of the black woman at work, while reinforcing the white exploitation of black women’s labor, also has a negative impact on the psyche of black women, leading them to internalize their role as servants to white society. Collins argues that black women can internalize this “controlling image” so deeply that they unwittingly transmit it to the black community, and in so doing, “potentially become conduits for perpetuating racial oppression” (73).3 For Collins, the Mammy image exists in order to show black women that the safest way to live in white society is in servitude to white power. While the Mammy is enshrined in white imagination as a black female who is compliant to white rule, the Matriarch is the antitype who, according to Collins, “symbolizes the bad Black mother” (75). The Matriarch is typically a single mother who works outside the home in order to support her own family (note that her attention is on the support of her family and not on the white family). She is commonly criticized for not sustaining a traditional home. Thus, her children’s inadequate performance in school is a direct result of her lack of “supervision.” Collins goes on to describe the Matriarch in the following terms: “As overly aggressive, unfeminine women, Black matriarchs allegedly emasculate their lovers and husbands. These men, understandably, either desert their partners or refuse to marry the mothers of their children” (75). In “Green-eyed Monsters of the Slavocracy: Jealous Mistress in Two Slave Narratives,” Minrose C. Gwin helps to extend this point further. For Gwin, it is perplexing that although black women have been traditionally barred from participating in what she calls




“The Cult of True Womanhood,” black women are still judged by its standards (42). Black women who assume the primary role as head of household usually are still judged by the false belief that women should be in the home. In such a case, the proverbial cards are “always stacked against” black women. If they stay home their children starve, but if they work they are absent from their children’s lives. In both cases, they are accused of being uncaring mothers. The “controlling image” of the Matriarch, like the Mammy image, is constructed to accomplish a specific social function: to ensure white dominance and the continued subordination of black women (Collins 75–78). As Collins explains, the image of the Matriarch is used to control black women who do not (or cannot) serve white society. Collins further unmasks the true purpose of the Matriarch image, when she observes that the Matriarch is really a negative stigma applied to women who “dared to violate the image of the submissive, hard-working servant” (75). As a result, it is not surprising that false and imperiling testimonies, such as the Moynihan Report,4 fail to see the causal impact of white society with regard to negative phenomena plaguing the black community, such as undereducation, high rates of poverty, and the continued ghettoization of black families. The Matriarch image covers over white society’s causal role in these negative phenomena and constructs a system of repressive knowledge, where these social failures are attributed to the personal failures of the Matriarch. In this way, Collins goes on to explain, “Those AfricanAmericans who remain poor cause their own victimization . . . Using images of bad Black mothers to explain Black economic disadvantage links gender ideology to explanations for extreme distributions of wealth that characterize American capitalism” (76). The third “controlling image” discussed by Collins is that of the “breeder woman” or today’s welfare mother. During enslavement, Collins suggests that the controlling image of the breeder woman “portrayed Black women as more suitable for having children than white women.” This image places the status of black women on par with livestock and provided justification for “interference in the reproductive rights of enslaved Africans.” Enslaved black women were prized for their fertility. “Slave owners wanted enslaved Africans to ‘breed,’” Collins writes, “because every slave child born represented a valuable unit of property, another unit of labor, and, if female, the prospects for more slaves” (78). In addition to the link between black female fertility and the institution of slavery, Dorothy Roberts’s book Killing the Black Body




further adds to this account by showing the wrath that infertile black women faced under that institution (26–27). While black fertility was prized during slavery—both as a source of profit and as a means of perpetuating the slavocracy—it came to be demonized afterward, most notably in the “controlling image” of the Welfare Mother. According to Collins, the image of the Welfare Mother is of an overly fertile black woman who is “content to sit around and collect welfare, shunning work and passing on her bad values to her offspring” (79). Without the institution of slavery, white society no longer has a use for this single woman.5 Consequently, she is now blamed for placing an undue burden on the welfare system. The truth of the matter, however, points in another direction. The American welfare system was introduced in the early twentieth century. Although working black people have contributed to this system since its inception, they were not allowed to collect welfare in any significant way until the 1960s.6 Since it is clearly a mistake to blame black women for the collapse of the welfare system, Collins rightly observes that “controlling image” of the Welfare Mother really serves to “stigmatize” the black woman as “the cause of her own poverty and that of African-American communities shifts the angle of vision away from structural sources of poverty and blames the victims themselves” (80). In so doing, the Welfare Mother takes the blame for a broken system that she did not create and of which she is not sole beneficiary. The final controlling image invoked by Collins is the “Jezebel.” The Jezebel is a sexually wanton or “sexually aggressive” woman (81). Deriving from the time of enslavement, the controlling image of the Jezebel depicts the black woman as hypersexual. This image, like the previous ones, also has a specific social function in white society: it serves to justify the sexual exploitation of black women by white men. Although white men may commit atrocious acts of sexual misconduct, the Jezebel image displaces the cause of their misconduct so that the black woman’s hypersexuality takes the blame for the misconduct of white men. Collins goes on to explain that that the Jezebel image reinforces reproductive control over black women. It was believed that since black women are so sexually wanton, they would also be extremely fertile. With this claim, Collins shows that the four “controlling images” of black women described above are all connected in the sense that they construct black female sexuality. Collins observes: “For example, the mammy . . . is a desexed individual . . . typically portrayed as overweight, dark, and with characteristically African features—in brief, as an unsuitable sexual




partner for white men. The matriarch represents the sexually aggressive woman . . . she refuses to be passive and thus is stigmatized . . . the welfare mother represents a woman of low morals and uncontrollable sexuality . . . Taken together, these four prevailing interpretations of Black womanhood form the nexus of elite white male interpretations of Black female sexuality and fertility” (84). Ranging from complete desexualization to hypersexualization, these controlling images construct white society’s perception of black women and their sexuality. Such images, as we have noted, do not serve primarily to understand the nature of black women, instead they are designed to construct black women as a problem for white society and to reinforce the dominance of white society. These social problems, as we have also noted, are constructed by the white imagination to serve a specific social function, namely, to ensure the continued dominance of white society. The Relics of Controlling Images

It is important to note that Collins’s “controlling images” are not just relics of the past. Instead they are, for example, perpetuated in the media today, and their direct analogues can be seen in black female celebrities today. These media images of black females provide a way of “framing” the black female experience for the audience. Framing can be defined as a process of “culling a few elements of perceived reality and assembling a narrative that highlights connections among them to promote a particular interpretation” (Campbell, Giannio, China, and Harris 20). The viewing audience thus participates in cultural tourism; it observes the other yet remains internal to its own culture. Such frames operate “as tools for media to promote hegemonic values, or the ideologies of the dominant culture” (Campbell, Giannio, China, and Harris 20). If indeed this is the case, then it points to the importance of being critically aware of the underlying social function of media images and their potential for perpetuating distorted images of black women. Dionne P. Stephens and April L. Few echo this point: “The socio-historical frameworks of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender embedded within sexual images highlight the distinctive identity process unique to African American women. Remnants of the Jezebel, Mammy, Welfare Mother, and Matriarch images remain, as exemplified by the similar, yet more sexually explicit images of the Diva, the Gold Digger, the Freak, the Dyke, the Gangster Bitch, the Sister Savior, the Earth Mother, and the Baby Mama sexual images” (252). Ultimately, this examination of




Collins’s controlling images will help us to think more critically about the images of black females in the media today. When those images turn out to be false or distorted, Collins helps us to realize that this is not just due to misunderstanding but rather forms part of a broader effort to confine and control the agency of black women in a white dominated society. In a very lively online discussion titled “Show Me the Mammy” on theblackactor.com, the question posed was, “Who is our modern day mammy? Or . . . who are our modern day mammies?” The participants on this site named several actresses including the comic Mo-Nique, Sherri Shepherd, Queen Latifah, and Oprah Winfrey (around whom much of the discussion centered). Oprah, for example, might be seen as the Mammy figure who gives advice to predominantly white viewers about everything from relationships to cleaning products. Like Mammy, she struggles with her weight, is dark skinned and childless, and displays great concern for the well-being of other people’s children. Many of the participants rightly gave Oprah credit for being a smart businesswoman who understands how to work her audience and make a profit. Nevertheless, as one respondent put it, “Oprah is a mammy because of the way she acts towards white women. Oprah always goes out of her way NEVER to upset her white female audience. Doesn’t anyone notice this? Mammy isn’t just about being overweight and being black. The stereotype of mammy is also the attitude of not offending whites and bending to their concerns” (theblackactor.com). If Oprah bends to the concerns of whites, then it might also be reasonable to assume that those whites to whom she bends find Oprah’s persona familiar, and due to this familiarity they might well find Oprah’s persona comforting. Might white feelings about Oprah also be extended to black women who “look like Oprah”? Tarshia L. Stanley in her article “The Specter of Oprah Winfrey” speaks broadly to both of these issues when she writes: “The language associated with the mammy serving the needs of a dominant white society resonates in the public commentary that surrounds Winfrey. And it does so in ways that black female spectators find troubling.” In response to a recent study showing that white viewers “felt comfortable with Oprah Winfrey as they would a friend and found her to be a natural, downto-earth person,” Stanley makes the connection to the mammy image clear: “For the black female spectator already harboring ambivalent feelings about Winfrey, the words ‘natural’ and ‘down-to-earth’ set off alarms, because this is the same language used to describe the mammy




in literature, advertising, and visual media since the mid-nineteenth century” (41). If Stanley’s analysis is right, this suggests that Oprah’s popularity with white viewers results, at least in part, from the fact that she occupies a well-established position within the white imagination. The same points could be made, if time permitted, with regard to Collins’s other controlling images and their present-day embodiment in celebrities such as Lil’ Kim, New York, and others.7 I am concerned for black women with dynamic personalities, who aren’t afraid to get a little “folksy” not because it plays well to those around them but because of who they are. These sistahs run the risk of being likened to Oprah (without the cash flow). Due to white society’s inability to see black women in their radical plurality, the realness and individuality of these women may be lost. The critique of controlling images must continue because white society refuses to call black women by their own name, refuses to see us as irreducible, refuses to see us as agents—and we must continue to refuse to accept this, and this refusal begins with analysis. What then is happening in the all-too-common experiences in which a white person identifies a black female with one of these celebrity images, saying, “You remind me of . . .” or “You look just like . . .”? The above analysis suggests that the (mis)identification of individual black women with media celebrities or the grouping of them in a single category—“all black women look alike”—is not a benign (mis)perception of a physical resemblance; instead it operates as an instance of power-knowledge. Thus what on the surface seems like a statement of knowledge or identification—“you remind me of ”—also contains an underlying illocutionary force. This means that the statement “you remind me of . . .” does not just have a truth-value but also a powervalue, which is used by the white imagination to exert power over interpersonal relations with black women. By identifying a black woman with a media icon, the white imagination neutralizes the individuality of black women. These media icons, as we have shown, replicate historically conditioned perceptions of black women by white society. For instance, when a white person identifies me as Whoopi Goldberg, he or she does not see or recognize the individuality of my black body but rather a preestablished type that frames the white encounter with me. My voice, my individual position, my lived experience are rendered inconsequential. If the white imagination has internalized images of the black body as dangerous or threatening, then controlling images can work to make me more approachable and less threatening. In some cases, the white




interlocutor might like Whoopi Goldberg. She makes him or her laugh and feel good. Seeing my supposed likeness to her might neutralize the threatening or mysterious aspect of my own body. The white interlocutor perhaps then feels more comfortable in approaching me and in expressing an interest in me (or, heaven forbid, my hair). Although such images may in some cases foster interaction between black and white people, they can also be corrosive to interaction. Such transfers are not as benign as the white imagination would like to believe, as if they were as benign as a transfer, say, from an individual tree to the concept of a tree in general. Instead, they enable the white imagination to claim possession and mastery over a foreign experience that is not its own and, in some cases, to rationalize its own misconduct toward them. Instead, these transfers harbor the potential for violence against the other. When, in the middle of a lecture, the white male student commented that I remind him of Whoopi Goldberg, this is not simply a case of (mis)identification. It is rather an effort to disrupt and to challenge the power relations of the classroom, specifically, a calling into question of the authority of a black woman to teach a white male. His expression sought to restore the dialectic of white male rationality and dominance and black female irrationality and subservience that is firmly established in the white imagination. In such encounters, my body and experience come back to me from the white imagination in a way that is distorted and violated. This has, at times, led me to doubt myself . . . led me to bow my head in shame . . . led me to become hyperaware of my black body as it waits for the next white person to say that I look like Whoopi Goldberg . . . led me to cry. In response to these experiences, what should I do? Charles Johnson states: “Once I am so one-sidedly seen, I have several options open to me on the level of consciousness” (230). Should I become the angry black woman and tell him to shut the hell up (thereby reinforcing another stereotype)? Should I use it as a teaching moment to challenge his viewpoint on black female identity (risking the possibility of being labeled irrational or oversensitive)? Or should I just give him a penetrating look, smile curtly, and then proceed to ignore his dumb ass? I don’t have an answer to any of these questions, other than to say that I am tempted to do all of these things.





In conclusion, if the analysis of “controlling images” discussed throughout this afterword is correct, then it not only leads to a better understanding of how the white imagination constructs black female identity but also indicates an important direction for future work in black feminism. “Controlling images,” as we have shown, reduce black women to general types and use these general types to rationalize the continued oppression of black women. Due to their awareness of the role that controlling images play in erasing the experiences of individual black women, it is understandable that black feminists would be reluctant to talk about the black female experience, as if there were one, essential experience. Carole Boyce Davies, for instance, argues that there is no unanimity among black women writers. Rejecting the association between black women writers and the United States, Davies observes, “If we see Black women’s subjectivity as a migratory subjectivity existing in multiple locations, then we can see how their work, their presences traverse all of the geographical/national boundaries instituted to keep our dislocations in place” (4). Like Davies, bell hooks also insists on the multiplicity of black identity. For instance, when she challenges black nationalist representations of the black struggle, hooks turns to postmodernism to offer an alternative interpretation of black identity that emphasizes the plurality of black identities. hooks, like Davies, Collins, and many other black feminist thinkers, is deeply concerned by the way in which “controlling images” pretend to tell the story of black women’s existence, while at the same time preventing black women from telling their own narratives. hooks is especially critical of stereotypes that posit black women as “strong” or “superhuman” because such stereotypes ignore the ways in which black women are “likely to be victimized in this society” (15). Yet, while we should reject essentialist notions of black female identity, black feminists must also be careful not to deny that black women do share similar experiences. After all, how many of us haven’t been told by whites that we remind them of Oprah or Whoopi Goldberg or some other media image? Clearly, there are specific experiences shared by black women, even if these experiences do not, in themselves, create an essence of black female existence. Many, if not all, black women face institutional racism, segregation in personal relationships with nonblack women, and the negative effects of “controlling images” in the mainstream media. Even though these experiences are widely shared, this does not entail that all black women are the same. Instead, as Collins suggests, it may be more



Directions in Black Feminism: Beyond “Familiar” Faces

accurate to say that “a Black women’s collective standpoint does exist, one characterized by the tensions that accrue to different responses to common challenges” (28, emphasis original). If “controlling images” continue to function as a means to control black women by providing white society with a reductive understanding of black women and thereby limiting the agency of black women, then clearly black feminism must work to combat these “controlling images.” But critical analysis of these images alone may not be enough. In addition to the critical work of unmasking these media images, black feminists must also give voice positively—through multiple means such as literature, film, and art—to the plurality and dynamism of the black female experience. Notes 1. Frantz Fanon, I would argue, recognizes this quite profoundly in Black Skin, White Mask. Speaking about the negative impact of the white imagination on the black image, Fanon writes, “The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes. I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim” (140). Fanon is not waiting for his true self but the self imagined by whites, and this self, though it stands in contrast to his actual being, nevertheless comes to define him. 2. New York, whose real name is Tiffany Pollard, came to prominence on the VH1 “reality show” The Flavor of Love. She has since gone on to star in her own VH1 shows I Love New York and New York Goes to Work. 3. As an aside, this paradoxical relationship is also seen in black enslaved women who were forced to perpetuate the very system that oppressed them by bringing children into an institution that would also forcibly enslave them—thus the enslavement of blacks was designed to exist in perpetuity. 4. Collins writes that the Moynihan Report “contends that slavery destroyed Black families by creating reversed roles for men and women. Black family structures are seen as being deviant because they challenge the patriarchal assumption underpinning the construct of the ideal family. Moreover, the absence of Black patriarchy is used as evidence for Black cultural inferiority. Black women’s failure to conform to the cult of true womanhood can be identified as one fundamental source of Black cultural deficiency” (77). 5. A woman being the head of a household without a husband, according to Collins, violates the cardinal tenet of Eurocentric masculinist thought: “She is a woman alone.” As a result, her mistreatment serves to reinforce the dominant ideology of Eurocentric masculinist thought: “that a woman’s true worth and financial security should occur through heterosexual marriage” (79).





Works Cited Campbell, Shannon B., Steven S. Giannio, Chrystal R. China, and Christopher S. Harris. “I Love New York: Does New York Love Me?” Journal of International Women’s Studies 10.2 (2008): 20–28. Print. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin/White Mask. New York: Grove, 1967. Print. Gwin, Minrose C. “Green-Eyed Monsters of the Slavocracy: Jealous Mistresses in Two Slave Narratives.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 39–52. Print. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South End, 2000. Print. James, Joy. Shadowboxing: Representation of Black Feminist Politics. New York: Palgrave, 1999. Print. Johnson, Charles. “A Phenomenology of the Black Body.” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 223–35. Print. Patton, Phil. “Mammy, Her Life and Times.” American Heritage 44 (1993): 77–87. Print. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Print. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (1987): 64–81. Print. Stanley, Tashia L. “The Specter of Oprah Winfrey: Critical Black Female Spectatorship.” The Oprah Phenomenon. Ed. Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2007. 35–50. Print. Stephens, Dionne P., and April L. Few. “The Effects of Images on African American Women in Hip Hop on Early Adolescents’ Attitudes toward Physical Attractiveness and Interpersonal Relationships.” Sex Roles 56 (2007): 251–64. Print. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print.



6. For a detailed discussion on this issue, see Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 202–45. 7. For an interesting discussion on the character New York, see Campbell, Giannio, China, and Harris.




Julie Burrell is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. She earned her master’s degree at West Virginia University. Her research interests include American drama, African American literature, and performance studies. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Race: Toward a Revolutionary Construction of Black Identity (University of Valencia Press, 2006) and, with George Yancy, is coeditor of the book Critical Perspectives on bell hooks (Routledge, 2009). Zetta Elliott earned her PhD in American Studies from New York University. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, and her plays have been staged in Chicago, Cleveland, and New York. She is the author of an award-winning picture book, Bird (Lee & Low, 2008) and a young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight (AmazonEncore, 2010). Michelle L. Filling received her PhD from the University of Delaware and is currently Assistant Professor of English at Cabrini College. She recently coauthored an article in Lore on literature scholars in writing program administration. Her scholarship and teaching focus on beauty culture, African American literature, women’s studies, and social justice. Maria J. Guzman received her MA in Art History from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and is an Instructor of Art History at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and at Westwood College. She is a Board Member at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, California, and is a contributing writer at Gender Across Borders, an international feminist blog. Her research interests include American and popular culture studies, feminist and queer theory, and performance art studies.



Contributors

Carol E. Henderson is Associate Director of Black American Studies and Associate Professor of English and Black American Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark campus. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals and critical volumes, she is the author of Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (University of Missouri Press, 2002) and the editor of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays (Peter Lang, 2006) and America and the Black Body (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). She is the recipient of two Excellence in Teaching Awards and has received numerous honors for her work in mentoring and advising students and junior colleagues on the University of Delaware campus. Stacie Selmon McCormick is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is a Presidential Fellow and editorial associate for The Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her scholarship focuses on black women’s literature, representations of the body, and scarring. Ana Nunes completed her PhD at University College, Dublin. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. She has published several articles on African American women writers. Her recent publications include a volume coedited with Carolina AmadorMoreno, The Representation of the Spoken Mode in Fiction: How Authors Write How People Talk (Mellen, 2009) She is the author of a forthcoming monograph on African American women writers’ historical fiction, which will be published by Palgrave in 2011. Venetria K. Patton is Director of African American Studies and Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. She is the author of Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction (SUNY Press, 2000), the coeditor of Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (Rutgers University Press, 2001), and editor of Teaching American Literature: Background Readings (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006). While at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, she won two teaching awards: the Annis Chaiken Sorensen Distinguished Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities and the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award.



208 Contributors

Contributors 209

Kaila Adia Story is an assistant professor and currently holds the Audre Lorde Chair in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. Her essay “Performing Venus: From Hottentot to Video Vixen: The Historical Legacy of Black Female Body Commodification” is published as a chapter in the anthology Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop & Feminism (Parker Publishing LLC, 2007), and her essay “There’s No Place like ‘Home’: Mining the Theoretical Terrain of Black Women’s Studies, Black Queer Studies and Black Studies” is published in the Journal of Pan-African Studies (2008).



Debra A. Powell-Wright is a published poet and a founding member of In the Company of Poets, an African American female spoken-word ensemble in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The recipient of several poetry awards, Debra’s work has been published in such venues as BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review and Essence magazine.




abjection and the abject, 3, 13, 15–16, 124–25, 129, 133–35, 139–41, 148, 153, 155 Addiss, Stephen, 88 Africa, 4, 8–10, 15, 25–40, 42n2, 46, 52–53, 60–61, 65–68, 70–73, 74n1, 110, 113–14, 163–70, 177 African art, 88, 90 Agassiz, Louis, 32–35 Alexander, Karen, 48 America Play, The (Parks), 126, 132, 134, 136, 139 American Anatomies (Wiegman), 187n6 Anderson, Carolyn, 80 Anderson, Lisa, 132 androgyny, 10–11, 13–14, 79–88, 92n2, 147–49, 156–57, 158n2 Angry Black Woman stereotype, 2, 118–19, 202. See also Sapphire stereotype archetypes. See controlling images; stereotypes Auerhahn, Nanette, 64–65, 70 Aunt Jemima stereotype, 127–28. See also Mammy stereotype/ controlling image Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid), 14, 146–47, 152–58, 159n8, 159–60n10 Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family/Ghosts (Pindell), 45, 49 Baartman, Saartjie (Sarah), 4, 89, 96, 123–26, 128, 142n2

Babbage, Eddie, 81 Baker, Houston, 56, 71 Baker, Josephine, 89, 140 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 124, 131–37, 140 Baraka, Amiri, 112 Bearden, Romare, 56 beauty culture, 11, 95–106, 106–7n2, 107–8n7 Beavers, Louise, 112 Beloved (Morrison), 51, 54, 159n7 Bennett, Michael, 17n5, 107n3 Bernard, Louise, 142n9 Bhabha, Homi, 55, 140 Bishop, Robert Charles, 52 Black Arts Movement, 12, 103, 106n1 “black feminine body,” 9, 23, 41–42, 42n1 Black Feminist Thought (Collins), 17n1, 194 “Black is beautiful” concept, 103–5, 106n1 Black Power movement, 11, 99–100, 105–6, 116, 125, 128, 132 Black Skin, White Mask (Fanon), 204n1 Black Venus. See Baker, Josephine Blue Blood (Johnson), 15, 166, 178–80, 183, 188n12 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 49 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Butler), 38, 148 Bois, Yve-Alain, 49 Bolling v. Sharpe, 100 Bonetti, Kay, 145–46 Bonner, Marita, 15, 165–66, 172–77, 183, 188n11



Index

Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Doyle), 59 Bosch, Hieronymus, 125 Bowles, Juliette, 126–28, 132 Boy George, 82 Brent, Linda. See Jacobs, Harriet Brooks-Bertram, Peggy, 17 Brown v. Board of Education, 100 Brown, Elsa Barkely, 187n4 Brown, Laura S., 64, 167–68, 187n5 Brown, Mary Jane, 186n1 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 49 Buffon, Georges, 30 Bulletproof Diva (Jones), 112, 115 Burns, Ben, 97, 107n4 Burrell, Julie, 12–13 Butler, Judith, 38–39, 42n3, 81, 83–85, 148 Butler, Octavia, 59, 72, 74 Byrd, Ayana, 18n5 Campbell, Shannon, 199, 205n7 Carby, Hazel, 180 Carlos, John, 96 Carpio, Glenda R., 125, 136, 140, 142n7 Carroll, Noël, 139 Caruth, Cathy, 64, 66 Cassuto, Leonard, 131 Césaire, Aimé, 153, 154 Charles, Michael Ray, 126–27 Chave, Anna C., 90–91 China, Chrystal R., 199, 205n7 Clairol magazine ads, 99–103, 107n5, 108n8 Clark Hine, Darlene, 188n10 Cleary, Stephen, 110–11 Clinton, Catherine, 112 Clotel (Wells Brown), 158n1 Cocker, Jarvis, 79, 87 Cohen Shabot, Sara, 139 Coleman, Arica, 3 Collins, Patricia Hill, 17n1, 187–88n7, 194–201, 203–4, 204n4–5

colonialism, 29, 38, 88–89, 131, 140–41, 153–55 commodification of the black female body, 8, 89, 104, 108n11, 123, 126 Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American, The (Reid-Pharr), 158n1 Consume (Walker), 139 controlling images, 2, 16, 17n1, 194–204. See also stereotypes Cooper, Anna Julia, 172, 180 Coral Cities series (Gallagher), 9, 46–51, 55 Corregidora (Jones), 59–60 Countryman, Matthew, 108n9 Craft, Ellen, 158n1 Cullen, Countee, 15, 163–64 cultural memory, 45, 70–72 Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Eyerman), 73–74 Cuvier, Georges, 4, 32 Daily Kos, The (blog), 1 Dash, Michael, 157–58 Davidson, Basil, 26 Davidson, Maria del Guadalupe, 16, 18 Davies, Carole Boyce, 203 Davis, Angela, 119, 188n8 DeFerrari, Guillermina, 159n9 DeJongh, James, 160n11 Delany, Martin, 187n6 D’haen, Theo L., 55–56 Diamond, Lydia R., 142n2 diaspora, 53–56 Dickerson, Vanessa D., 17n5 Donald, Gerald, 47 Douglass, Frederick, 187n6 Dove ad campaign, 108n10 Dowd, Maureen, 2 Doyle, Laura, 8, 59, 65 Drexciya, 9, 47 dualism, Cartesian, 24–25 Duboin, 66, 69–71



212 Index

Index 213

Eagleton, Terry, 54 Ebony (magazine), 49, 80, 95, 97–105, 107n3, 107n5, 108n8 Eli, Quinn, 119 Elizabeth, Princess of Toro, 105 Elliott, Zetta, 12, 14–16 Ellison, Ralph, 56, 187n6 End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, The (Walker), 129–30, 134–35, 140–41 Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress (Walker), 134 Enlightenment, 28–29 Eradicating This Evil (Brown), 186n1 Essence (magazine), 100, 107n6 Eurythmics, The, 82 Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Harris), 168 Eyerman, Ron, 73–74, 127, 141 Fame (Jones), 81 Family Pictures (Weems), 50 Fanon, Frantz, 192, 204n1 fashion, 10, 80–88, 95, 101, 105–6 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 15, 165–66, 181, 183–85 fertility, 141n7, 198–99 Few, April L., 199 Filling, Michelle L., 10–11 Flavin, David, 91 “For Women” (Kweli), 12, 110–18 Foster, Hal, 49 Four Women (Simone), 12, 109–11, 119 Frampton, Edith, 158n3 Fried, Michael, 90, 92

Funkadelic, 17n4. See also Parliament Gaffney, Karen, 160n11 Gallagher, Ellen, 9, 46–56, 142n8 gangster film genre, 159n6 Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch), 125 Garrett, Shawn-Marie, 124 Gass, Joanne, 160n10 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 127–28, 137 Gianno, Steven S., 199, 205n7 Giddings, Paula, 170, 185 Gilman, Sander, 38 Ginzburg, Ralph, 186n2 Go Tell Michelle (Nevergold Seals and Brooks-Bertram), 17 Goldberg, Whoopi, 16, 191–92, 194, 201–3 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 136, 195 Good Housekeeping (magazine), 97–102, 107n3, 107n5, 108n8 Goodell, William, 176 Goude, Jean-Paul, 80–81, 88–89, 92n3 Gould, Stephen Jay, 30–37 Gray, Herman S., 127, 132 Gross, David, 111 Grosz, Elizabeth, 24 grotesque, the. See stereotypical grotesque Guarded Conditions (Simpson), 50–51 Gunning, Sandra, 171–72 Guzman, Maria J., 10–11 Hall, Stuart, 56 Hammonds, Evelyn, 91 Hammons, David, 57n1 Harlem Renaissance, 14–15, 165–66, 177, 186. See also Bonner, Marita; Fauset, Jessie Redmon; Johnson, Georgia Douglas Harris, Christopher S., 199, 205n7 Harris, Essic, 187n4 Harris, Trudier, 168–71, 188n9 Henderson, Carol, 8, 60, 65–67, 69, 160n11



DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn, 136, 140, 142n3 duplicate advertising, 97–102, 107n5, 108n8 Duran Duran, 82 Dyer, Leonidus, 177

214 Index

I Put a Spell on You (Simone and Cleary), 110 Imitation of Life (film), 112, 115 Imus, Don, 41 In the Blood (Parks), 134 In This Our Life (film), 195 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 126, 129, 137 International Review of African American Art (IRAAA), The (IRAAA), 123, 126–27 Introduction to African Religion (Mbiti), 61 inverse articulation, 97–98, 104–5 Invisible Man (Ellison), 187n6 Jackson, Ronald, 3 Jacobs, Harriet, 3, 126, 129, 136 James, Joy, 191 Jazz Singer, The (film), 112 Jezebel stereotype/controlling image, 111, 116–17, 195–99 Jim Crow era, 45, 111–19, 173, 195 Johnson, Charles, 192–93, 202 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 15 Johnson, John, 97–98, 103, 107n3, 165–66, 178–80, 183–84 Jolson, Al, 112 Jones, Gayl, 59, 74 Jones, Grace, 10–11, 79–92, 92n3 Jones, Hettie, 112 Jones, Lisa, 112–13, 115 Jones, Vanessa E., 118 Jordan, Winthrop, 25–26, 42n2

Judd, Donald, 86, 91 Kershaw, Miriam, 86, 89–90, 92n3 Kiely, Robert, 63 Killing the Black Body (Roberts), 198, 205n6, 17–18n5 Kincaid, Jamaica, 13–14, 145–47, 152–58, 158n1, 159n2–3 Kindred (Butler), 59, 72 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 96 Kitchen Table (Weems), 50 Knight, Christopher, 141n4 Krauss, Rosalind, 49 Kristeva, Julia, 133, 137, 157 Ku Klux Klan, 1–2, 132, 187n4 Kweli, Talib, 10, 12, 109–19 Lady Gaga, 80 Larsen, Nella, 158–59n1 Laub, Dori, 64–65, 70 Lawrence, Jacob, 184 Lee, Spike, 123–24 Liberation of Aunt Jemima, The (Saar), 127–28 Life (magazine), 95, 97–98, 100, 107n3 Lil’ Kim, 201 Lipman, Jean, 52 Long, Lisa, 61–62, 67, 72–73 Lorde, Audre, 18n7, 117, 174 lynching, 15, 133, 166–68, 170–71, 177–78, 180, 183–85, 186n1–2, 187n3–4, 187n6, 188n9, 188n12 Madonna, 82 magic realism, 55–56 Male Animal, The (film), 195 Mammy stereotype/controlling image, 3–4, 111–15, 127–29, 141n7, 191, 195–201 Manigault-Stallworth, Omarosa, 118 Mansbridge, Joanna, 160n11 Many Strong and Beautiful Voices (Eli), 119 Massive Attack, 79 Matriarch controlling image, 195–99



heteronormativity, 148 Hobson, Janell, 17–18n5 Hodgkinson, Will, 89 Holland, Sharon Patricia, 3–7, 17n4, 18n6, 151–52, 155, 159n5–7 hooks, bell, 4, 6, 17–18n5, 109, 119, 203 Hopkins, Pauline, 172, 180 Hottentot Venus. See Baartman, Saartjie (Sarah) Hume, David, 31

Maybelline magazine ads, 102 Mbiti, John S., 61, 74n1 McAfee, Noëlle, 137 McCarther, Avis, 105 McCormick, Stacie Selmon, 12–14 McDowell, Deborah, 8, 54, 59 McKay, 147 menstruation, 28 Mercer, Kobena, 49, 52–53 Middle Passage, 9, 45, 47–53, 56, 62, 65–66, 169. See also slavery Miller, Ericka, 188n9 Miller, Greg, 135 Minh-Ha, Trinh, 14, 146–47, 153, 159n2 Minimalism, 86–92 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 55 Mismeasure of Men (Gould), 36–37 Mo-Nique, 200 monogenism, 30, 32, 35 Morris, David, 141n6 Morris, Kathryn, 153, 155 Morris, Robert, 86 Morrison, Toni, 7, 13–14, 49–55, 65–66, 145–58, 158n1, 158n2–3, 159n4, 160n9 Morton, Samuel George, 36 Moulton, Tom, 81 Moynihan Report (1965), 50, 197, 204n4 mulatto. See tragic mulatto stereotype Murdoch, H. Adlai, 159n3 Muse (Jones), 81 Nadinola magazine ads, 103–4, 108n9 Naison, Mark, 116 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 166, 177 navel-erasing, 14, 145–58 Nelson, Charmaine A., 1, 10, 12–13, 17–18n5 Nelson, Laura, 166 Nevergold Seals, Barbara, 19

New York (Tiffany Pollard), 194, 201, 204n2, 205n7 New Yorker, The (magazine), 2, 118–19 Newkirk, Pamela, 123 Njoya, Nimu, 160n11 Normal, The, 81 Norment, Lynn, 80 Nunes, Ana, 7, 9, 66–67, 71–72 Nyong’o, Tavia, 135 O’Grady, Lorraine, 37–38 Obama, Barack, 2, 95–96 Obama, Michelle, 1–4, 16–17, 17n3, 95–96, 105–6, 118–19, 159n3 objectification of the black female body, 13, 46, 50, 91, 123–26 Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity (O’Grady), 37 Omolade, Barbara, 8 One Citizen, 1–2 One Man Show (Jones), 10–11, 79–92 “One Nation Under Groove,” 4–5 Oppenheimer, Margaret, 88 Oyewumi, Oyeronke, 24–25 Pacteau, Francette, 84–85, 92n2 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 13, 123–28, 131–40, 142n1–2, 142n9 Parliament , 4–5, 17n4 passing for white, 114–16, 158–59n1, 181–84 Past in Ruins, The (Gross), 111 Patterson, Orlando, 65–66, 151 Patton, Phil, 195–96 Patton, Sharon F., 46, 56 Patton, Venetria K., 7–8, 59 performativity, 13, 38–39, 80, 83, 148 Perry, Phyllis Alesia, 8, 59–63, 66–74, 74n2 Peterson, Carla, 3, 23 Pierce-Baker, Charlotte, 71 Pindell, Howardena, 9, 45–46, 49 Pittman, Gene, 129 Pittman, Lari, 142n4



Index 215

216 Index

Queen Bee (Carpio), 142n7 Queen Latifah, 200 queer identity and theory, 10, 42n3, 79, 82–86, 142n4 Race Matters (West), 18n8 Race, Rape, and Lynching (Gunning), 171–72 racism, 3–4, 7, 12–15, 17n1, 29, 36, 38, 49–52, 83, 98, 109–10, 114–19, 123, 125–31, 138–40, 166, 172–78, 185–86 Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivit, 4, 7, 17n4, 18n6, 151 Rap on Rap: Straight-Up Talk on HipHop Culture (Naison), 116 rape, 15, 114–17, 136, 154, 166–72, 177–81, 185 Raymond, Yasmil, 131, 135 re-commodification, 123 Reconstruction, 15, 167, 178, 187n4 Reid-Pharr, Robert, 158n1, 160n11 re-objectification, 123, 126 Revlon magazine ads, 104–5 Rhianna, 80 Ringgold, Faith, 57n1 Roberts, Diane, 136 Roberts, Dorothy, 17–18n5, 198, 205n6

Ruas, Charles, 145 Rubin, William Stanley, 88 Saar, Betye, 127–29, 132, 134 Sanders, Madelyn, 105 Sapphire stereotype, 2–4, 111, 117–18, 191, 195. See also Angry Black Woman stereotype Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (Henderson), 60 Scarry, Elaine, 3 Scheman, Naomi, 24 Schiebinger, Londa, 24, 27–29 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 83–84 Serres, Etienne, 30–31 sexual abuse, 116, 125, 136, 159n8. See also rape Shadd Cary, Mary Ann, 3 Shamberg, Michael, 81 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 17–18n5 Shepherd, Sherri, 200 Shohat, Ella, 55 Sievers, Stefanie, 68, 73 Simone, Nina, 10, 12, 109–19 Simpson, Lorna, 50–51 Sims, Naomi, 105 Since You Went Away (film), 195 Slattery, Dennis, 67 slave ships, 45–48, 51, 53, 55 slavery: African males’ experience of, 164 asymmetry and, 37–42 cultural trauma of, 127–28 escape from, 118, 158n1 female body in, 5, 59–74 gender role reversal and, 204n4 the grotesque and, 113 history of, 26–35, 45–48, 159n5 Mammy stereotype and, 112, 195 Middle Passage and, 9, 45, 47–53, 56, 62, 65–66, 169 Morrison on, 145, 149 pregnancy during, 9, 47, 118 scars of, 8, 59–74



Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Morrison), 65 Plum Bun (Fauset), 15, 166, 181–85 Pollard, Tiffany. See New York (Tiffany Pollard) polygenism, 30–36 Portfolio (Jones), 81 postcolonialism, 92n3, 140, 146–47, 153, 157 postmodernism, 9, 47, 92n3, 123, 133, 203 Powell-Wright, Debra A., 10, 12, 111, 114, 116–18 Primitivism, 11, 86–90

s ocial death and, 151–2 symbolic substitution and, 165–82, 186 Welfare Mother controlling image and, 197–98 Slavery! Slavery! (Walker), 137–38 Sly & Robbie, 81 Smith, Robert, 90 Smith, Tommie, 96 Solomon, Akiba, 17–18n5 Song of Solomon (Morrison), 14, 146–58, 159n4, 160n9 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (Wells), 170–71 Spillers, Hortense, 5–6, 14, 17n2, 18n5–6, 47, 164–66, 169, 176–77, 179, 181, 183, 186, 195 Stam, Robert, 55 Stanley, Tarshia L., 200–201 Stella, Frank, 86 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 27, 35–36 Stephens, Dionne P., 199 Stephens, Judith L., 188n12 stereotypes: Angry Black Woman, 2, 118–19, 202 Aunt Jemima, 127–28 Jezebel, 111, 116–17, 195–99 Mammy, 3–4, 111–15, 127–29, 141n7, 191, 195–201 Sapphire, 2–4, 111, 117–18, 191, 195 tragic mulatto, 111, 114–16 See also controlling images stereotypical grotesque, 13, 49–52, 57n1–2, 123–41 Stewart, Michelle Pagni, 159n3 Stigmata (Perry), 59–74 Stinson, James, 47 Stokstad, Marilyn, 88 Stoler, Ann, 38 Story, Kaila Adia, 7, 9–10 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 112, 129, 136 Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching (Perkins and Stephens), 188n12 symbolic substitutions, 15, 165–66, 176, 181, 186

Takaki, Ronald, 187n6 Tate, Greg, 47 Thomas, Darnella, 104–5 Thomas, Hank Willis, 142n8 tragic mulatto stereotype, 111, 114–16 Train of Thought (Kweli), 12 Truth, Sojourner, 3 Turner, Mary, 187n3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 112, 129, 136 Van der Hart, Onno, 68 Van der Kolk, Bessel, 68 Venus (Parks), 123–26, 131–41 Vice, Sue, 132–33, 137 Vickroy, Laurie, 66–67, 69, 73 victimization, 131, 166–67, 185–86, 186n1, 197–98, 203 Violence in the Black Imagination (Takaki), 187n6 Virginia’s Lynch Mob (Walker), 132–33 Voice From the South, A (Cooper), 180 Voyeurs de Venus (Diamond), 142n2 Walker, Aida Overton, 158–59n1 Walker, Kara, 13, 123–40, 142n1, 142n3–4, 142n7–8 Walker, Karen, 57n2 Walker, Susannah, 104, 108n11 Walker King, Debra, 142n6 Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, 17–18n5 Walters, Barry, 86 Warhol, Andy, 79 Warner, Sara L., 128, 140 Warren, Elizabeth V., 52 Water Bearer, The (Weems), 50 Watery Ecstatic series (Gallagher), 51–52 Watkins, 160n9 Webb, Barbara, 160n11 Weems, Carrie Mae, 50 Welfare Mother controlling image, 195, 197–99 Wells Brown, William, 158n1, 187n5



Index 217

218 Index Winfrey, Oprah, 3, 194, 200–201, 203 Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality, and Feminism (Minh-Ha), 146–47 World’s Exposition (Walker), 130–31 Wright, Beryl J., 50–51 Yancy, George, 192–93 Young, Jean, 123–24, 126 Zipes, Jack, 111



Wells, Ida B., 170–72, 180, 185 West, Cornel, 16, 18n8 White, Deborah Gray, 188n10 White, E. Frances, 17–18n5 White, Walter, 166, 187n3 whiteness, 26, 28–29, 46, 101, 103, 105, 106n2, 107n7, 131, 182–84 Wiegman, Robyn, 187n6 Williams, Carla, 17n5, 29, 38–39 Williams, Summer L., 141n2 Willis, Deborah, 17n5, 29, 38–39

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