Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery SubjectsDuke University Press, 7 sep 2010 - 272 pagina's Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist. |
Inhoudsopgave
1 | |
One Gayl Joness Corregidora and Reading the Days That Were Pages of Hysteria | 27 |
Redemption Subjectification and the Problem of Liberation | 67 |
Three Isaac Juliens The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life | 111 |
Four Kara Walkers Monstrous Intimacies | 153 |
Notes | 189 |
223 | |
243 | |
Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen
African American appears attempts Attendant Baartman bear become beginning blood body called chapter child claim coloured Conservator continue Corregidora critics cultural daughter desire disavowed Douglass effects enslaved evidence experience father feel figure forced freedom give Gram hand Head Head’s human intimacy Julien KhoiSan kind live look Mama mammy Margaret mark Maru Masarwa master means monstrous mother museum narrative never oppressed painting particular past person pleasure political position possible post-slavery present produced question race racial refusal relation relationship remains repeats repetition representation repressed response says scene seems sexual shame slave slavery social South South Africa space speak story tell thing Thurmond tion trauma turn Ursa viewers violence visible Visitor Walker’s Washington-Williams whip witness woman women writes