“Forever Perverse, Queer, Askew”: Notes on Slavery and Resistance in African American Studies

Abstract

At a recent meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), a host of plenaries and concurrent sessions theorized the politics of Emancipation as nonevent and the practice of historiography in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. Held in October 2013 in Jacksonville, Florida, the 98th Annual Meeting of ASALH attracted a record number of attendees, despite obstacles associated with the shutdown of the federal government, closures at a local airport, and increased mobilization in opposition to the state's controversial “Stand Your Ground” statutes. Indeed, rushing into one conference room a few minutes late, having just presented earlier that day myself, I was struck by the sheer number of scholars in the room, the palpable enthusiasm to get things under way. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't have been too surprised. Taking as its subject Shonda Rhimes's hit television show Scandal – the Season 3 premiere of which had aired only the night before – the panel stoked a range of interests: race and popular culture, matters of sexuality and desire, even the impeccable style of protagonist and professional “fixer” Olivia Pope (played by actress Kerry Washington). Titled “Crashing the Ol’ Boys Club: Interrogating Power and Representation in ABC's Scandal,” the discussion sutured fans and critics alike into a collective accounting for the effects of a nation's apparent seduction by the labyrinthine exploits of Pope, head of the foremost crisis-management firm in Washington, DC, and her paramour, white, married, Republican US President Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III (played by Tony Goldwyn).