Abstract
ABSTRACT The paper traces the trope of partitioning and de-partitioning in Sherley Anne Williams’s neo-slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) to argue that the richly structured, polyvocal narrative reveals a political impetus: it privileges the protagonist’s voice and vision in order to comment on the representational paradigm endemic to mainstream cultural representations of the American South. Dessa Rose challenges those well-known, white-authored representations of the South that either emit or distort the Black perspective. Its structure, especially its initial reliance on the monocular, fragmenting white gaze and its subsequent disruption of this mode of seeing ultimately allow Dessa to emerge as the only reliable narrator, thus amplifying – what is more, enabling – the eventual catharsis while producing a complexly fragmented vision of the South.
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