Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto

Abstract

Reviewed by: Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto Danielle Bainbridge (bio) Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020, 264 pp., $26.95 paperback, $99.95 cloth. In her latest monograph, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto theorizes "uncertainty" and "vulnerability" to problematize the mire of issues surrounding Black women's early celebrity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A central inquiry regards the question of Black women political actors' rights as they navigated the complex world of early celebrity culture. Pinto's approach is both familiar and destabilizing, as she draws into conversation diverse sources on the topic of Black women's embodied performances and the history of subjectivity and agency as it collides with their nascent celebrity. She weaves together a diverse array of resources on rights, performance, and celebrity such as Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection, Daphne Brooks' Bodies in Dissent, Uri McMillan's Embodied Avatars, Patricia Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights and Joseph Roach's It. Pinto argues that Black women's transgressive performances of personhood in public life were not simply attempts at engaging in larger freedom struggles nor were they solely a performance strategy or a question of civic engagement. Rather, the acts of public appearance were central to the questions of rights and vulnerability for many early celebrities. Pinto is invested in the category of rights as central to the phenomena of celebrity for the "infamous" Black women subjects in her study and how their performances resist the over-simplification of categories like "freedom" and "unfreedom." Pinto asserts early in the text that, "Black women celebrities are also at the cultural, conceptual, and representational center of debates about rights, humanity, and freedom" (4), rather than relegating them to the margins of our attention and theoretical concerns in the debates about rights. By demonstrating the subtle negotiations of Black women celebrities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pinto makes the case for how her text "reimagines these celebrity genealogies both as they critically intersect with the formation of human rights discourse around individual civil rights and entitlements, and as they represent a variety of black women's experiences as embodied political subjects of modernity who engage with pleasure, risk, violence, desire, ambition, and vulnerability" (3, 4). Additionally, she lays claim to the term "infamous" to describe the subjects in her monograph rather than relying purely on the rubrics of "celebrity" because "it also includes the disapproving public attention of fame, as well as a legal valence in its history as describing a state of rightlessness [End Page 365] (Paik 2016), a deprivation of right as legal 'consequence' (OED 2017)" (9). By reimagining and applying what she terms "corrective history" to the lives of her subjects (Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta), Pinto centers their archival remnants and continued infamy in the debates about rights and Western modernity. If it feels like the categories that Pinto is working with (celebrity, rights, modernity, history, infamy) are larger than life, that's because they match the larger-than-life personal narratives and archives of the women in her text. Chapter one focuses on the lives and many archival and contemporary representations of Black poet Phillis Wheatley. Pinto situates Wheatley, her life, and her multiple legacies at the center of the early American project of Western human rights. Her analysis claims Wheatley as both a celebrity and a political actor whose assertions of literacy (in the face of claims that Africans were incapable of the act) and the creation of art rendered her at once highly visible and extremely important, therefore ". . . tying her to blackness and rights, positively and negatively" (26). In chapter two, we are introduced (or rather reintroduced) to the infamous story of Sally Hemings, who is most famously remembered through her relationship with/to founding father Thomas Jefferson. By evaluating the ". . . contradiction between the notion that 'all men are created equal' and the decades-long, scandalous (even in its own time) entanglement," Pinto centers Hemings...