Intimate Antagonisms: Re-Imagining the Scene of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

Abstract

I introduce the concept of “intimate antagonisms” to examine literary representations of intraracial conflict. The radical unity of Black politics exacerbates the painful injuries inflicted by intraracial abuses in the microsocial sphere. At the same time, however, the radical disunity enunciated in critiques of intracommunal rejection and repudiation serve as key sites for redefining racial resistance and augmenting understanding of racial justice for the entire group by calling attention to the ways that intraracial acts of aggression and abandonment reproduce rather than resist the injustices of racism. I explore these questions in Gayl Jones’s neoslave narrative Corregidora. Emboldened by Civil Rights and Black Power struggles, the neoslave narrative questions the relationships between literacy and liberation and between liberation and freedom. Addressing intimate conflict in Black life is central to the meaning of resistance and struggle in these narratives. Because the exercise of racism positions Black people as the witnesses and symbols of each other’s oppression, I demonstrate how the depictions of “intimate antagonisms” create the opportunity to examine how intraracial conflicts impact Black political consciousness. I argue that depictions of intra-group relations represent critical sites where the realities of racist subordination are negotiated, arbitrated, inculcated, and resisted.