Of Rape, Black Women and ‘Whitened’ Pudenda: Psychosexual Identity in the Ghanaian Neo-Slave Narrative

Reviewed by: Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic by Shatema Threadcraft Keisha Lindsay (bio) Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic by Shatema Thread-craft. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 207 pp., $38.39 hardcover. Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic is a groundbreaking text. Shatema Threadcraft demonstrates not only that black women experience intersecting race and gender-based oppression but also that how they do so is "embodied." By this, Threadcraft means that racism and patriarchy are coconstitutive in ways that severely limit black women's ability to "use the powers and capacities of the black female body freely and equally" (6). The tangible result of this disturbing reality, Threadcraft explains, is that black women experience a range of oppressions including, but not limited to, "coerced sterilizations," "racially biased child removal policies," and "systemic sexual violence as a weapon of racial terror" (8–9). Threadcraft further demonstrates that Platonic, Rawlsian, and other traditional conceptions of freedom and justice—as that which is material and is realized in the public sphere—neither recognize nor acknowledge the intersectional, intimate dimensions of black women's subordination. Intimate Justice is especially outstanding in three arenas. First, it provides a black feminist rereading of key moments in African American history. Thread-craft, in one such rereading, reveals that the race riots of the late 1890s and early 1900s were not about white hostility to black male soldiers or, more broadly, to many black males' "new status as agents of public authority" (78). The riots were also about racist whites' revolt against the many "newly liberated women [who] withdrew from the agricultural labor they had almost all performed within the plantation regime" and focused, instead, on caring for or "meeting the physical and emotional needs of the black body" (74). Threadcraft cites, as evidence, firsthand accounts of white male rioters' use of rape to coerce black women back to their "natural" role as servicers of whites' intimate desires, as well as fliers, produced by white male rioters, that demanded, "Negro women shall be employed by white persons" (72). Threadcraft reveals, second, that like "mainstream" political theorists, past and present black male scholars also ignore black women's embodied oppression at the crossroads of race and gender. The difficulty, Threadcraft [End Page 293] explains, is that these scholars' conceptualization of liberation focuses not on the intimate capacities associated with black women's subordination, but rather on "blacks' capacities for controlling their political and material environment" in the traditionally masculine public or "civic" sphere (27). One result is W. E. B. Du Bois's assumption that cultivating black people's capacity for reason—as opposed to, say, sexual autonomy—is most crucial in the struggle against racism. Another result is Tommie Shelby's failure to recognize that blacks in the "dark ghetto" are oppressed not only because of their "relegation to low-wage menial jobs within an advanced capitalist consumer society" (118), but also because many of them are victims of racist child protective services officers, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and other forms of intimate injustice. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Threadcraft uses black male theorists' silence regarding black women's intimate, intersecting oppression as a departure point for determining what an empowering, gender-expansive understanding of black liberation looks like. The answer, Threadcraft concludes, lies in melding Afro-Modern conceptions of freedom and justice—as the ability to participate in civic life and the radical redistribution of material goods, respectively—with a more comprehensive, feminist understanding of these terms. Threadcraft draws on the work of feminists Iris Young, Martha Nussbaum, and Nancy Hirschman to make the more specific case that black freedom and justice are attainable when black women can (1) exercise intimate capabilities—such as making emotional attachments and controlling the movement of their bodies—and (2) do so in social and cultural contexts in which they, rather than men, have the "final say over the meaning of [their] sexual, reproductive, and caretaking actions" (60). Intimate Justice poses two other important questions: (1) How do we recognize a black woman when we see her? And (2) how do we recognize black women's...

Neo-S(k)in TradeWhite Skin, Black Bodies in Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins (bio) How would they like us to make slaves of and hold them in cruel slavery, and murder them as they do us? —David Walker White myth making around the black female body is inextricably linked to the larger African diaspora, that space of rupture, dispersion, and displacement. The presence of white hegemony, the black female body as property, the pervasive phenomenon of sexual abuse, and the experience of trauma constitute significant motifs … that are indicative of the reality of black diasporic women's existential experiences. —George Yancy Responding to the question, "What sparked Blonde Roots?" Bernardine Evaristo explains, "I wracked my brains about how I could write about [the transatlantic slave trade] in a way that enabled people to see it afresh."1 The British novel combines current and historic realities; there are slave ships and minstrel shows but also subways ("Tube trains") and self-help books.2 The blending of old and new urges readers to consider how modern slavery exists and operates in a contemporary context, particularly the sociocultural hierarchies and economic infrastructures that support such oppressive systems. [End Page 1] Similar to the 1995 American film White Man's Burden, Blonde Roots interchanges the roles of blacks and whites in society, imagining a world where Europe (Europa) is the "Gray Continent" whose natives must work as slaves for the black oppressor in Aphrika, the UK of Great Ambossa, and the West Japanese Islands (i.e., Caribbean islands).3 In Evaristo's novel, the white female body occupies the position of the deviant, aberrant Other, a "role" historically held by blacks. Protagonist Doris Scagglethorpe (slave name Omorenomwara) and her fellow female slaves suffer at the hands of ruthless slave catchers, violent and abusive Ambossan slave masters, and cruel and constantly suspicious Ambossan mistresses. In Blonde Roots, everything is doubled; white is also black, the past is also the present, what is imagined is also real. The various doublings in the narrative, though primarily focused on the story of white Doris, serve to represent and underscore the complexities and contradictions of black invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility, particularly as it relates to black women who "are likely the most socially invisible in societies where poverty, blackness, and women historically mark the depths of powerlessness." David Theo Goldberg writes, "Constitutive or reflective of strategic relations, visibility and invisibility each can serve contextually as weapons, as a defensive or offensive strategy, as a mode of self-determination or denial of it."4 Evaristo uses Doris's textual visibility or presence (in lieu of a black protagonist) as a narrative strategy to retell black women's "unspeakable" slave experiences. Her whiteness also reminds readers of the power of white oppression with regards to its strategic efforts to deny or refuse to see black subjectivity. Other doublings serve a similar purpose in the novel: they remind us of an ugly past while exposing and denouncing contemporary global problems such as sex trafficking and modern-day slavery—issues that remain concealed from or ignored by the public eye. My title signifies on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) whose title speaks to Blonde Roots's racial inversions; Doris's supposed inferiority is due to her being a "Caucasoi," a race of people who suffer from "infantalism, aimlessness, laziness, cowardice, poor coordination, [and] moral degradation."5 In his pro-slavery pamphlet, The Flame: Reflections, Thoughts, Experiences & Sentiments Candid & Free on the True Nature of the Slave Trade Remarks on the Character & Customs of the Europanes & An Account (Modest & Truthful) of my Progression from Inauspicous Origins to the Highest Echelons of Civilized Society, Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I notes that "[b]eating the hide of a Caucasoi is more akin to beating the hide of a camel to make it go faster," a statement that equates "whyte" skin with animalistic traits historically assigned to black corporeality.6 Thus Doris's whyte skin barely masks her symbolic black body. Chela Sandoval writes that Fanon's metaphoric title "calls up, but also undoes," the very racial binary opposition that the metaphor also depends on in order...

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Black feminists promote decolonization as a strategy to recuperate Black women’s dignity and humanity from racist colonialist ideologies. In order to fully explore Black women’s emancipation, Black feminists have to explicitly consider how Black women break away from the ways in which thick Black female bodies have been defined by dominant white colonial cultures, and how Black women of different ethnicities engage in their own recovery of voluptuous Black female bodies. In this paper, I use a Black feminist intersectional lens to explore the ways in which Black Caribbean women recuperate thick Black female bodies from colonialist and racist ideologies. Specifically, using focus groups, I examine how these women participate in what I refer to as emancipatory thick body politics, discourses that challenge and resist the dehumanization of thick Black female bodies. Findings indicate that Black Caribbean women actively participate in decolonizing thick Black female bodies by forming sisterhood communities with other Black Caribbean women, re-defining womanhood, and engaging in transgressive interpretations of Christian doctrine.

The Black female body as a retrospective site of ecology holds an intimate connection to nurturing kinship of water to the Earth. Black women are the cornerstone of existence in relation to humanity. For hundreds of years, Black women in the United States of America were enslaved, raped, humiliated, dehumanized, and breastfed the babies of white slave masters. Becoming the pillars of community, the innate intellect, intuitive knowledge, and wisdom of Black women has saved countless lives, liberated souls, and filled spaces with joy. This chapter explores, expands, and examines the ecological, spiritual, and social relationships of the African American female body to water as nurturer, giver, and sustainer of life. The Black female body is transcendent, exploring the unique philosophical inquiry of American history with ancestral memory, spirituality, and extraordinary physical manifestation. This chapter provokes, invokes, and radicalizes our precious gift of the African American Black female body and water as fugitive, giver, and sustainer. Life is connected to the water. For centuries, Black women have recognized the value, importance, and relevance of water as spiritual, intellectual, social, ecological, and emotional contextualization of life force. Water is a basic human need.

Discussions of the coercion and abuse experienced by enslaved people in New World slave societies have tended to focus on violence. In many ways, this is how it should be: for enslaved people, experiencing or witnessing violence was indeed an everyday part of life. Nevertheless, violence inflicted by slaveholders on enslaved people did not take place in a vacuum: it was accompanied by, mediated through, and often preceded by abusive words. Yet while debates around negotiation, slave resistance and paternalism focus in detail on the cultural and discursive context of these relationships, discussions of violence tend to home in on their purely physical aspects.1 This article examines the context of violence in a society undergoing the transition from slavery to a post-slave society, by investigating the insulting words employed by plantation owners and managers in Jamaica, and the means by which enslaved people responded to them. It suggests that such words, in themselves and through their relationship to violent acts, played a central role in asserting and attempting to perpetuate the dominance of slave-owners and plantation managers over enslaved people. For some contemporary observers, insulting language served as a substitute for personal violence in situations where the latter had been de-legitimated. Benjamin McMahon, writing of the apprenticeship period in Jamaica (1834–38) when slaveholders lost the legal right to directly 'punish' their unfree workers, argued that, 'the overseers, as they could not flog and tear the flesh of their victims, constantly vented their spite in the most dreadfully abusive and obscene language, which always hurts the feelings of the negroes even more than corporal punishment'.2 While McMahon was probably correct in his assessment of the frustration of overseers deprived of the use of the lash, I suggest that rather than 'hurt the feelings' of apprentices in a manner that contrasts with the hurt of corporal punishment, the 'hurt' of such abusive language lay precisely in the threat of violence that always implicitly accompanied it, and thus in the fear that it produced. McMahon's claim is not gendered. The evidence I present in this article, however, suggests that the kind of language he refers to was primarily directed at women, and that its ability to insult consisted of sexualised and animalistic language. Through this language of insult, planters discursively fragmented women's bodies, denied them the status of 'real' women, and metaphorically reduced them to their genitalia or to animals. The misogyny of insulting language directed against enslaved and apprenticed women suggests that these women's specific experience of subordination is not adequately described by a focus on discrete acts of sexual violence, or analyses of the additional burden of domestic and reproductive labour imposed on them, but rather was intertwined with daily interactions among managers and enslaved/apprenticed people. Analysis of spoken language, even though frozen in the archives and no doubt distorted through the recording process, provides a point of connection between three aspects of power relations that differentiated women's experience from that of enslaved men. The historiography of women in slave societies has been centrally concerned with the exploitation of their labour, the exploitation of their reproductive capacity, and the sexual violence, including rape, routinely imposed on them. However, while many fine historians have provided detailed accounts of each of these dimensions of enslaved women's oppression, their analyses have rarely linked these elements together.3 It has proved difficult to move beyond an analytic framework that understands enslaved women as 'doubl[y] oppressed through production and reproduction', or through their status as both enslaved and female.4 Such a paradigm is problematic because it recognises enslaved women's lives as structured by gendered power only in relation to experiences that appear to be specifically female, such as reproduction and sexual violence, and implies that men's experiences were not organised through gender. This article focuses on the generalised culture of racist misogyny of plantation managers, as revealed through the archival traces of their use of insulting language, with the aim of developing a framework for understanding slavery and gender that recognises the pervasiveness of gendered power. Through sexualised insulting language, gendered domination and more specifically the threat of sexual violence was integrated into the totality of power relations in slave society, rather than isolated in discrete acts of rape or other forms of sexist oppression. The language of insult described here was used by managers in the context of disputes over work, health, family and other conflict-provoking aspects of daily life. It played a role in justifying, in the eyes of these managers, the sexual victimisation of enslaved women. Analysis of its content allows us to see everyday planter ideologies in action, in contrast with the writings of the plantocratic elite, which reflect the views of a minority of planters and were often produced for public consumption in the context of the debate over the abolition of slavery. The language of everyday relations of domination is difficult to access. While insults exchanged between near-status-equals are frequently repeated in courtrooms, those used in situations of extreme status difference such as slavery and apprenticeship are rarely preserved in archives.5 Powerful people can usually deal with insults from their social 'inferiors' without taking those who insult them to court, while recipients of insults from bosses, landlords, state officials and other powerful people can rarely afford to take the risk of prosecuting. As a result, historians have rarely analysed insults used by powerful to hurt and control their social inferiors. Perhaps the ubiquity of such behaviour renders it invisible. In order to circumvent this problem, this article makes use of the methods of microhistory, basing much of its argument on detailed analysis of a single small-scale case recorded in particularly rich detail, supplemented by additional examples. The goal of a microhistorical approach is not to find 'representative' cases, but rather to analyse in detail what can be gleaned from those exceptional cases that survive in archives, in order to provide insight into historical dynamics that cannot be observed at higher levels of abstraction.6 Enslaved women did not accept the male planter designation of their bodies as vile. They countered the planter language of insult in two ways. First, they responded in kind, turning managers' insults back on the insulter, although the precise content of the insults were different. In addition, they acted to redefine and reclaim their bodies, and to elaborate their own bodily practices of modesty and protection. In particular, enslaved and apprenticed women repeatedly claimed the right to define their own state of health, and thus when they were and were not fit to work. As the apprentice Susannah Stewart put it 'I told him I know my own pain and sickness, and if I wasn't sick, I wouldn't stop to take all the pulling and hauling from Busha'.7 Such claims were not a direct response to misogynist insult, but did have the effect of elaborating an alternative view of the black female body. By presenting their bodies as whole and claiming the power of their own bodily knowledge, enslaved and apprenticed women contradicted the hostile discourse that disaggregated their bodies into a collection of parts. The evidence discussed here comes from a particular place, Jamaica, and mainly from a specific time, the early nineteenth century, including the transitional apprenticeship period (1834–38) through which slavery was ended in most British colonies. Jamaica in the first third of the nineteenth century was a society organised around intensive slaveholding and sugar production. The vast majority of its population was enslaved. Approximately half of these enslaved people lived on sugar plantations, with most of the rest divided among properties devoted to stock-raising and growing other crops including coffee and pimento.8 Jamaican rural society was characterised by large plantations of more than fifty enslaved workers; Barry Higman has calculated that in 1832 almost 50 per cent of enslaved people in Jamaica lived in units of more than 150.9 By the time slavery ended in 1834, Africans and their descendants had developed complex networks of kin within and across these plantations. With the exception of domestic workers, enslaved women in rural Jamaica worked mainly in gangs as field hands. The majority of enslaved men also worked in the fields, but men also had access to a wider range of skilled occupations.10 Enslaved people also constructed their own economy, growing crops and raising livestock for consumption and for sale in Jamaica's markets.11 Jamaican slaveholding units were run as businesses, with a range of white managerial staff who either worked alongside resident proprietors or served under the attorneys who represented absentees.12 Relations between enslaved people and managers were complex, tense and personal. Enslaved workers had distinct preferences about styles of manager, and were often astute in playing off lower-level managers against government officials and attorneys.13 The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 produced an economic squeeze, with declining numbers of enslaved workers pressured to produce increasing amounts of export crops. There were contradictory pressures on managers and owners trying to make a profit under post-slave-trade conditions and enslaved workers trying to protect their autonomous time, bodily integrity and pace of work. These pressures produced frequent conflict in a context in which one group was socially and legally legitimated to use violence to enforce its will.14 Some slaveholders responded to these pressures by adopting an ameliorationist slaveholding model in which 'good management' would supposedly produce high rates of productivity, as recommended for instance by Thomas Roughley in his The Jamaica Planter's Guide.15 Abolitionist exposés and the grievances of enslaved workers suggest, however, that it was at least as common for planters to respond with bitterness and anger to increasing imperial efforts to control their management practices. Violence and the threat of violence continued to be a core part of everyday plantation life. The apprenticeship system that came into force in 1834 did not abolish unfree labour, but it did produce profound changes in the dynamics of plantation life.16 Under the new system, which was implemented in almost all the British slave colonies, chattel slavery was replaced by compulsory labour enforced not by the private punishment of the planter but on the authority of the state. Apprentices were required to work for 40 hours a week without pay, for their former owner. If they refused this labour they could be taken before a stipendiary magistrate – one of a new group of officials created to oversee apprenticeship – who was authorised to order their punishment by flogging (if male), imprisonment or additional labour. Apprentice-holders who illegally mistreated apprentices could be punished as well, but only by fines. The British government intended the system to last six years, but it produced such intense conflict that it was abolished in 1838. Apprenticeship was not merely slavery by another name; it did not simply bring out into the open conflicts that already existed during slavery. Rather, by reconfiguring the relationships between state, property holder and unfree labourer, it produced new areas of contestation. In particular for our purposes, slaveholders' loss of the right to directly punish their slaves (now apprentices), came into direct conflict with apprentices' increasing assertiveness as they tried to ensure that their new rights were worth more than the paper they were written on. One result was a great deal of anger and frustration on the part of managers. This may well mean that planters' verbal abuse of unfree workers took place more frequently during apprenticeship than during slavery. It is also possible, however, that the incidents discussed here were very like those that took place during slavery, but that the conditions of apprenticeship mean that these incidents were recorded while similar events from the period of slavery were not. For several reasons, we know more about day-to-day interactions between unfree workers and their managers during apprenticeship than we do about slavery itself. As has already been mentioned, the apprenticeship system involved the appointment of a number of stipendiary magistrates who were to enforce apprentices' labour and adjudicate conflicts between apprentices and apprentice-holders. Many conflicts that would not have been recorded during slavery were during apprenticeship aired before these officials, whose records thus provide a rich source of evidence about daily contestation on and off the estates.17 In addition, the intense interest of the abolitionist British public in the progress of the apprenticeship system led to the production of a number of abolitionist investigations of the colonies, characterised by the detailed recording of specific incidents.18 Thus while the conditions of apprenticeship may have led to more frequent exchanges of angry words, the language of insult itself is unlikely to have changed much since the end of slavery – and indeed I cite below some pre-1834 evidence that confirms the similarities. Thus, while most of the evidence in this article comes from the apprenticeship period, it provides insight into planter cultures during late slavery as well as during apprenticeship. The argument here is specific in terms of time, but has potential wider applicability. It is also specific in terms of place, but it seems likely that similar kinds of gendered abusive language, likewise connected to the threat and practice of violence, were used in other slave societies. Further research will be necessary to reveal the particularities of such languages of insult, but we might expect that, while they might differ to some extent according to the specific European cultures of the planters, the social context of gendered domination and subordination in slave societies would lead to similar patterns of insult and abuse across Atlantic slave societies. Sarah Williams, an enslaved woman, lived and worked on Content Hall Pen in the parish of St Elizabeth, in south-west Jamaica.19 The term 'Pen' suggests that the business of the property was cattle-raising, although it may also have cultivated one or more of the secondary crops, coffee, pimento and ginger.20 Williams's elderly mother, Tabitha Hewitt, was a cook and general domestic worker in the house of the estate's resident owner, Thomas Mason, who stipendiary magistrate William Oldrey described as a 'very rich man'.21 When Hewitt became sick, Mason refused to provide her with any medical care, something he also refused to the other enslaved people on his estates. Mason's denial of medical and social care was part of a pattern of refusal to provide enslaved workers with the means of subsistence: they also complained of a lack of clothing and provision grounds. Tabitha Hewitt's illness meant that she was unable to look after herself, and became dependent on the care provided by her children and grandchildren, who were only able to look after her when they were not required to work.22 As a result, her condition rapidly worsened as a result of her inability to prepare food for herself. She experienced an unnecessarily demeaning final illness, at times lying in her own excrement for lack of anyone to clean her. Tabitha Hewitt died early in August 1834, a matter of days after she ceased legally to be a slave. On her death, her daughter Sarah Williams and granddaughter Evelina Smith washed her body and dressed it but, rather than allow them to stay with the body, Thomas Mason ordered the two women to return to work. Testifying at an investigation into Mason's actions four months later, Williams reported that: I went to field, massa walked up and down in the field and told me 'that he heard me say that I was a strong woman, and he wished to have a try at me, that he would beat off twenty like me', … the expressions Massa made use of I am ashamed to speak before you sir. The investigating magistrates asked Williams to overcome her reticence and reveal the words used in detail, which she did: Massa say I was a stinking bumbo, he said I was a maggothy [sic] bumbo, he said if he had the will of me, he would run a red hot iron up my bumbo; he said that I stood like an old Spaniard Mule, he said that I was a woman and a man.23 According to Williams, this was only the beginning of Mason's stream of invective. The investigating magistrates asked her if Mason said 'any thing to you about diseasing the men'? The testimony continued as follows: 'Massa said that I was a poxy a—se, and that I pox'd up all the men'. Q: 'Have you ever had such a complaint'? 'Since I was born I never had such a disease'. As well as these sexualised insults, Mason Williams with physical violence should she to the to the stipendiary magistrate for the who by was the property on the of Hewitt's Massa … said that if I to him he would the down my and that he did not care if he went to and had to Mason's insulting language, in to his of Tabitha Hewitt and his general of the apprentices' – his refusal to them with the clothing that enslaved people had – led to on the property including and according to the rather of the who Hewitt's death, the plantation was in state of or when he Perhaps by the of her Williams put Mason's and reported his actions to the In Mason livestock from her and from many other apprentices on the 'the very that Oldrey came on the property Massa in spite because I went to to the took my it was because I took him before the apprentices at the investigation also to Mason's angry and abusive language. Evelina Smith reported that Mason to her should she stay with her body. Sarah Williams's and a former on the reported that Mason him a … a and for those … meant by the my Sarah Williams and Evelina testimony at the investigation revealed that Mason had to Williams and Smith as on other This provides the most detailed testimony about planters' languages of insult that I have It the racist misogyny of Jamaican planter and is worth in some I use the term with care, for this language not merely a of sexual difference and as is by the term even one of gendered as is by but a of women. Mason his anger with Williams through an directed at her that renders her body insults to Williams to her sexual her with her which he as an of and These an of and already by the use of the term The according to from the term and is only with obscene In contemporary Jamaican the term is insulting if directed against another Mason did not to Sarah Williams as an of In addition, he her with an of extreme sexual rape with a red hot on to her to a – an that is both and – and even more to into her by that she is both woman and a he to the of this time her sexual to and that she is and the source of pox'd up all the The misogyny of the language is but I would that this is a racist The is not in this case made although in some other incidents of abusive language, planters did use terms such as Nevertheless, Mason's language was implicitly racist in directed against a black woman in a context where such language could routinely be used against black women but was unlikely to have been used against a white in which a white use against a white woman, in the recorded in by in the of an enslaved woman, the the sexual relationships first with with and the of a by the who to be by It the me say him white for massa my my this as a general white women would be likely to be in this than would black women. The that in this case the white woman is the of the is and suggests that white women might be most likely to be to such insults in domestic and In addition, although the white woman in this is a her body is not as a means to insult is as or On its Sarah Williams's could be as an isolated and extreme us about the general culture within which enslaved and apprenticed people in Jamaica lived and However, other evidence suggests that similar language was In a case from slavery, an was of in his to force an enslaved woman, to have with When she continued to he to her to the on even though she was in According to a of the of to or not he should be said in the her stay the and be with another at which This evidence is and the precise words suggests a planter culture in which about enslaved women were used to relationships among white and British who the in to conditions during reported a case in which a woman was up illegally by a and stipendiary magistrates on planters' use of insulting language against apprenticed women. One claimed that apprentices' of their labour primarily the overseers own and the such as insulting the women and them and other likely to from that planters' of for the feelings of the people, and of the women in particular, by the frequent to them of language the most that could suggest, or the of common led to and other of that a apprentice against was against These general are as to the content of planter but evidence from particular cases confirms the first that the most frequently used insult was a term that in Sarah Williams's an enslaved domestic was as a by her the who had ordered her to prepare food that he he did not The insulting words were by physical both her and had her a apprentice a before her around the As in two cases women were The insult in this context two of it refers to the woman as an a common of insulting language The of the between and was powerful in a society that repeatedly discursively reduced enslaved people to – for in the of alongside in plantation or in the of for enslaved with also has sexual The whose of the is to a a or an from her while of insult in than which the up and the Thus in enslaved women planters a discourse of the black woman as both or and is Mason's use of a Jamaican term to Williams, rather than a The use of such a term by a white resident planter is that Jamaican if not was not to black but was in also used by white Mason was integrated into a culture in a that, for the investigating magistrate Oldrey could not have This suggests that, to use Mason's cultural with and of the and of Jamaican The use of an term by a white in the specific context of a language of insult confirms argument that is a process, but rather a of In most of the cases in which planters used insulting language, the insults were directed at women. in one case where the direct of the insult was the insult was through an directed at the mother, when William told his apprentice to and before him with a Thomas Mason a a and a but did not him While be many more cases of abusive language in the archives, and many more that were never this of the evidence suggests that planters' use of languages of insult was directed primarily at women, and that it was discursively directed at women's This evidence with what we know about languages of insult in where of women were personal and while those of men much likely to their own The insults from a context very from that of the of insults among that has the on The because the use of insulting language by powerful people to insult those over they have power – and in particular, by powerful men to insult women – is to the of insults among In the former the recipients of the abuse have much and the insulting language is more with it the potential for violence and other kinds of when by a with power over is it may be merely even when by without In understanding the dynamics of such we might on the work of legal with who have developed the of or such as and developed this in the context of a debate about legal on the that on the state to to is not a to the problem, but

Reviewed by: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers Tyler D. Parry They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii, 296. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-300-21866-4.) Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South is a groundbreaking work that reorients popular perceptions of slaveholding in American history. Typically viewed through a lens of southern white masculinity, slave owners are often envisioned as landowning white men who dominated chattel bondpeople. Though previous scholarship has occasionally recognized that some white southern women owned enslaved people, such women have often been portrayed as reluctant enslavers who either had to learn the business of enslaving or had to rely on a male relative to guide them. In either case, white men are popularly centered in both the historiography and the popular memory of U.S. slavery. Thankfully, Jones-Rogers shatters this myth with precision. Using an impressive collection of published and unpublished materials, she examines how white women enslavers not only owned black people but also actively participated in every function of antebellum slavery. White women were buyers, sellers, investors, traffickers, and violent disciplinarians. Far from being the passive heiresses who wrote glowingly of their love for enslaved men and women, white women enslavers, Jones-Rogers argues, asserted their rights to [End Page 473] human property. Readers are introduced to various white women who studied the law and contested any man who tried to obfuscate their participation in the antebellum markets. Each chapter reveals the different roles white women played in accumulating personal wealth and expanding the institution. Since slavery was the basis of the southern economy, one can imagine that privileged white children raised in the violence of this antebellum world were conditioned to accept their role as enslavers. Jones-Rogers notes that slave-owning women raised in this system did not simply replicate examples from their elders, as “some children clashed with their mothers over the best way to deal with slaves” (p. 12). They Were Her Property shows that many white women enslavers viewed themselves as autonomous owners who acted independently, relishing their ability to accumulate financial and social capital in a world dominated by aristocratic white men. In chapters 2 and 3, readers are left with little doubt that white women asserted their positions as slave owners and used legal, social, and economic means to secure their autonomy from male relatives. Jones-Rogers marshals various sources to prove that violence was an omnipresent reality for those who were owned by white women. Of course, this violence took many forms, as white women willingly exploited every part of the enslaved laborer’s body. In harrowing detail, Jones-Rogers shows how these enslavers actively advertised the wet-nursing capabilities of the black women they owned, selling these services and profiting from the value of this reproductive function. As reproductive value is often presumed to simply connote the birth of enslaved children, chapter 5 proves that wet nursing was another facet of reproductive violence that commodified black women and secured the enslaver’s profits. Indeed, readers leave with a haunting reminder: just as white women separated enslaved women from their own children, white women simultaneously mocked black women’s roles as mothers by “plac[ing] their own infants at the breasts” of those they owned (p. 122). Jones-Rogers shows how white southern women contributed to the omnipresent violence on antebellum plantations. She uses a vast array of primary sources to prove that white women were not peripheral to the institution of slavery but crucial to its expansion. In looking closely at her chapter titles, one finds they hold a unique feature. Many of them are quotations from the testimonies of the formerly enslaved. This authorial choice exemplifies the book’s unique methodological approach, in that one can read the narratives of formerly enslaved people, specifically those from the often-cited Works Progress Administration (WPA), as evidence for the position of slave-owning white women. Often used to garner...

Beyond Respectability employs an Anna Julia Cooperian approach to reading and interrogating the theoretical work and lived experiences of Black women intellectuals. To understand this methodological approach, one needs to first become acquainted with two of Cooper’s cardinal commitments. They include: 1) a commitment to seeing the Black female body as a form of possibility and not a burden, and 2) a commitment to centering the Black female body as a means to cathect Black social thought. In Voice, Cooper places the Black female body and all that it knows squarely in the center of the text’s methodology. She fundamentally believed that we cannot divorce Black women’s bodies from the theory they produce. The author recognizes these forms as an embodied discourse, which predominates in Cooper’s work. Embodied discourse refers to a form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies and, in particular, working class bodies and Black female bodies by placing them in the texts they write and speak. By pointing to all the ways Black women’s bodies emerge in formal and informal autobiographical accounts, archival materials, and advocacy work, this work disrupts the smooth function of the culture of dissemblance and the politics of respectability as the paradigmatic frames through which to engage Black women’s ideas and their politics.

In 1990, Carolyn Richardson Durham, an American scholar researching the portrayal of Afro-Brazilian women in literature, traveled to Sao Paulo where she met Miriam Alves, a poet and an activist. At that time, Alves had been compiling an anthology of black women writers that, because of a lack of funds, she was unable to complete. Soon after, they decided to turn this project into a collaborative endeavor and, as a result, published the first anthology of black Brazilian women writers as a bilingual edition in 1994 (all the poems were translated by Richardson Durham). The anthology, entitled Enfim . . . Nos: Escritoras negras brasileiras contemporâneas/Finally . . . Us: Contemporary Black Brazilian Women Writers, presents seventeen women poets, most of whom belong to the Quilhomboje literary movement (Alves decided to distance herself from the movement in 1994). With its monthly publication, Cadernos Negros, Quilhomboje inscribes itself into the tradition of Afro-Brazilian cultural production and political resistance, alongside movements such as the Frente negra brasileira and the Movimento negro unificado.1 Alves felt that the movement was heavily inflected by male voices and that female voices needed additional platforms for expression. The collection deals with a great variety of topics, from representations of the black female body and the monotony of everyday life to the Brazilian myth of racial democracy and the imagining of a transnational African diasporic consciousness. In the introduction to the anthology, Alves expresses the generative idea behind the project:

Background Disparities in chronic systemic inflammation among black and white women and men are well documented. However, while chronic stress domains such as discrimination and financial strain, as well as socioeconomic factors such as education, have all been linked to inflammation, more research is needed to clarify how these social determinants influence each other and contribute to inflammation. Guided by the Stress Process Model and Intersectionality, this present study assessed the mediating role of both discrimination and financial strain in the relationship between race-gender groups and inflammation (measured as elevated CRP levels). This research also examined if the potential indirect effects of discrimination and financial strain were contingent on the educational level of black and white men and women with the United States. Methods This secondary analysis focused on an analytic sample (ages 25–74) of black and white men and women (n=775) from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Biomarkers Project (2004–2009). SPSS version 24 and PROCESS macro were used to test all mediation and moderated mediation analyses. Results Separate mediation analyses revealed that after adjusting for age and when compared to the reference category (white men), both financial strain and daily discrimination mediated the relationship between race-gender (black men, black women, and white women) and inflammation (CRP levels). That is, self-identifying as a black man, white woman, or black woman positively influenced perceptions of both everyday discrimination and financial strain, which in turn contributed to increased levels of CRP. However, when both mediators were included in the mediation model, discrimination was only significant among black men. Results of the first moderated mediation analysis indicated that the indirect effect among black men on inflammation through discrimination was significantly stronger for black men educated beyond high school. Findings from the second moderated mediation analysis findings suggested that education significantly moderated the indirect effect of race-gender on inflammation through financial strain. While this indirect effect was stronger for black men and white women with a high school degree or less; conversely, the effect was stronger for black women with educational levels that exceeded high school. Conclusion This study contributes to the literature on inflammation by further illuminating the social determinants and social patterning of inflammation among black and white women and men within the United States.

“Keep Remembering”

2020 Rise to the challenge

Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized , in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance ,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property ,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself...

Since the inception of queer theory, there has been an ongoing and perhaps constitutive resistance to its squarely confronting the manner in which Black people are placed in what Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185) has called "the position of the unthought." This blind spot includes, but is not limited to, the manner in which queer theory has often failed to "include" blackness (Reid-Pharr 2001: chap. 5), if by inclusion we mean the additive approach through which, for instance, black and brown stripes were recently added to the redesigned rainbow flag (Campbell 2019: 82–87). Even in inclusionary or additive gestures, race often serves either as an analogy to sexuality or as a past historical social struggle (aka. "the civil rights movement") upon which the LGBT movement now builds (Johnson and Henderson 2005: 4–5). As recently as 2005, Jack Halberstam (2005: 220) could remark how the archive of queer theory remained predominantly white, Western, and canonical, despite the emergence of queer of color scholarship. In the past two decades, an emergent field of Black queer and trans studies has continued to address this blind spot, but its recurrence in queer studies as a field must by now be attributed to something deeper than ignorance.1This recurrence, I have argued elsewhere, suggests that Black and Queer may not operate as "equally actualized signifiers" but instead depend upon a process of occulting of the Black. In order for "queer" to become visible, following Lacan's account of metaphor, "black" must be occulted, or hidden, in the chain of signifiers (Nyong'o 2008: 98–99). Three recent books help us think through this complex interplay of blackness and queerness and offer new avenues of possible redress. They each do so with distinct methodological approaches and disciplinary commitments, and they arrive at different conclusions. Even their sense of audience differs, making the task of reviewing them together less a summing up of a particular academic field than an articulation of tensions roiling underneath the disciplines and interdisciplines. Our present conjuncture—in which Black trans* and queer lives are politically central to the practice of Black revolution in previously unimaginable ways—justifies the usefulness of thinking these texts together. And while only one author under view, Amber Jamilla Musser, addresses her text extensively to the development of queer theory "proper," all three books hold great significance for the improper and heterodox itineraries for queerness that are found in Black and/or Black feminist histories and futurities.Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a landmark work of the historical imagination that centers the unruly and anarchic lives of Black girls and women at the turn of the twentieth century. This is a period sometimes known as "the Nadir" in Black history (1877–1923)—a time when the backlash against emancipation and reconstruction led to Jim Crow laws, virulent white supremacy, and lynching. It is a period that students often learn through the stories of charismatic Black male leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and his rival Booker T. Washington. Black women leaders such as anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, who spearheaded the African American women's club movement, also figure prominently. Wayward Lives acknowledges these leading figures (Du Bois in particular), but comes at the period from a different angle. Here Hartman, a scholar known for her scouring critiques of acts of archival recovery, turns to a technique she terms the "close narration" (xiii) of the lives of ordinary girls and women who migrated to Philadelphia and New York City from the South. Reading both with and against the archival grain, close narration highlights the continuity between the violence done to her subjects and the historical records through which she must access them.In order to produce a text that can center their desire to live life on their terms rather than as either respectable race women or obedient drudges, Hartman refuses the conventions of standard historiography. As such, the book defies easy summary, and the most I can hope to do in this review is encourage you to read it in its entirety. Close narration enables Hartman to re-narrate history in ways that decenter the most famous and recognizable figures in order to ask new questions about those who remain present but anonymous in the historical record and to notice those whose unrealized ambitions did not make their errancy any less real. And she also poses crucial questions about history itself, at times turning to a kind of ficto-criticism to do so. For instance, she fabulates the well-known story of Gladys Bentley, the legendary bulldagger blues singer, as "Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux" (the legendary early Black film director). She remaps the sexual geography of the city from the vantage point of the lesbian chorine Mabel Hampton, who aspires to become a concert singer but ends up offering her services on the infamous "Bronx Slave Market" of Black female domestic day laborers. And in the final section of the book, the chorus itself becomes a space of Black queer feminist narrative possibility, as their movements in concert on stage, in cabarets, and in close historical narration constantly test the limits of an anti-Black world. By rearranging and defamiliarizing the historical record, Wayward Lives is itself a beautiful experiment in freeing us up from our dependence on linear temporalities of progress, completion, and/or recovery.While a momentous work of cultural history, Wayward Lives also resonates in our moment because of the way it brings together blackness and queerness at the site of a revolution in ordinary life. By deemphasizing the narratives of social reformers, soapbox radicals, and official ideologies, Hartman reimagines the history of anarchism and queer refusal as a quotidian practice spontaneously adopted by these Black girls and women who simply willed their lives to be otherwise. In a short, credo-like chapter, Hartman (227–28) defines this waywardness: Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis of the dispossessed. . . . To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. . . . It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.In passages like this, Wayward Lives speaks directly to our own moment, as the best history always does. In offering up a history of the present, it redefines concepts like mutual aid, fugitivity, opacity, and queer wildness in Black feminist terms.2Another text that centers Black feminist genealogies in queer theory is Musser's Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (full disclosure: I am a coeditor of the series in which this book was published). Like Hartman, Musser is deeply invested in the wayward and insurrectionary potential of feminine desire. But where Wayward Lives adopts a close narration (or counternarration) of archives meant to police, expose, and regulate Black women's bodies, Sensual Excess employs feminist and psychoanalytic theory to launch a series of provocative readings of contemporary art. At the center of Musser's concern is a reappraisal of the body/flesh distinction in the work of Hortense Spillers and of Spillers's (2003) influential theories of the pornotroping of Black women's bodies. Whereas some readers have taken Spillers as arguing for absence or lack as constitutive of Black sexuality (emphasizing her account of slavery acting to ungender the Black body), Musser argues instead for a reading of the pornotrope as leading to sensual "excess." Musser deploys the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance in order to interrupt the popular belief that pleasure derived from this excess fulfills or satisfies the subject, rather than dividing it from itself. At the same time as the excess that is jouissance undoes theories of blackness as lack, brownness for Musser serves a means of "expanding the parameters" of the pornotrope "beyond blackness" (7). Here she joins other queer of color critics in arguing for the value of Black feminist theory for reading Asian, Latinx, and other racialized peoples' lives, moving "away from theorizing blackness as the space of negation by positioning it in relation to multiple forms of brownness" (8).3 Subsequent readings of Black and women of color artists expand upon the multiple dimensions of queer femininity that are manifested through the particular ways blackness and brownness expose histories of slavery, colonialism, and genocide.Musser's (7) detailed readings demonstrate the manner in which Black and brown queer feminine jouissance creates "inhabitations of the pornotrope" theorized by Spillers. The first two chapters directly engage inhabitations of the pornotrope through extended readings of yonic imagery in the work of Kara Walker and Mickalene Thomas. Musser's work here offers a heterotopic rereading of the feminine body, showing how labial feminist artwork often castigated as essentialist (or trans-exclusionary) is in fact engaged in a process of corporeal reterritorialization. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to performances of listening and witnessing in the work of Cheryl Dunye, Xandra Ibarra, and Carrie Mae Weems, while 5 and 6 veer toward considerations of automaticity and aggression, respectively, in the work of Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan. With impressive sweep, Musser in each case combines close description of the aesthetic maneuvers of these artists with rigorous revisions of the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance by way of a feminist account of these artists' work. She concludes the book with a riposte to both the Lacanian neglect of the mother's desire and queer femininity's relative silence around the figure of the maternal.Even as Sensual Excess seeks to expand the parameters of the pornotrope without abandoning its grounding in Black feminist theory, the book also intervenes in the calcifying debates over "pleasure" versus "criticality" in readings of racialized sexuality. Those critics who argue against accepting lack as the condition of blackness are often accused in return of uncritically celebrating pleasure. (And to be sure, there are some who do indeed see Black pleasure as reparative or healing in a direct way, but this is not the case with any of the authors under present review.) Pushing this debate beyond the pleasure principle affords Musser new opportunities for rendering the affect and aesthetic of what she calls the brown feminine. It also affords a timely opportunity to reconsider Audre Lorde's writings on the erotic, of which Musser is among our most able contemporary critics. A return to Lorde is warranted, Musser persuasively argues, less to recuperate pleasure in sensuality and more to redress the overly self-conscious break with prior women of color feminisms that the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s effected. Reclaiming a Black socialist lesbian feminism discarded as too essentialist during the heyday of poststructuralism, Sensual Excess invites us to think with the surface and textures that queer feminism continue to afford aesthetic and erotic experimentation.In a telling coda, Musser (172–73) even revives the contested figure of the mother, arguing that a queered motherhood has been central to her book all along: "To think the mother as a place, not a void, works toward a framework of generativity, fleshiness, and sensuality. Black and brown mothers have haunted the pages of this book, sometimes appearing and sometimes absent, but always hovering. . . . This is not about producing the maternal as homeland, but about reaching toward the black and brown maternal as horizon." The jouissance of the Black mother is so frequently rendered as monstrous in the anti-Black imagination that citing examples seems fruitless (although a return to Hartman's Wayward Lives might provide one useful inventory). And while the final book under review here swerves sharply away from the inclusionary gestures of queer of color critique instanced in Musser, it shares with her text a powerful conviction that the Black body (and flesh) is a continuous shock to thought.Calvin L. Warren's Ontological Terror brings together the historiographical and theoretical concerns of the above two books with its focus on the ontology of antiblackness. On an initial approach, Warren could be counted among those critics for whom blackness must be theorized through negation and lack. In his work, the very word being, in relation to Black people, can appear only under erasure, as being. The very notion of freedom, for Black people, can only appear under the double negation "is not." As with other critics working in an Afropessimist frame, Warren argues both that anti-Black racism is a permanent feature of modernity and that appeals to Black humanity, suffering, and/or hope only intensify this bleak condition.4 Rather than pessimism per se, Warren's book foregrounds nihilism, a term rich with philosophical controversy. Ontological Terror can be read both as a defense of Black nihilism in the face of gratuitous violence and as a carefully wrought argument about how anti-Black violence works. Its combination of theoretical rigor and interrogation of legal, political, scientific, and visual archives place it squarely in conversation with contemporary debates in Africana philosophy. Of the multiple threads Warren pulls together, I will focus here on his treatment of Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics (at the risk of some simplification), because it provides a useful entry point into some of the central claims of the text.For Warren, the free Black "is not" because "being" is a crucial attribute of humanness, and it is precisely the humanness of the Black that is refused by modalities of power in the modern world (both under slavery and during its afterlives). Heidegger conceives human being (dasein) as a world-building and tool-bearing animal. But because the human builds his, her, or their world by reducing the slave to a tool, Warren argues, no act of mutual human recognition can be forthcoming between the human and the slave. Instead, the human must reduce the slave to a worldless thing: a tool. The free Black, the "slave without a master," is nothing to the white man (Berlin 1974). Warren accepts that Black people exist and inhabit the world (13) but denies that this existence adds up to the sort of being that grounds "metaphysical schemes of political hope, freedom, and humanity" (172). Rather than inveigh against this logic as a calumny against Black humanity, Warren aims to destitute it through a Heideggerian Destruktion. In a section titled "Chief Justice Roger Taney: Ontometaphysician" (76–87), for instance, Warren destructs the language of the notorious Dred Scott decision, not in order to retrieve the human rights that Taney's decision travesties but in order to argue "the absurdity that any right could ever change the formulation of black existence as nonexistence" (85). Following Taney, the freed or emancipated Black is not a proto-citizen ready to join human society but, as a now-broken tool, becomes newly visible in its brokenness as an insoluble problem for civil society.In a chapter titled "Catachrestic Fantasies," Warren delivers one of the most elegant destructions of anti-Black nineteenth-century visual culture in the recent critical literature. Drawing upon Frantz Fanon, David Marriott, and others, he argues for the significance of the free Black body as a site of fantasy projection in which Black being is characterized by white supremacy as a site of continuous malapropism and category collapse. This chapter is a contribution to debates on troping (and stereotyping) insofar as it focuses on the contrastive mechanism of catachresis: the misapplication of a word to describe something that would otherwise go unnamed. Where stereotype discourse presumes the repetition of a familiar trope, catachrestic fantasy intimates the disturbance of the anti-Black imaginary from within. Free blackness is this unnamed thing: it is not troped or stereotyped, it is the site of perpetual and structural misrecognition.I am summarizing all too quickly, but the nihilistic, existentialist, and at times even mystical gist of Ontological Terror should already be apparent, as should its departure from the more Hegelian account of the master-slave dialectic preferred by thinkers such as Paul Gilroy (1993) and Susan Buck-Morss (2000). Rather than a struggle to the death and consequent bid for mutual recognition, for Warren there is only "ontological terror"—a title that we must take in a double sense to indicate both the terror Black people felt at the gratuitous violence we faced before and after emancipation and, crucially, the ontological terror the anti-Black imagination experiences in encountering Black being as an inexplicable nothingness that somehow is. Here, I believe, is a crucial contribution of this book to the Afropessimist polemic: its positioning of the anti-Black human as terrified. Warren (9; emphasis added) writes: A mentor once asked me a terrifying question: why are blacks hated all over the world? Stunned, I remained silent, but the question remained with me. . . . We can call this hatred antiblackness: an accretion of practices, knowledge systems, and institutions designed to impose nothing onto blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as nothing incarnated. Put differently, antiblackness is anti-nothing. What is hated about blacks is this nothing, the ontological terror, they must embody for the metaphysical world.The rhetorical doubling of terror in this passage, as something experienced by Black people and, at the same time, something caused by our existence, returns me both to waywardness as "errant path" and to "feminine jouissance" as that which splits, rather than consolidates, the subject of "pleasure." In making this observation, I am not over the and even among these critical Instead, I am to the thinking that has to Black critical theory, in its with queerness to be can so often take a one sexuality and are to Black critical Warren for instance, on when he a reading of the Black (or the of the Lacanian for the that as deeply within a of Black bodies, in these will be and On the other such a turn (or to even a placed under the of dark is what Warren with an argument against critics such as Musser and Scott who he Black in the by such a In a that such with Warren emphasis added) do not within is no more a against antiblackness than or metaphysical its when the body is and pleasure in a black is not by black death or through black from the perhaps of jouissance in this reaching its from also the of his own critical in I also to the feminism to the logic of reading as What Musser in Sensual Excess as the of thinking of in with those of is not a to theories of antiblackness through to sexual pleasure. is it to of feminine jouissance with of they as the very sort of double and negation that Warren Musser that psychoanalytic feminist such as have to logic of and as Musser it is not a to but a means of why "the problem of the black body is not as being to the problem of At on this is a question that Ontological Terror also to of this review it will have been to the of queer theory as it to with the and to Black studies in its ongoing with The that some see between and the is not one that would queerness as it to the of and sexuality or could be as a human and when it comes to the of it is a case of to these and ongoing two might be in their theoretical there may be a value in in the of both the Afropessimist and the precisely in order to to the surface all the through which and life is under the of And I would hope this review has a point of all would to an act of to or Black feminist debates over terror, and the insofar as they both and queer we are with the psychoanalytic or a more in recent critical has as a of it At the same time, it the case that the in such to the of not always do to the very of struggle they This is less a I of to hope, or as rhetorical and less a of the in the order of antiblackness. It is more a question of the archive of Black queer feminist as to as to the of the human order of metaphysical her Audre Lorde an into such of Black lesbian feminist refusal when she writes: is there for us to be after we have face to face with death and not I the existence of as a life who can ever have power over me in the terror of death is as Warren critical pleasure in the of a possible by refusal not As Hartman suggests at the of Wayward Lives, the would be the to that there is a in theoretical and perhaps even political our debates over and But there may not be two one to and the other to sensuality and Even if it would make it for of us if there

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Lindsay A. Silver Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. America in the Nineteenth Century. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x, 284. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5339-9.) In Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, Erin Austin Dwyer insightfully demonstrates how emotions shaped, maintained, and challenged the institution of slavery by examining the power dynamics of real and performative feelings between people who were enslaved and slave owners. At the same time, Dwyer emphasizes the prominence of emotions in proslavery defenses and abolitionist critiques, further underscoring the centrality of sentiments to many of the arguments seeking to uphold or destroy slavery in antebellum America. As a book about the power of emotions and feelings, Mastering Emotions primarily focuses on relationships between enslaved people and slaveholders. Dwyer draws on a wide variety of sources while making particular use of first-person accounts. These sources, which include slave narratives alongside the journals and diaries of white southerners who owned enslaved people, enable Dwyer to expose and explore the feelings and emotions that established, maintained, and even challenged the power dynamics within slavery. Dwyer’s work is deeply rooted in an extensive historiography of American slavery that acknowledges the prevalence of such sentiments among enslaved Blacks and slaveholding whites. What stands out about Mastering Emotions is that Dwyer is the first to seriously and methodically analyze the significance of feelings and emotions to the institution of slavery. Dwyer accomplishes this goal by applying the framework established by scholars of the history of emotions to the history of American slavery. As a result, the reader revisits many familiar scenes and stories from nineteenth-century narratives of enslaved people and slaveholders, but with a new understanding of how power dynamics operated between them, due to Dwyer’s emphasis on the importance of emotions in these relationships. Mastering Emotions covers considerable ground, examining a number of emotions from multiple angles and perspectives. Dwyer successfully demonstrates how the roles of enslaved persons and slave owners were culturally constructed, learned, reinforced, and challenged through emotions both real and performative. Included in the wide range of emotions Dwyer examines are trust, happiness, fear, and the enjoyment of freedom. In her discussion of fear and punishment, the author highlights how scholars have traditionally focused on physical punishment inflicted on enslaved people and have ignored or downplayed the role of emotional or affective discipline. By shifting the focus away from physical punishment and examining the role of emotions, Dwyer successfully demonstrates a greater understanding of “the lived experience of slavery and . . . the critical place of emotional mastery in discipline” (p. 139). Additionally, Dwyer exposes the contradictions in proslavery literature that argued that enslaved people did not have the capacity to feel emotions as strongly as white people, even as emotional punishments designed to break up enslaved families became a common form of control—one that enslaved people often felt was much more painful than physical violence. [End Page 142] In order to fully demonstrate the significance, power, and legacy of the emotional politics of slavery, Dwyer concludes with a brief but important overview of how emotions have shaped Black and white race relations in America since emancipation. In doing so, Dwyer outlines how different emotions, particularly fear, have tragically impacted the joys of freedom for Black Americans from the Jim Crow era to the present. Importantly, Dwyer’s conclusion makes a strong case for further academic and cultural work to better understand the power dynamics of emotions within race relations since the abolition of slavery more than 150 years ago. Lindsay A. Silver Texas A&M University–San Antonio Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association