Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet Michelle D. Commander (bio) Tillet, Salamishah. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. During her monologue, the ghost child and titular character of Toni Morrison’s Beloved recalls the Middle Passage, offering a sharp critique of the US Reconstruction project as well as the attendant consequences of transatlantic slavery and racialized violence: “all of it is now … it is always now … there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too” (248–49). The very prescience of Beloved’s rememory and, by extension, Morrison’s authorial voice captures the political sentiment undergirding the movement toward the utilization of the speculative by Black American authors, intellectuals, and artists in the post-1965 era. Through the implementation of fantastic methodologies, they have reimagined, re-configured, and deconstructed slavery, the slave narrative, and other tales and myths set during the time of bondage as a means by which to genealogize and grapple with the continued oppression experienced by descendants of enslaved Africans. This persistent renovation of slavery’s horrors remains unspeakable. The United States generally has moved on from the slavery period as if the passage of time has resolved its many traumas, effectively erasing certain pasts deemed not worthy of remembrance—those contrary to the myths that America promulgates about its founding and commitment to freedom. The cultural pushback to this grotesque, willing ignorance is precisely what Salamishah Tillet thoughtfully explores in her monograph, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Sites of Slavery commences with Tillet’s positioning of her book’s argument as a corrective to Charles Johnson’s claim that neo-slave narratives, including his regarded Middle Passage, and historical fiction are solely about the past—that they have no bearing on the present or future. Tillet maintains that the use of speculative methods to analyze and critique America’s hypocrisies demands and has indeed resulted in varied works by “post-civil rights African American writers, artists, and intellectuals [who] respond to this crisis of citizenship by revisiting the antebellum past and foregrounding” what she refers to as a democratic aesthetic in order to attend to Black American civic estrangement (3). Sites of Slavery is interdisciplinary in its consideration of drama, dance, cinema, visual art, and literature. Tillet contemplates how cultural producers imagine sites of slavery to democratize traditional US historical narratives that have tended to slight, disremember, and/or erase Black Americans. Additionally, she reflects on how the re-constructions of these sites and texts are steeped in melancholic, disillusionment mourning and “engage in rituals of collective remembering, recuperative forms of recognition, and revisionist forms of historical representation” (4). As I will detail below, Tillet provides impressively detailed analyses about the stakes of democratizing the discourse of slavery, though her argument falters briefly regarding diasporic loss and mourning. [End Page 732] Chapter 1, “Freedom in a Bondsmaid’s Arms: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and the Persistence of African American Memory,” is a consideration of the controversial relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, and the ways in which historians and authors have ignored, exploited, or embraced the relationship to various political ends. Through the analyses of texts that foreground the Black American woman’s experience rather than that of this founding father, Tillet maintains that each author’s recentering of the dominant perspective democratizes the historical narrative. She explores Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings, which focuses on how the nation’s multi-raciality exceeded the segregationist project demanded by antebellum America’s societal structure; Annette Gordon Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which deconstructs the biases inherent in many scholars’ protection of the Jeffersonian narrative myth by foregrounding the romantic possibilities of the union between master and slave in her historical writing about Jefferson and Hemings; and Robbie McCauley’s play, Sally’s Rape, which figures the abject citizen as most representative of the actualities regarding the status of the nation and formulates what Tillet explains as a “lineage of...