The Religious Motif of Mountains in Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?

Reviewed by: The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South Lisa Hinrichsen (bio) Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. Resonating with W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line, Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason- Dixon Line assesses the landscape of African American consciousness one hundred years later, arguing that the afterlife of slavery and subjugation on southern soil continues to disturb and inspire African American literary production. For Harris, the lingering anxiety and fear surrounding the South as a historic site of white privilege and black degradation initiates what she terms a “confrontation” in the work of all African American writers, whereby they must negotiate a fundamental ambivalence about membership in a society that calls their belonging into question. In setting up the South as ground zero for African American literary consciousness, Harris contends that all African American writers, even those not born below the Mason-Dixon line, feel “compelled to confront the American South” (1). As her emphasis on the word “compelled” makes clear, Harris argues that the charged relationship between writer and region is part of a rite of passage into African American belonging: “African American writers cannot escape the call of the South upon them . . . Not one of them considers himself or herself truly an African American writer without having confronted the South in some way” (2). Thus, all African American authors are, as the provocative title of her first chapter indicates, “Southern Black Writers No Matter Where They Are Born.” Through negotiating a polarity of repulsion and attraction inherent to a history both traumatic and triumphant, African American writers seek the space to enable “creativity operating under the influence of history” (1). Over the course of ten brief chapters, Harris explores the fraught intersection between the South and African American literary imagination, reading native-born black Southerners such as Ernest J. Gaines, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Phyllis Alesia Perry, [End Page 1384] Tayari Jones, Edward P. Jones, and Raymond Andrews, alongside non-Southern writers James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler, and Sherley Anne Williams. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line focuses on contemporary African American fiction (1964–2003), but the scope of the work that Harris examines deliberately stretches across genres, genders, themes, and storylines to support her sweeping claims. The range of her text thus functions to interject into and expand conversations about the relationship between geography and identity formation, African American identity and creativity, intersections between African American and European American writers, and Southern literature and culture. Her introductory chapter explores the way the South comes to represent a “cultured hell” (3) for African American writers, a phrase she borrows from Claude McKay’s poem “America.” “The South” is, for Harris, a slippery nexus of meanings, and her argument shifts, at times problematically, between the South as an idea, a geographical place, and a historical experience. While her text consistently foregrounds how regionalism remains a relevant marker of social, cultural, and individual identity, Harris needs to be more explicit in detailing how both the South and the color line have been reconfigured in the late twentieth century through cultural and political changes such as the struggle for civil rights and the Black Power movement, which fundamentally altered the terms of this historical confrontation and raised key questions about cultural and individual self-determination. Subsequent chapters explore the psychosexual dimensions of this confrontation in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); the struggle to claim black masculinity in Ernest J. Gaines’s “Three Men” (1968); the rewriting of African American agency under slavery in three neo-slave narratives: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003); the spatial and temporal portability of racial fear in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poetry (1988); heteronormativity and queer masculinity in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989); the relationship between folk communities and fear in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998); Tayari Jones’s efforts to domesticate fear in her...

The year of John Brown's unsuccessful uprising at Harpers Ferry, writer, lecturer, and political activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper launched African Americans' participation in the art of short story writing. Harper's short story “The Two Offers” (1859) appeared in the Anglo-African, a magazine published in New York from 1859 to 1865 by Thomas and Robert Hamilton with a view to educate, encourage, and provide a voice for black people in America. Emblematic of the work of racial uplift, the tale traces the lives of two young cousins, Laura Lagrange and Janette Alston, and the consequences of the one young woman's decision to pursue romantic love and marriage and the other's attempt to discover the full scope of her abilities and inner self. For Harper and African American writers who followed her, the short story provided a vehicle through which they could explore the complex realities of African Americans' lived experiences in a form shorter than that of the novel. As an African American woman writer, Harper opened a way for other black women to explore the tension between women's self-fulfillment and adherence to social convention implicit in Anglo-America's cult of true womanhood. There are those nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American women short story writers, like Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, who are perhaps better known for their accomplishments as novelists, poets, and essayists. Because of its accessibility, the short story invites innovation, an opportunity to experiment with style and form, voice and language. An exploration of the short story reveals black women's significant contributions to the aesthetic and political contours of the form over time.

This paper examines the approach toward narratives of Black Power by African American and black British writers in the post-Civil Rights era. The relationship to Black Power politics is explored here in the particular context of how African American and black British writers are perceived to relate to a “memory of Africa”; how “Africanness” fits into these diverse configurations of contemporary black identity. African American writers often find that Black Power, with its heavy reliance upon iconography, has failed to acknowledge the fluid relationship which exists in African American communities and artforms with a traditional African American past, and with a “memory of Africa” within that tradition. The performance of Black Power is a practice which is shown to distance the present from the past, whereas traditional African American artforms are understood to figure performance as a site where the past may “possess” the present. Black British authors are not concerned with situating the memory of Africa as part of a continuous tradition in the way that African American writers are. Both American tropes of blackness, and the memory of Africa itself, are dramatized in black British fiction as inherited tropes which must be adapted in order to bear any relevance to contemporary experience. The very different kinds of emphasis that writers from these two cultural scenarios place upon notions of performance and tradition, in relation to blackness, lead us to discover that narratives in the vein of the “Black Atlantic” must be approached with some caution if they are understood to provide a global locus of identification while also respecting specific conditions of local cultures.

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Between the 1830s and the 1860s, African Americans published many slave narratives, including those of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Bibb (1849). But perhaps the most influential slave narrative during this period was that of a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. Even as Black writers rediscovered their African and African American cultural and historical past during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, there were only two narratives or novels about slavery, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon (1931).1 Nor were any narratives/novels about slavery written by African Americans in the 1940s or the 1950s. But the absence of texts about slavery by African Americans does not mean the absence of the image of slavery and the enslaved African American before the American public. Within the institutions of the ideological state apparatus, such as the media and education, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin's influential and widespread construction of slavery was taught in high schools and colleges and was reproduced on television and in Holly-wood. There were many film adaptations of Stowe's novel, including nine from the silent era—especially Edwin S. Porter's 1903 twelve-minute film adaptation, in which Uncle Tom is "a childlike, unthinking, and happy slave" (hooks 2013, 99). Later there were Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Song of the South (1946), and The Foxes of Harrow (1947)—all dealing with the Civil War, slavery, and Reconstruction. The mainstream literary establishment, educational institutions, and Hollywood successfully established Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and related films as the generalized truth about slavery. In the 1960s, things begin to change for African American writers and the representation of slavery. In 1962, William Melvin Kelley in A Different Drummer revisited and reconfigured the enslaved African, giving him subjectivity and agency. In 1966, Margaret Walker published Jubilee, which is about her great-grandmother, who was a slave. In 1971, Ernest Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is about a one-hundred-year-old Black woman who was born in slavery and had [End Page 253] lived to see the beginnings of the civil rights movement. With these texts, along with John O'Killen's Slaves (1969), Gayle Jones's Corregidora (1975), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), J. California Cooper's In Search of Sale Factory (1994), Lorene Carey's The Price of the Child (1995), Lalita Tademy's Cane River (2000), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019), slavery returned to the center of African American literature. Why were African American writers again writing slave narratives or novels about slavery? Was it the stories about slavery that their grandparents had passed down, as in the case of Walker's Jubilee? Was the new emphasis on slavery a result of the 1960s, which created a generation of African Americans who had "assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, ha[d] freed themselves of it and w[ould] never be victims again" (Baldwin 1997, 20), or who, in critically examining their history, had psychologically broken away and freed themselves from white hegemonic narratives about slavery (embodied in Stowe) and, therefore, could revisit the issue of slavery from a different space, giving them an understanding of their own power and agency? Seemingly, the 1960s produced a generation of African American historians, scholars and writers who revisited, dusted off, interrogated, and critically studied and reclaimed African and African American history, cultural traditions, and belief systems that had been denigrated, appropriated, omitted, and/or excluded by Western reason. But unlike normative American society, this generation viewed this history and these...

For many years, Black female representation of women in mainstream movies has been lacklustre at best. Most Black female leads have been misconstrued as one-dimensional, stereotypical beings portrayed for the world to see. The decade of 2010–20 proves to be pivotal for cinematic portrayals of Black female leads. A narrative thematic analysis is used to examine Black female lead characters represented in romantic relationships. Fifteen films were chosen in the genres of romantic comedy and romantic drama. Stereotypes are found to still exist. Yet, the relationships of the characters are nuanced, and movies provide more in-depth development for Black women characters than seen in the past and offer more variances of romantic relationships that better reflect those actually existing in the real world. Finding love is not without its obstacles; however, Black female leads tend to still find a Hollywood happy ending.

As in other aspects of America's literary culture, any consideration of variants in development of the Bildungsroman genre would be less textured without inclusion of works by Black women authors. While the novels of Black American male writers have been replete with scenes of initiation more typical of Western Bildungsroman tradition (i.e., the famous Battle Royal scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, episodic agony from familial and societal oppression in Richard Wright's Black Boy and youthful religious confessions in James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain), representative novels by Black American women writers have no similar preoccupations with adolescent recognitions. Virtually to a woman,1 they have not devoted comparable, measurable space in their works to the components traditional in Western Bildungsroman (that is according to the standards set forth by well-known scholars of the genre, Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, and Ray L. Ackerman, Bildung and Verbildung in the Prose Fiction Works of Otto Julius Bierbaum): first physical awakenings; dramatic adolescent conflicts and later reconciliation with family, religion, educational systems or national community.2 When using Bildungsroman themes these women writers did not even choose the adolescent years as appropriate frameworks for Black feminine rites of passage; nor as novelists do they concentrate on youthful recognition of racial rejection by the dominant white society. Rather, they collectively depict the Black woman's internal struggle to unravel the immense complexities of racial identity, gender definitions (in contexts of Black and not white experience), and awakening of sexual being in short to discover, direct, and recreate the self in the midst of hostile racial, sexual and other societal repression to produce a literature not confined to usual Bildung development at set chronological ages. From the first novel by a Black American woman in 1892, Frances E. W. Harper's lola Leroy: Or Shadows Uplifted, through the prolific period of the Harlem Renaissance in which several Black women writers ap-

Fish Out of Water:Black superheroines in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon Dr. Nedine Moonsamy (bio) She swims around the alien home that was in the water … they could not stay underwater for a long time, they could not breathe it as she could –Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon opens with a swordfish narrator who watches aliens while they populate the Nigerian waters. Unlike the narrator, who is entirely at home in the ocean, the aliens cannot breathe water with the same ease because, like the two black female protagonists in the novel, Ayodele and Adaora, the aliens are amphibian-like in nature. As the novel proceeds, Ayodele and Adaora's amphibian bodies become increasingly suggestive of the tentative navigation of spaces that they do not necessarily inhabit. My sense is that this oxymoronic habitation of an "alien home" alludes to that which is both strange and familiar, and so performs a metatextual mapping of the precarious space that black women more generally occupy in science fiction. As Mae G. Henderson observed "the complex situatedness of the black woman as not only the 'other'of the same, but also as the 'other' of the other(s)" implies "a relationship of difference and identification with the 'other(s)'." Because oppressive representations of black women in literature stem from both racialized and gendered discourse, she argues that multiple sites of othering must be interpolated and interrupted in black women's writing. This is equally true of science fiction, where race and gender discourses can often work at cross-purposes in wanting to produce alternative and affirmative narratives for black female characters. The importance of Lagoon, however, is that it is more self-conscious in this regard and plays with our expectations of science fiction superheroines by marking ideological and representative failures that arise in relation to black women. It thus follows that in wanting to [End Page 175] retain the integrity of the black female subject, Okorafor insists on the tentative abode of an "alien home" that operates both within and against the wider generic frameworks of popular science fiction. In his monograph, In Search of the Black Fantastic, scholar Richard Iton argues that popular culture is, by definition, a nonblack culture-a series of hegemonic tastes that rely heavily on the identification of the other that, in the American context, was achieved through the production of the negro. This is not to suggest that black characters do not appear in popular arts and culture, but rather that the abundant stereotypes of blackness exist only as counterfoils to the neutrality of normative whiteness. Somewhat ironically, the range of available signifiers for blackness is an excess that renders the black experience invisible. According to author Michelle Reid, this invisibility of black experience occurs in science fiction, where early space exploration stories were "narrated by the inheritors of advancement, often assumed to be white, Western, and on an adventure." Consequently, the genre became susceptible to various colonial and imperialistic fantasies that captured a troubled relationship to women, people of colour and nature by using the figure of the alien to symbolise these others. Nevertheless, in "Becoming Animal in Black Women's Science Fiction," Madhu Dubey explains that "although science fiction perhaps more than any other genre traffics in otherness, its conventions strongly discourage direct representations of that which is alien to humanity. The alien is typically encountered, comprehended, and subsumed by a human perspective; rarely (if ever) is the alien the subject of narration." Science fiction is replete with feminised or racialized robots aliens and monsters, however, they are always othered and the narrative requires that their otherhood be rendered benign through a process of masculine purging or consumption. Consequently, the question remains—what does it mean for a black artist to engage in contemporary popular culture? For Iton, the solution is to lend visibility to the black experience by engaging the fantastic that sits on the margins of popular culture. Black self-narration must then take on surreal dimensions and embrace the art of making strange. Hence, it is a search for blackness in a "minor key" where, much like the surrealists, the engagement with popular culture...

Harris, Wier. 2001. Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $18.95sc. 272pp. Terry Rowden College of Wooster Trudier Harris has been one of the most prolific, if under-recognized, presences in African-American literary criticism for the last twenty years. reasons for her relative anonymity for those outside of the orbit of the African-American critical community are, however, not hard to find. Her work, unlike that of her peers Houston Baker, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Henry Louis Gates,Jr., Deborah McDowell, and Hazel Carby, has not engaged modernist or postmodernist concerns or recognizably theoretical feminist or postcolonial issues with any obviousness or consistency. Nor has her writing been peppered with the linguistic markers that signal a self-consciously upto-date critical posture. Because of the manifestly straight-forward and jargon-free articulation of her insights that characterizes her writing, she has been, perhaps inevitably, relegated to the margins or simply absent from most of the high profile and influential debates on African-American fiction and culture. Despite its strengths, her latest book is not likely to change that situation. highly concept driven and sociologically informed nature of what are still her two strongest books, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982) and Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), has in her recent work, most notably Fiction and Folklore: Novels of Toni Morrison (1991) and now in this book, devolved into an analytic posture that often seems simplistic when compared to both Harris's earlier work and to more fully contextualized critical work on the topic by other scholars. Even in as early a text as From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature, Harris was especially attentive to those characters in Black fiction which give the lie to the myth of the strength of black (44). In Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, she expands this interest into a sustained investigation of the textual representation of this myth. Over the course of a series of well-written but critically insular essays, Harris explores the image of The Strong Black Woman in selected works of African-American fiction and drama in terms and within conceptual parameters that should be easily accessible to advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, or general readers with an interest in this issue. Still, despite the force of her considerations of particular texts, the most telling limitation of Saints, Sinners, Saviors is that the signal concept of The Strong Black Woman is not given the kind of definitional and conceptual clarity that would take her analysis beyond offering simply another, albeit well-argued, consideration of the received and stereotypical images of black women in African-American fiction. According to Harris, appearance of these images in African American literature and their evolution over more than a century suggests that African American writers were just as complicitous as the white-created mythology surrounding black women in ensuring that strong, asexual representations of black female characters dominated the literature in the twentieth century and threaten to continue that domination in the twenty-first. …

Black women’s bodies and sexualities have particularly been exposed and spoken about in public spaces from an outsider perspective. In this essay, I ground the exploration of sexual pleasure as described and imagined by Black female characters in contemporary short stories written by Black French women. I examine three short stories from the anthology Volcaniques: Une anthologie du Plaisir (2015) by Gisèle Pineau, Léonora Miano, and Hemley Boum to explore how these writers complicate, expand, and subvert heteronormative notions of pleasure, and seek it via their Black female characters. Instead of further silencing Black women’s sexuality for fear of reinscribing hypersexual tropes, or reiterating narratives of trauma and unhappy sexualities, these narratives reclaim women’s bodies and sexualities for their pleasures. I take an intersectional and afrofeminist approach to underscore the different forms of sexual (and other forms of) pleasure for middle-class Black French women. These narratives prove to be a mirror for other Black women who read and experience pleasure as well as a window to the variety of ways they experience and write about (sexual) pleasure and desire. Ultimately, beyond body and sexual positivity, by writing about these sexual matters, these compelling narratives lay claim to the humanity of middle-class Black women.

This article provides a Black theological reading of the cultural production of African American producer, writer, actor and entrepreneur, Tyler Perry, in conversation with the African American writer, director, producer and polemicist, Spike Lee. In this article I seek to explore issues of masculinity, as addressed through the prisms of cinematic and religious imagery, juxtaposing Perry and Lee and their differing conceptualizations of Black masculinity. In looking at the work of Tyler Perry I hope to explore how Black male identity is played out in terms of religio-cultural tropes within the mainstream culture of America. What I offer in the pages that follow is a reading of Tyler Perry that locates him within a tradition of masculinity in America. What I forward is a historicist interpretation of Black masculinity, which sees Tyler Perry as a gendered throwback from the not too distant past. In light of this reading, I argue that Perry embodies a cultural legacy of African Americans, which has not been fully engaged, a legacy that is worthy of critical examination.

Reviewed by: Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character Harvey Young Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character. By Hazel Waters. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007; pp. viii + 243. $90.00 cloth. Hazel Waters’s Racism on the Victorian Stage belongs in every college library and on the bookshelves of theatre historians with an interest in the early Victorian era and/or black drama. Tracing the development of the “black character,” broadly construed to include Moors, Africans, and diasporic Africans, the book introduces the reader to dozens of plays, provides an authoritative reading of the presentation of black character(s) from 1700 to 1860 in England, and, in so doing, restores the historical presence of the black body on the English stage. Whereas the average theatre scholar likely would blank after naming Shakespeare’s Othello and Aaron, Waters identifies over fifty prominent black characters that appeared in the English theatre before 1860. The lasting value of this book anchors itself not only in Waters’s rediscovery of early plays (and characters), but also in her emphasis on the influence of American racism on nineteenth-century English theatre. In the opening chapters, Waters offers a chronology of plays that feature black characters, beginning with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1589). Describing her approach as “primarily empirical, based on extensive readings of largely forgotten plays to discover how black-skinned characters . . . were represented” (5), the author develops a narrative structure in which she identifies a play with a prominent black character and provides an extensive plot summary before moving on to another play and another summary. In this manner, she introduces the reader to Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), Edward Young’s The Revenge (1721), Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Padlock (1768), George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787), and Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797), among others. Although the “forgotten” aspect of these plays demands reminders by Waters, the successive summaries create a reading experience more analogous to an encounter with an encyclopedia than a sustained critical study. As a result, the first section functions best as a handy reference source containing useful and important information that can be accessed with ease. The middle chapters, where Waters shifts her attention from plays to performers, are the most engaging and rewarding. Here, Ira Aldridge, T. D. Rice, and Charles Mathews take center stage. The author builds her analysis of the evolving role of the black character on the English stage on the back of Aldridge, an African American actor who staged the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoire in England and Europe throughout the Victorian era. Waters skillfully introduces Aldridge’s mixed success in London by highlighting his concerted efforts to present “noble” black characters to British audiences and by drawing attention to critical reviews that dismissed the actor as being a novelty (because of his skin complexion). Concerning the former, the author notes the tragedian’s commitment to playing complex characters, as in his adaptation of Titus Andronicus in which Aaron is the protagonist who evokes the spectator’s sympathy. The challenges and resistance that Aldridge faced in England do not become evident until Waters’s subsequent chapters on Rice and Mathews. As Aldridge sought to create a space for the black performer and to render a more realistic depiction of black individuals onstage, Mathews’s tremendously popular comedic impersonation of a black American actor who unsuccessfully attempts to recite Shakespearean lines in stereotypical dialect dogged Aldridge throughout his career. Waters, noting the influence of Mathews on the critical reception of Aldridge’s performances in London, cites reviewers who suggest that the actor’s “thick lips” prevented him from mastering the Bard’s dialogue. Rice’s blackface minstrelsy proved as successful in England as it was in the United States, launched a widespread desire to see comic and “grotesque” representations of blacks, and, ultimately, undermined the efforts of Aldridge. In short, racial parody and blackface minstrelsy in the mid-nineteenth century proved so successful that they established a new model for black characters in English theatre. Waters notes, minstrel stereotypes “[proved] grist to the jobbing dramatist’s mill...

Contemporary African American women writers are perhaps best characterized as diverse. From Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) to Rita Dove's award-winning collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah (1986), to Suzan-Lori Parks's experimental drama, Topdog/Underdog (2001), full circle, back to Morrison's eighth novel, Love (2003), contemporary African American literature by African American women writers offers full expressions of the complexity of contemporary African American life, particularly as this life relates to the black woman. Setting the tone for the literature to come and its corresponding social critique was Toni Cade [Bambara]'s all important, simply yet magically titled The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970). As she concedes that the work she wanted to do in the anthology was “overly ambitious” from the beginning, a “lifetime's work,” she is clear about what the text does achieve: “This then is a beginning - a collection of poems, stories, essays, formal, informal, reminiscent, that seem best to reflect the preoccupations of the contemporary Black woman in this country.” As Eleanor W. Traylor notes in her introduction to the 2005 reprinting of the text, The Black Woman “explores first the interiority of an in-the-head, in-the-heart, in-the-gut region of a discovery called the self . It tests the desires, the longings, the aspirations of this discovered self with and against its possibilities for respect, growth, fulfillment, and accomplishment.” As accurately as Traylor describes the anthology specifically here, her statements also describe, more generally, the literature of contemporary African American women writers - literature which explores the self , its desires, its longing, its aspirations, and its possibilities, particularly in the post-civil rights United States.

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Aunt Jemima is certainly one of the most prominent images of African American women in American culture, but it is not the only one. How this image of the large, strong, happy, asexual cook joined the mammy figure, the suprahuman endurer, and the Christian hard worker to dominate black female representation in a variety of genres is a fascinating strand in American history. The black female body—with passing connection to reality—was manufactured for white public consumption, whether in print or visual media, or on the stage. Even more fascinating is how such images, especially that of the strong black woman, were embraced within African American culture and eventually found their way into and dominated female portrayal in African American literature. This embracing suggests that black acceptance of these images served financial, psychological, and cultural functions. The appearance of these images in African American literature and their evolution over more than a century suggests that African American writers were just as complicitous as the white-created mythology surrounding black women in ensuring that strong, asexual representations of black female characters dominated the literature in the twentieth century and threaten to continue that domination in the twenty-first century.KeywordsBlack WomanBlack PeopleFemale CharacterFamily ReunionAfrican American CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Previous articleNext article Free“Thou maiest inforce my body but not mee”: Racializing Consent in John Marston’s The Wonder of WomenKirsten N. MendozaKirsten N. MendozaUniversity of Dayton, USA Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Grandison, a Slave, v. The State (1841), Judge Nathan Green reversed the decision of the Tennessee circuit court of Warren County for the assault, battery, and rape of Mary Douglass. While the indictment expressed that the accused did “feloniously ravish and carnally know” the said Douglass, it had omitted the victim’s race. According to Green, “[s]uch an act committed upon a black woman would not be punished with death. It follows, therefore, most clearly, that this fact”—the victim’s White race—“gives to the offense its enormity.”1 As Green’s cold assessment makes plain, rape statutes were designed with White female victimhood in mind. In the antebellum American South, it was not just the severity of rape that was mitigated by the race of the survivor but the crime itself that could be effaced if the victim had not been White. The Mississippi Supreme Court in 1859 reversed another conviction in the lower-court ruling of George v. State, a case concerning the rape of a nine-year-old Black girl. George’s attorney argued that “the regulations of law, as to the white race, on the subject of sexual intercourse, do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves; their intercourse is promiscuous, and the violation of a female slave by a male slave would be a mere assault and battery.”2The debasement of the sexualities of Black people was not just a product of slavery, an institution that made their marital bonds and reproductive capacities the property of White masters, but also the consequence of pervasive stereotypes that labelled Africans as naturally libidinous and sexually insatiable. The perception of Black slaves as incapable of maintaining bonds of marriage due to a natural promiscuity maligned their pleasures and served to eradicate their legal ability to claim possession of their bodies and to defend their persons from unwanted touch and violation. The reversal of the original verdict in the Mississippi Supreme Court concerning a child under the age of consent negates the fundamental importance of will. The court’s relegation of the crime from rape to “mere assault and battery” brutally proclaims that it is the race of the victim and not a woman’s decision to withhold consent that determines whether or not rape had occurred. According to this court, the perceived whiteness of the victim makes rape happen.In both cases, the perpetrators were Black slaves. While White men could be held accountable—but rarely were—for crimes such as fornication, adultery, or miscegenation, a White man’s attempted or completed rape of a Black woman whether bonded or free was neither recognized nor punished by law.3 Slavery institutionalized the vulnerability of Black women and men by making the bodies of slaves entirely accessible to a White man’s violent touch, which criminalized their resistance and simultaneously enabled the protected status of White womanhood. “The vulnerability of all enslaved black persons to nearly every conceivable violation,” Aliyah I. Abdur-Rahman argues, “produced a collective ‘raped’ subjectivity.”4 Rape statutes make palpable how the right to property in one’s person derives from a politics of touch firmly rooted in racism and misogyny that delimit who can touch, be touched, and have their pleasure and wills matter in the court of law. The pornographic vision of a White woman’s sexual violation, according to Green, provides the emotional impetus that makes rape reprehensible. Less than twenty years later, the Mississippi Supreme Court would make race a determining factor for the crime itself on the basis of Black promiscuity. Although these cases were adjudicated in the mid-nineteenth century, the cultural biases that undergird their convictions purported as objective “fact” and “truth” had already been in circulation for hundreds of years. This article analyzes the privileged emergence of White women’s self-possession—their theoretical right to determine who can touch their bodies and in what way—at a point in history that inaugurated England’s involvement in slavery, a system that institutionalized sexual violation and denied the fundamental right of Black men and women to property in their persons.Legal tracts in England, especially after the 1530s, sought to clarify the ambiguities concerning what exactly constituted rape.5 Specifically, the statutes of 1555 and 1597 reiterated that it was a felony distinct from the abduction of a man’s goods, requiring the carnal knowledge of a woman against her will. This asserted that the woman’s lack of consent was the decisive factor for whether or not rape had occurred. Thus, in the legal transition of rape, the woman—not her father or husband—became the primary victim.6 This revision made possible the presupposition that a woman not only protected her body as a good steward would care for the belongings of her husband but as a subject who possesses ownership of her person. However, the cultural perception of women as goods, whose legal rights were subsumed by that of their owners, would not so easily be uprooted and continued to influence the adjudication of rape cases through the end of the seventeenth century.One particular legal conundrum presented at the Inner Temple and documented in Harvey 1691 exemplifies the tensions that arise at this transitory period when men’s possessions were endowed with the ability to have their wills gain legal traction. In the case presented, a woman is raped while she and her husband are separated and seeking divorce. She subsequently files an appeal under her name. As her appeal of rape is pending, the husband and wife revoke their divorce. The question posed is whether or not the husband and wife may have a new joint appeal of rape. The first unnamed lawyer who responds denies their petition for a new appeal since the crime did not occur when the woman belonged to her husband. He goes further yet, stating: “if a woman who has cause of appeal marries, the appeal is gone.”7 During her assault and when the original appeal was made, the woman was unmarried, unclaimed, and the sole owner of her body. According to this lawyer, the espousal, which made her person the possession of her husband, retroactively annuls her original appeal since a wife no longer owns her person. He perceives rape less as an assault than as an improper seizure, a distinction that diminishes the significance of the violation sustained by the survivor. The owner of the unlawfully seized body who had made the original appeal no longer exists in this lawyer’s strict interpretation of English law.Fulwood, the second to respond, counters each of the arguments posed by the unnamed lawyer. In a virtuoso conclusion, he contends: even if the woman had married another man “(which [he does] not concede in this case), she still remains the same person to whom the wrong was done.”8 For Fulwood, rape cannot be effaced because the woman’s relation to herself is immutable. It was her person that had been violated and remains her person after marriage. These starkly divergent responses reveal that the legal move toward recognizing the efficacy of women’s consent was in part hindered by a conceptual schism between proponents, like Fulwood, who held that rape is ultimately a crime against the primary owner—the woman whose body was violated without her consent—and those like the unnamed lawyer who maintained with cruel persistence that a woman could never absolutely possess her person. Fulwood’s powerful response, his call to acknowledge the woman’s right to property in her person, relied precisely on an expected visceral reaction to sexual violence. As the unnamed lawyer attended to the intricacies of coverture, theft, and rape statutes, Fulwood forces his colleagues to remember the horror of sexual crimes and the survivor of that atrocity. However, what kind of woman did the men imagine in Fulwood’s emotional appeal? What assumed class, moral status, and physical traits of the survivor made rape a monstrous act?Scholars need not look further than the early modern stage to consider the kind of woman imagined during this period of legal and cultural contestation on the efficacy of women’s consent and self-possession. John Marston’s The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba, performed by the Children of the Revels (circa 1606), turns the story of a Carthaginian princess, one that has been treated as a minor historical aside in the defeat of Carthage and rise of imperial Rome, to a drama that underscores the force of a woman’s volition and the righteous defense of her body against unwanted touch.9 Although perceived as a mere commodity, the titular heroine asserts the value of her pleasure and strives to maintain the efficacy of her consent. In Marston’s adaptation set in the Second Punic War, Sophonisba scorns Syphax the Numidian king and instead marries the Carthaginian general Massinissa.10 Rather than consummate their marriage, the princess instructs her husband to defend their kingdom against the combined forces of love-scorned Syphax and the Romans. While Massinissa fights, his prized possession is expropriated by Sophonisba’s father Asdruball and the Senate, who give Sophonisba to Syphax’s bed (2.1.10). Scenes of sexual violence dominate the third and fourth acts of the play with a barely dressed Sophonisba fleeing from Syphax who threatens to “tack [her] head / to the low earth, whilst strength of too black knaves, / [her] limbes all wide shall straine” (3.1.9–11). Although Sophonisba and her husband are reunited at the end, their happiness is short-lived; Massinissa’s alliance with Rome comes at a price. He must deliver the princess to Scipio as a prisoner of war. After being trafficked from one man to another and evading the licentious clutches of her attempted rapist, Sophonisba drinks poison to save her husband and her people.Recent critics of Marston’s The Wonder of Women, who focus on the gratuitous descriptions of sexual violence pervading this drama, have underscored the treatment of Sophonisba as one of men’s moveable goods, a possession exchanged for the benefit of male homosocial bonds. Although patriarchy requires Sophonisba to remain chaste—Sukanya Senapati argues—she is paradoxically “circulated like a common whore.”11 Unfortunately for beautiful women who rail against the inconsistencies of masculine authority, as T. F. Wharton concludes, Marston creates exemplary female figures only to kill them off at the end, a choice that retroactively undermines the agency of feminine exemplars.12 In stark comparison, critics such as Peter Ure and Reginald W. Ingram interpret the objectification of Sophonisba as trials that exemplify constancy, self-denial, and ability to control her passions, attributes that figure the princess as a Stoic model for men whose suicide is not an abnegation but a move toward a Senecan apotheosis.13 Self-possession in this play, thus, has primarily been understood as the control of one’s ignoble appetites that distract from the fulfillment of duty and honor. Instead, this article defines self-possession as having the right to property in one’s person.Rather than dramatize an utter lack of female mobility and a woman’s compromised or nonexistent will, Marston presents a compelling portrayal of a fair woman as a political subject while acknowledging the cultural biases that deny the efficacy of her consent. I argue that Marston cultivates Sophonisba’s right to self-possession and enables her ascendance as a political subject through and in relation to his dispossession of the classed and raced bodies of Zanthia, her Moorish maidservant, and Vangue, Syphax’s Ethiopian male slave. While Marston expressly highlights the whiteness of Sophonisba’s complexion, it is worth noting that the African princess could have had a range of skin complexions and mixed signifiers of both dark and fair to intimate a number of qualities of which skin tone is just one, such as morality and geographic location. Joyce Green MacDonald, in fact, reveals that Sophonisba is just one example in a long line of African princesses whitened in English drama.14 Although Marston underscores Sophonisba’s fairness, it is unclear how Syphax, the primary villain of the play, was depicted. Unlike the overabundance of signifiers attached to Sophonisba, Vangue, and Zanthia, the lack of descriptors given to Syphax makes it possible that despite the king’s reign over a territory often associated with African blackness, an early modern metaphor for skin and sin, the Numidian king could have been similarly whitened during the performance. This potential indicates another means by which the theater engaged in a politics of touch to normalize White men’s access to the bodies of all women even as they chastised such violence by making the image of a Black man on the body of a White woman the stuff of fantasy that cannot be staged.From the moment audiences are introduced to Sophonisba, blackness frames the fair princess. In the first act, her dark and bawdy maidservant undresses Sophonisba in preparation for the culmination of her long awaited nuptial rites. Later Syphax threatens to gang rape the princess by commanding Zanthia and Vangue to pinion Sophonisba’s resistant White body to the ground. And, in another scene with equally heightened erotic fervor and violence, Sophonisba orchestrates a bed trick, substituting her place with Vangue’s body. Critics have noted how the drama exploits the traditional dichotomy of Black and White to amplify the virtue of Marston’s heroine. As Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton have argued, early modern texts reveal the development and exploitation of the “ideologically charged connections between inner essence and bodily traits,” connections that later racialized logic would most vigorously espouse.15 For example, Anthony Barthelemy highlights how Zanthia’s blackness and Sophonisba’s whiteness represent their moral states; the “vile lascivious, and faithless [Zanthia] serves the faithful, virtuous, and matchless Sophonisba.”16 As the work of Kim F. Hall reveals, fair skin marks the desirability of European women through a racialized hierarchy of beauty and virtue.17 In addition to the ways that blackness makes whiteness signify as moral, superior, and attractive, Arthur L. Little shows how the Black characters in Renaissance works were essential to representations of rape because the “black body simultaneously enables and distances (makes foreign) the pornographic story.”18Building on their crucial work, I suggest that Marston’s Black characters are more than “accessory” to the play’s investment in crafting a woman who deserves the privilege of self-possession. They are important in their own right for just as the drama thinks through the means by which fair women can claim the efficacy of their consent, The Wonder of Women also theorizes how the subjugation of Black persons can be justified through their ignoble pleasures. Marston’s drama is symptomatic of how the English Renaissance theater actively participated in the construction of modern paradigms of race. As the rape cases that began this article make clear, the translation of stereotypes to rationales that deny protections, privileges, and rights would be crucial for the later justification of the enslavement of Black men and women. “Enjoyment,” as Saidiya Hartman poignantly argues, “in turn defined the meaning of subjection [for] it appeared not only that the slave was indifferent to his wretched condition, but also that he had nonetheless achieved a measure of satisfaction with that condition.”19 The decisive work of this play, thus, is the twinned phenomena of White women’s self-possession and Black dispossession through the significations attached to their respective wills, pleasure, and consent.Throughout the play, Sophonisba maneuvers to determine to whom she submits and to what extent, adamantly confronting those who attempt to strip her of a voice with the importance of her will. Although the play safeguards the primacy of the fair Carthaginian’s consent and endows her with the ability to harness a lexis of pleasure and consensual submission reserved for male political subjects, it does so at the expense of Black characters. Audiences witness scenes in which bodies of alterity are rendered disposable and incapable of defending themselves from a totalizing dispossession that the drama unsympathetically justifies. In a play that exploits the objectification of women, servants, and slaves, The Wonder of Women distinguishes Sophonisba from other possessions through conditioning audiences to the sight of dispossessed and violated dark bodies. Ultimately, those who are marked with dark complexions are denied the fundamental right to self-possession for the whitened Sophonisba to have hers.IAt the most sexually charged moment in act 1, when Massinissa moves to embrace his wife, a wounded soldier disrupts their intimacy and calls the groom to war. and Asdruball a on the while a and dressed Sophonisba their After an of one the men the entirely her The between a wife and a of and that in that of woman’s does not matter even if it the of her her and her husband. Massinissa he is and for Sophonisba, Massinissa to his nuptial in to she his he to her my are / I must not Sophonisba his and with a to Carthage than their sexual not make to be a his every that my these Sophonisba the of an subject and a wife to a of her Sophonisba Massinissa’s her Although the princess sexual to a which who often she nonetheless their carnal in erotic Rather than her reproductive as a wife, which requires Massinissa’s physical in their she her to a woman’s traditional to in of her Sophonisba the bed and the as for men to their According to this the the choice for male than a woman’s It is not the of her body but of his that to her a her pleasure to Massinissa’s on the Sophonisba undermines the that so marks the of this her sexual and her as both and she that her consent was neither nor the consequence of Massinissa’s Sophonisba she has / of the princess the significations of her abnegation since her a of Massinissa’s a and a give her she a husband, Sophonisba proclaims that she not be wretched This to her which may a lack of just as it to her Stoic reveals how Sophonisba’s pleasure the that she Sophonisba were no that [her] / [her] to her husband, she to herself an Carthaginian through bodily the for are denied to women, she must through her husband and his body than her Sophonisba does not consent in to the in Massinissa as her husband and Instead, her and his decision are such that it to who is the head and who the whether her or his Massinissa’s choice to than consummate their Sophonisba Massinissa to her father and the Carthaginian a alliance with Syphax through her body. Sophonisba their to the of Carthage by herself Syphax’s to shall be to and of Carthage my is their what they of than that she the of the Senate, the of her father and other men who political over she her submission as an act of to the kingdom that has given her While the princess herself the possession of she also her to it and the pleasure she in the to this emotional a submission that be perceived as the product of also an act of After the had presented Sophonisba with the to her for her [her] to Sophonisba her that to be a good subject requires a consensual submission most and when one wills the of one’s body. As with the she to Sophonisba the of her that such acts of volition the distinction between and from This is all the more because feminine is to the of of requires a on feminine undermines the and that to be and too threatens to the woman’s In the of her pleasure, Sophonisba to play the part of a through which men their wills her in the of and by the princess that she has to be the subject of the but she has also herself to all have good Massinissa makes and no other man and but the consequence of this Sophonisba herself to be one of their a Carthaginian subject who has given to Massinissa and who actively the bonds that Sophonisba it was her of given this choice Syphax Sophonisba not In for her husband, and own the princess her consent. She possesses bonds to Carthage and to Rather than one to the she both that her and the efficacy of her consent. In and her duty to she maneuvers between the and on her as one of men’s and underscores her status as a political subject whose volition and pleasure have Sophonisba in her and with Syphax as he her body in in my / he that to Sophonisba exists Syphax’s he control of her In and England, on often the between a and his subject to a marriage between husband and Syphax’s of access to Sophonisba’s sexual body due to her his a of political with Sophonisba does not that her in the king access to her person. her of Sophonisba her own political that of with her body. not only acts on a subject in a the subject Sophonisba to be the primary means between people are the for to her also from recognized by the of her she ownership of her person by that she as a political subject than as Syphax Sophonisba and the that he has the ability to do as he his maiest inforce my body but not with She a to rape, that the decision to withhold consent that is not to her Sophonisba asserts that she can only be had through volition and not bodily Although Sophonisba may to the of Marston it is not her that this but Sophonisba’s that her consent has since it the between the play as a of Syphax the princess, is their force can make more than he his totalizing physical of her person with his as a than attempt to the by on the of Sophonisba that force does not with While a may to his will, Sophonisba this act Syphax to incapable of a subject to when Sophonisba that she or / she Syphax’s to his in political subjects, like Sophonisba, physical over against their “the subject forces the the of and resistance It is the who in a of the of his or her while the to a of masculine Sophonisba’s her from because it is given a value that authority, a value that Syphax and Sophonisba to her The king was right when he his to her What this from rape is the that a act his and to both Massinissa and As in the the ability for the subject to call on consent to the of the body is never Sophonisba’s to Syphax to his requires that she make acknowledge her political which distinguishes her submission from the subjugation of other English and representations of dark bodies and White feminine often enables The Wonder of exploitation of blackness for the emergence of fair women as political However, it is not just their subjugation as bodies that are and trafficked that Marston but also their distinct of erotic which as the upon which Black objectification and are justified in this Marston makes a case for Sophonisba’s right to pleasure, and the efficacy of her consent only through English audiences to the of Black characters to the value of their physical