Barbara Chase-Riboud Research Articles

Modernist Antagonisms and Material Reciprocities: Chase-Riboud’s Albino

This paper considers the material exchange initiated in the early sculptural practice of Barbara Chase-Riboud when she began to incorporate fiber into her bronze sculptures by looking closely at her 1972 work, The Albino. I suggest that Chase-Riboud staked a claim for sculpture as a symbolic site at which material knowledge might be transferred across time and space. The work’s negotiations open western sculptural practice to a hybridized form located within transhistorical associations that rework the alleged specificities of both craft and bronze into sites for the exchange of ideas and practices.

The master as parasite in modern literature

ABSTRACT The master speaks infrequently and rarely does he speak directly from his immediate, personal experience as conqueror, slave holder, colonialist, or father/husband. Literary works, beginning with slave narratives and including several twenty and twenty-first century novels, furnish helpful insights into the master’s daily routine of subjugating others. For a theoretical framework, I begin with G. W. F. Hegel’s examination of the master-slave dialectic in his 1807 work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, and rely on subsequent critical theories such as psychoanalysis, colonialism, and feminism to illuminate more fully how radical ideas about cultural representation can be used to decipher literature. From Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness and George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ to Pauline Réage’s novel, Story of O, and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus, the master is portrayed as a brutal man with the capacity to act bestially toward another human being. Tragically, for the master, he can never transcend the dehumanised condition that allows him to exist.

The Bio-national Symbolism of Founding Biofictions: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

Authors of biofiction fictionalize the lives of actual historical figures not so much to represent the past accurately as to create a new reality in the present and for the future. In this essay, the author shows how Barbara Chase-Riboud and Lin-Manuel Miranda fictionalize the lives of Sally Hemings/Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in order to bring into existence a new way of national thinking and being.

Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe ed. by Michael Lackey

Reviewed by: Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe ed. by Michael Lackey Laura Cernat (bio) Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe Michael Lackey, editor Bloomsbury, 2019, 284 pp. ISBN 9781501341458, $34.95 paperback. A goldmine for biofiction researchers through its conceptual density and the vividness of its dialogues, Conversations with Biographical Novelists is also a great source of insight into the working strategies of numerous acclaimed contemporary authors from various countries, including the recent Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk. The interviews tackle specific contemporary issues like the porous boundary between historical and literary discourse and the limits of writerly responsibility, without shying away from the broader questions undergirding them, such as the meaning of writing and making sense of the world in the twenty-first century. In Michael Lackey's first volume of interviews with biographical novelists (Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists), Julia Alvarez quotes Joseph Conrad's definition of art as "bringing to light the truth, manifold and one" to explain the distinction between traditional biographies and biographical fictions. The novel, she adds, brings to its readers "the feel of the texture of reality"; it helps not simply to understand the past, but "to understand the experience of being alive in the past" (30). In the same volume, Michael Cunningham confesses that he doesn't see "a particularly clear or easily-drawn line between fact and fiction" (90), since experience inevitably informs fictions, whereas expectations and beliefs inform our perception and our accounts of facts. These thoughts are also at the core of the second volume of interviews edited by Lackey (this time in collaboration with other scholars, including Bethany Layne and Virginia Rademacher). Yet, while the approach of the first book was more exploratory, this new volume, preceded by Lackey's more theoretical books on biofiction (The American Biographical Novel and the edited volume Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms), comes with a stronger conceptual scaffolding, aiming to explain the contemporary boom in biofictions (novels and stories that name their protagonist after a real historical figure), and more importantly, what specific accomplishments distinguish this type of fiction from other contemporary lifewriting genres. One of the main aspirations of the flourishing new hybrid—neither biography nor traditional historical fiction—is, in Hannah Kent's words, to "interrogate the idea of a single truth" (108). Coming from different angles and often answering differently pitched questions, most of the respondents converge in defining the truth they are depicting as multiple, "heterogeneous," according to Hannah Kent (108), or "polyvalent," in the words of Javier Cercas (55). Some, like Laurent Binet, even refuse to speak about truth—"a big word with too many meanings" (38)—preferring to delineate between "veracity" ("the truth of facts") and the literary recontextualization provided by novels. Critical of the wholesale dismissal of truth, which he diagnoses as "literary dandyism" (39), Binet underlines the importance [End Page 484] of tapping into a "deeper and more thought-provoking" version of postmodernism. In tune with this return to historically-rooted forms of literature, Colm Tóibín speaks of the "anchor" (231) that facts supply and Colum McCann of the necessity "to ground the truth somehow" (135), even when some facts are altered. The reliance on facts, partial as it may be, provides a rediscovered "gravitas" (17), as Michael Lackey describes it in his introduction, thanks to which we can conceive of strategies to overcome the dissolution of meanings while preserving the multiper-spectival advantages of the postmodern framework. If biofiction offers alternative truths, these are not always opposed to the narrative a historian or biographer would provide, nor always overlapping with it. In some cases, writers' intuitions are confirmed later by factual or documentary discoveries, or by interviews with the prototypes of their characters (examples include works by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Colum McCann, and Anchee Min). This is, nonetheless, just one side of the coin, since many of the interviewees also write novels and stories in which fictional characters interact with life-based ones, or where very little is known about the prototype of a character. Chika Unigwe, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Emma Donoghue, Nuala O'Connor, and Hannah Kent talk about such borderline...

Chase Riboud’s <em>Hottentot Venus</em> (2003) and the Neo-Victorian: The Problematization of South-Africa and the Vulnerability and Resistance of the Black Other

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a result of these will be a substantial argument throughout the text represented in the historical and fictional character of the Venus Hottentot. She was seen as the icon of sexual deviancy and became a victim of the white colonizer as the embodiment of black racialized sexuality for Europeans. However, despite her vulnerability, in the narrative she gains agency in resistance in Butlerean terms. In the Hottentot Venus, Barbara Chase-Riboud tries to bring to light the experience and the memory of slavery as they constitute a key element in the reconstruction of the past and in the construction of a better future. Similarly, the process of recovery and identity construction in a postcolonial era determined by the traces of colonial trauma is an important element in the fictionalization of Sarah Baartman’s life as an icon of the idealization and problematization of South-Africa. These issues bring to the fore questions of race and feminism, the idealization of the colonies and colonized people in contrast with white imperial subjects, and the consideration of the contemporary neo-slave narrative as a neo-Victorian genre.

Mike Brown's Body: New Materialism and Black Form

Mike Brown's Body:New Materialism and Black Form André Carrington (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Stowage of the British Slave Ship Brookes Under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, digital ID cph.3a34658. [End Page 276] "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." —President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961 Is colorblindness a queer form? There is something Black about spatial practices of incarceration and perishment that dehumanize living matter.1 The Brookes (fig. 1) is a figure for the flesh. The flesh is pressed into the Brookes and the Zong. The flesh becomes knowledge through art: Barbara Chase-Riboud's Echo of Lions (1989) and Djimon Honsou's performance in Amistad (1997); the illustration above and its reproductions; M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry and Amma Asante's film Belle. To the putative owners, speculators, and underwriters of these ships, the flesh was only so much precious metal temporarily suspended in a perishable state. Posterity, the potential for power to reproduce itself and its world through the flesh, spilled out of the hold of those ships. Out of the hold of those ships, the lonely, uncovered flesh of Michael Brown spilled out into the street. Millions of eyes to swarm around him spilled out of the hold. The uninvited ghost of Renisha McBride spilled out onto Theodore Wafer's porch. Olaudah Equiano, as he was pressed into the service of making a new world for others, recalled his own flesh being "hurried away even amongst the uncircumcised" and swept up into the hold along with "a people who did not circumcise, and ate without washing their hands."2 He would meet distant peoples who cooked in iron pots and sharpened their teeth; he would worry over whether he would be killed and if his flesh was "to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair."3 Elsewhere I have written about how Black skin and Black hair form the substrate for a variety of commercial and scientific practices that assign them quantifiable value even as they engender intimacy. Our skin and hair belong to us without determining the limits of our belonging because we are more than flesh. Our captors insist we have always been flesh, so we can be left to perish like Michael Brown and Renisha McBride. Like Equiano, we try to remember when we were pressed into the hold. Adapting the new materialism to the task of reckoning with the flesh demands a critique of form, and the work of Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Alex Weheliye articulates this demand in inspiring fashion.4 This work is all the more urgent in the wake of what Ian Haney Lopez terms "reactionary colorblindness," which he traces to the backlash against affirmative action and the contemporary "renewed penchant for the racial formalism which in an earlier and ignominious version helped defend Jim Crow oppression."5This doctrine finds expression in legal reasoning that equates affirmative action with reverse discrimination, "positing whites as black to justify heightened review, but blacks as white to deny the persistence of racial hierarchy."6 In the name of colorblindness, a perverse (queer) [End Page 277] return to disenfranchisement proceeds by enabling the faceless majority to "reconfigure the existing political process in a manner that creates a two-tiered system of political change, subjecting laws designed to protect or benefit discrete and insular minorities to a more burdensome political process than all other laws."7 Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor scrutinizes the form in which a concern for Equal Protection gets articulated in this new moment by meeting it with a timely critique of her own: a rarely cited "political-process doctrine." While the ahistorical claims lodged in the name of a strange (queer) resurgent formalism seek to unmake the humanity of racial minority subjects, the political-process doctrine comprises a new, materialist mode of vigilance toward the ruses of form. Attention to the processes by which Blackness loses its human form, as well as to the processes that enable the human to take on a...

The American Biographical Novel by Michael Lackey

Reviewed by: The American Biographical Novel by Michael Lackey Daniel W. Ross Michael Lackey. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ix + 278 pp. Michael Lackey's The American Biographical Novel is well worth reading for its careful scholarship and its insights into both a literary genre and a select group of novels that are often overlooked. The book has a couple of significant flaws, which I will detail as a warning to readers; however, by no means would I wish to suggest that these imperfections should discourage anyone from reading Lackey's book. This book offers some real insights, several of which surprised me. For one, I appreciated the aforementioned fact that many of these novels are not well known; if the purpose of criticism is to encourage one to read more widely, Lackey has accomplished that. His thesis is that biographical novels offer insights into truth that historical novels might not be free to give precisely because novelists are not bound to the facts of a single life. He makes a strong case for what he calls the "dual-temporal" truths of biographical novels, truths that can simultaneously give readers "a vivid and compelling vision of the past" while saying "something substantive and relevant about the present" (179). As Lackey says, the biographical novelist does not owe his readers an accurate depiction of the historical figure's life, a reality which frees him to create a truth less likely to be found in biographical or historical treatments of the same subject. Lackey's analysis is especially illuminating in two areas: the extent to which biographical novels reveal the complexities of German fascism and of America's racial history. The former subject is covered in two chapters, which deal primarily with Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It and Lance Olsen's Nietzsche's Kisses. In these discussions, the author makes the point that important biographical figures like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche can become literary symbols that their authors use "to illuminate more than the individual subject's life" (68). This strategy works especially well when the portrayal of the biographical subject is balanced against a less brilliant character who understands neither the philosopher's work nor the implications of Hitler's rantings. In Olsen's novel, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth plays such a role. Through these secondary characters the novelist helps us to see "the conditions that made it possible for Hitler and the Nazis to seemingly accept and promote Nietzsche's writings and ultimately come to power" (97). I attribute the soundness of these interpretations to Lackey's remarkable command of scholarship: not just of literary criticism, but of German intellectual history and the many cultural debates about race in America. More effectively than any recent scholar I can remember, Lackey shows how audiences were seduced by Hitler's [End Page 774] Mein Kampf (a fact which always amazes anyone who has read the book in the aftermath of World War II). As we read of Hitler's sinister selling of Germany as a Christian nation, it is hard not to think about political debates that still surface in the twenty-first century. The discussion of race focuses on three novels: Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemmings: A Novel. Only the discussion of the third novel disappoints, primarily because Lackey goes off on a tangent to discuss Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. He does not take his eye off the ball when interpreting Bontemps's 1936 novel, first showing its superiority to Guy Endore's Babouk (1934) and then allowing it to illuminate his reading of Styron's Nat Turner. Here again, the use of historical background is insightful; by discussing the influence of the Enlightenment on apologies for slavery, Lackey demonstrates the way slaveholders rationalized that even a slave like Gabriel Prosser, who could read and write, was incapable of understanding freedom: "blacks can be trained to desire freedom and even to formulate arguments in favor of freedom, but they lack the intellectual capacity to know or experience freedom on their own" (174). To be fair, I admit...

"A tiger will perhaps tear you to pieces, but he will not steal your life": the politics of animal use in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus: a novel

"A tiger will perhaps tear you to pieces, but he will not steal your life": the politics of animal use in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus: a novel

On the Novel and Civic Myth

On the Novel and Civic Myth

The Neo-Victorian Doctor and Resurrected Gothic Masculinities

Both neo-Victorian fiction and popular discourse repeatedly reprise the nineteenth-century Gothic doctor figure to represent a crisis of post-Enlightenment masculinity, as well as problematising the past's continuing influence over our own time. From parodic to sinister re-imaginings of transgressive medical men, the trope constitutes a significant schema through which the nineteenth century is filtered, formatted, and reactivated in and for the present. This essay attempts both an overview of the prevalence of this neo-Victorian trope and an exploration of its deployment in a series of literary case studies of Gothicised masculinities including Faye L. Booth's Trades of the Flesh (2009), Barbara Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus (2003), Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger (1999), Matthew Kneale's English Passengers (2000), and Barbara Vine's The Blood Doctor (2002).

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

Reviewed by: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet Patricia Stuelke Tillet, Salamishah . 2012 . Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC : Duke University Press . $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. 248 pp. In a second-season flashback, viewers of Shonda Rhimes’s delicious soap opera Scandal finally become privy to African-American political fixer Olivia Pope’s reasons for (temporarily) abandoning her job and her affair with married white president Fitzgerald Grant, despite having helped steal the election for him. “I’m feeling a little Sally Hemings–Thomas Jefferson about all this,” she tells Fitz in a stolen hallway conversation. How does this rare historical invocation fit into Scandal’s optimistically postracial yet manifestly corrupt world? Salamishah Tillet’s penetrating study of the uses of slavery in African-American post–civil rights culture offers a means of approaching this question, suggesting that we might understand Rhimes’s show and other texts like it as complicated articulations of African Americans’ ambivalent dreams for American democracy in the post–civil rights era. Tillet’s elegantly constructed book analyzes representations of slavery in the post–civil rights period by African-American authors, artists, and intellectuals as responses to the experience of “civil estrangement”: the paradox in which African Americans possess equality under the law but remain barred from American economic prosperity and the nation’s official myths, monuments, and histories. African-American post–civil rights representations of slavery respond to this paradox by advancing what Tillet terms “a democratic aesthetic,” a “mode of poetics and politics” (12) that critiques myths of American equality while simultaneously writing African Americans back into those narratives and revising them for a radically democratic future. In defining this aesthetic, Tillet explains that these representations neither idolize the past nor revere the state but rather advance a “critical patriotism,” one that incorporates elements of postmodern skepticism and Post-Soul aesthetics in order to advance a utopian dream of democracy while “remaining skeptical of its materialization” (12). In her book’s first two chapters, Tillet investigates the deployment of this “democratic aesthetic” by interrogating post–civil rights revisions of antebellum icons. The first chapter traces how novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, playwright Robert McCauley, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed reimagine Sally Hemings not as a victim or an empty symbol, but rather as a “radical black female subject” (23). These authors’ restagings of the interracial intimacy between Hemings and Jefferson, Tillet argues, revise sanitized myths of slavery and register post–civil rights civic disenfranchisement while casting Hemings as an agent of history and an ideal model for post–civil rights citizenship. In the second chapter, Tillet [End Page 146] considers post–civil rights renditions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Topsy, tracing how works by Ishmael Reed, Robert Alexander, Bill T. Jones, and Kara Walker use satire to puncture the hegemony of Stowe’s sentimentality while reimagining more complex Uncle Toms and Topsys. Both of these chapters would make for excellent reading in undergraduate literature or composition classrooms, as Tillet organizes them in clearly framed sections that would offer undergraduates useful models for comparative analytical essays. The second chapter, however, is ultimately more compelling than the first, due to Tillet’s careful exploration of how the texts she discusses “are remembering slavery at different points in time” (85). She is beautifully attentive, for example, to how Reed’s 1976 Tom registers a cynical critique of the Black Power movement, while Alexander’s later reappropriation of Tom registers the frustration of the civic estrangement that arose after Rodney King’s beating. In contrast, such attention to shifting historical context is noticeably absent from Tillet’s first chapter. Further consideration of her authors’ revisions of Sally Hemings in relation to the different historical moments of their production (ranging from 1979 to 2008), particularly the evolving context of US feminisms, might have helped Tillet more fully account for the texts’ variegated presentations of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship. The second half of Tillet’s book takes up more collective forms of remembering and representing slavery, considering post–civil rights African-American heritage tourism and African-American...

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

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...

Sara Baartman and the “Inclusive Exclusions” of Neoliberalism

Abstract This essay examines three African-American feminist texts—Elizabeth Alexander's “The Venus Hottentot,” Barbara Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus. In their nuanced critiques of the sovereign power of neoliberalism as both a sociopolitical and a discursive condition, that is, as what Foucault calls a biopolitics, these texts represent a feminist cultural activism that challenges the hegemonic forms of neoliberalism and transnational market relations. Despite their apparent focus on African-American women's bodies and their exploitation and instrumentalization, what is additionally meaningful in these texts is that the more recent history of globalization to which women are subjected under late capitalism—a history within and on which these texts and their writers work—is shown to be coextensive (although not homologous) with the history of imperialism that made it possible in the first place to mark out a place for a Sara Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus) in nascent capitalist relations and forces of production and in the early colonization of southern Africa. In their nonreferential literary representations of twentieth-century neoliberalism, Alexander, Parks, and Chase-Riboud give readers a marginal subject, “Sara Baartman,” who serves not simply as an icon of sexual difference between white and black, as some critics have argued, but as an economic placeholder for these interrelated nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic and social histories.

Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, <em>Salamishah Tillet</em>

Reviewed by: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet Robert Anthony Bennett III (bio) Salamishah Tillet Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 248 pp. ISBN 9780822352426 paper. Salmishah Tillet's Sites of Slavery builds on the work of Roger Smith's Civic Ideals by expanding on the idea of "civic estrangement," the notion that a person or group of people have been marginalized and underrepresented in the symbols and narrative of United States history. To be more specific, the aim of Tillet's book is "to broaden and complicate the ways in which scholars define and critically interrogate contemporary representations of slavery" as a means to illustrate the ways African Americans have been excluded from the narrative of American history (p. 4). The author defines "sites of slavery" as "the objects, texts, figures, places, and narratives from the American past that provide tangible links between present-day Americans and American chattel slavery" (p. 5). Her interdisciplinary approach draws upon film, visual and performance art, music, and a wealth of secondary sources in an effort to support her claims. Tillet identifies four "sites of slavery," each serving as the focus of one of the four chapters. The first chapter, "Freedom in a Bondsmaid's Arms," contextualizes the sexual relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Tillet draws on the work of several scholars to discuss the ways in which they interpret the life of Sally Hemings within the context of "civic estrangement." These scholars, according to Tillet, reconstruct the ways in which enslaved Black women were critical agents in the founding of the United States. Throughout this chapter, she uses the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud, Robie McCauley, and Annette Gordon-Reed to illustrate why their various interpretations of Hemings's life are vital to the telling of early American history, because her biography "ties black people to the founding of the nation, reinforces birthright claims, and gives them access to a 'kind of epic American identity' previously unavailable to them" (p. 48). Chapter two, "The Milder and More Amusing Phases of Slavery," discusses the representations of Blacks in Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the works of other writers to examine their depiction of enslaved Blacks through satire. When Stowe's novel was published in 1852, it became the first book to sell a million copies. Tillet illustrates that numerous Black male writers sought to distance themselves from the caricature of Uncle Tom as a way to redefine Black manhood. In all, African American writers throughout the post-civil rights period demonstrated "that a confrontation with the complex past of slavery is the only path toward a sustainable practice of American democracy" (p. 93). [End Page 124] "A Race of Angels," the third chapter, examines "Back to Africa" tourism and its link to historical memory for African Americans. Tillet argues that contemporary scholars have shifted their focus away from the early 20th-century proponents of expatriation, who saw a return to West Africa as a means of freedom. However, in the 21st century, Blacks have become "heritage tourists," visiting countries like Ghana and Senegal "as part of an obligatory process of self-identification and cultural affirmation" (p. 98). The author uses photography and film to help illustrate this point, relying on the work of Chester Higgins, Carrie Mae Weems, and Haile Gerima. In the final chapter, "What Have We Done to Weigh So Little on Their Scale?," Tillet examines two contemporary court cases, Cato v. United States and the African American Slaves Descendants Litigation, as well as legal history more broadly to demonstrate how 21st-century African Americans advocated for "intergenerational monetary compensation" as a way to restructure American civic memory as it relates to their lives and history. The epilogue of Sites of Slavery points out that while African Americans are reexamining their position in American society through the lens of chattel slavery, so are many Whites. She mentions the Tea Party, among other organizations, to demonstrate opposition to revisiting and revising the traditional American narrative. Scholars from academic and artistic backgrounds...

Abrading Boundaries: Reconsidering Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry

Abrading BoundariesReconsidering Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry Suzette A. Spencer (bio) and Carlos A. Miranda (bio) Edgy, epic, oft-times controversial, always boundary-crossing—Barbara Chase-Riboud has attracted international attention as a sculptor, novelist, and poet for the past fifty years. This issue of Callaloo features creative work by Chase-Riboud alongside critical engagements with her creative writing, poetry, and sculpture. Few Americans, certainly few women or African Americans, have excelled across the genres of sculpture, poetry, and fiction simultaneously and received the acclaim Chase-Riboud has consistently garnered. While there is an overwhelming tendency to concentrate primarily on her sculpture, the time has now come, we believe, to reconsider Chase-Riboud as more than a sculptor. The critical essays assembled here in Callaloo navigate across Chase-Riboud's capacious oeuvre. One of our central aims in this gathering of creative and scholarly work is to impress the dynamism, diversity, and breadth of Chase-Riboud's artistic compositions. We aspire to abrade the boundaries that have compartmentalized her work. To date, Chase-Riboud has published two books of poetry and five historical novels, in addition to sculpting and drawing. Her poetry books include From Memphis & Peking and Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, both of which bear a synthetic relation to her sculptural work. Her novels include Sally Hemings (on Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress), Valide: A Novel of the Harem (on gender and power in the Ottoman Empire), Echo of Lions (on the 1839 Amistad ship mutiny), The President's Daughter (sequel to Sally Hemings), and Hottentot Venus (on the life of Sarah Baartman), a complement to her prizewinning sculpture Africa Rising at the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, New York. In 1986, Chase-Riboud won the Carl Sandburg Award for her poetry, an honor she shares with notables such as Nikki Giovanni. In 1989, the Connecticut State Legislature and the governor of Connecticut recognized Chase-Riboud's Echo of Lions for outstanding contribution to Connecticut state history. Most recently, in 2004, her novel Hottentot Venus won the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for fiction and was nominated for the prestigious Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Legacy Award, alongside novels by Austin Clarke, Nalo Hopkinson, Edward P. Jones, Mat Johnson, and Caryl Phillips. Chase-Riboud's sculpture Africa Rising at the African Burial Ground was awarded the Best Public Arts Design Award for art produced between 1993 and 1998. Barbara Chase-Riboud's work is as challenging as it is inspiring. She is an artist who is unafraid of contradiction, conflict, and multiplicity. "If you have to have acceptance," she says, "then you shouldn't be an artist. There is no such thing as an 'acceptable artist.'"1 Her literary and sculptural provocations are thus as unsettling as they are revelatory of the [End Page 711] silences, hauntings, and paradoxes that shape the making of the past, whether we think of Africa or the Americas. In this Special Issue we revisit these provocations by juxtaposing excerpts from Chase-Riboud's novels alongside selections from her poetry, images of her sculptures, and critical essays from an interdisciplinary group of intellectuals who address all of these key areas. We also include a comprehensive interview with Chase-Riboud in which she talks frankly about the relationship between her sculpture and her creative writing and the intricacies of her craft. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1939, Chase-Riboud divides her time between Paris, France, and Rome, Italy, and has lived in France for the past forty years. She is part of a long line of cosmopolitan African American artists who, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, have traveled to Europe in search of artistic opportunities and training and in contestation of United States racial proscriptions. In fact, she is part of a trajectory of African American women artists—several also from Philadelphia—for whom Europe represented possibilities that far exceeded those available in the United States. This trajectory includes artists such as Anne E. Anderson Walker (1855–1929), Mary Edmonia Lewis (1843–1911), Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), Laura Wheeler Waring (1887–1948), Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998), Augusta Savage (1892–1962...

On Hearing of a Death in Prison

On Hearing of a Death in Prison Barbara Chase-Riboud (bio) For George Jackson Blois, August 21, 1971 I heardA wailing, mournful, sacredSong,A bitter, screaming, humpingSong,A positively displeased Nigger'sSong,A Maximum SecuritySong,A river of bile,Har-Monica fresh filled withSalty blood.I taste itMyselfNow. I heardA silent GeorgiaBadlandsSong,Flat-outIn the damned blackOf the American sky,White speckled withFilthy stars,Spangled,Cold as ice,Cold as Hell.Frozen overOut there,OneDies. [End Page 955] I heardA teeth-grinding, heart stripping lover'sSong,A fine jazz ricochet of desire,Drizzling gall,Sex-starved and slave-chained inSongs of sixpence,The inherited penalty of painPassed from father to son inSongsOf penitentiaries:San Rafael,Folsom,San Quentin,Alcatraz,Soledad. I heardA never-ending song ofSolitude,Eleven years of putrid cement,Nailed downWith bulletsAnd theConstitutionFor six-seven dollars net,A song eleven years to sing ofSolitary confinement,Excrement thrown,The total pride of death,The soul-destroying body search,A rape of every aperture,A curse so foulMen cry. I heardBlack notes on lined paper,Barred,Dropping wounded daysOf manhood lostIn gut-punctured, spine-shatteredDeath,Death of the spirit,Death of the bowels,Death in the white heat [End Page 956] Of a charred sunlit court,So lonely it seizesThe heart,That hoarded, dreamed ofMoment of LifeThe last. I heardA clamorous, clapper-tonguedSound,The holocaust of Easter Week,A trenchant trill,Quivering in hear overThe Entire Race,Blue desert women,Wind and sand whipped pillarsStretching across Africa,Tattooed hands held overThat obscene opening,Kohl-ed eyes weepingColored tears for Colored Men,Red veils aspired in RageIn Rage, In Rage, In Rage. I heardA SongSo rich in gut and sweatThat any sperm would flower there,And any SongRejoice in beingNotFor singing. [End Page 957] Barbara Chase-Riboud Barbara Chase-Riboud, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a sculptor, poet, and fiction writer who studied visual art at Temple University, Yale University, and the American Academy in Rome, before she moved to Paris, France. Her writing career began in 1974 with the publication of From Memphis & Peking: Poems. She is also author of six other books, including Hottentot Venus: A Novel, Echo of Lions, and Sally Hemings: A Novel, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in 1979. Chase-Riboud began her career as a visual artist as early as the 1960s, when she exhibited her work at the New York Architectural League Show, the Festival of Negro Art in Dakar in Senegal, and the L'Oeil Ecoute Festival in Avignon, France. Since that time, her work has been mounted in museums throughout the United States and Europe. Copyright © 2009 Barbara Chase-Riboud

Politics of Belonging: Race, Freedom, and Subjectivity in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Echo of Lions

Politics of Belonging:Race, Freedom, and Subjectivity in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Echo of Lions Trimiko Melancon (bio) As the "Others" of society who can never really belong, strangers threaten the moral and social order. But they are simultaneously essential for its survival because those who stand at the margins of society clarify its boundaries. —Patricia Hill Collins The ideological dependence on racialism is intact and, like its metaphysical existence, offers in historical, political, and literary discourse, a . . . route into meditations on morality and ethics . . . a way of thinking about justice; a way of contemplating the modern world. —Toni Morrison In her 1989 novel Echo of Lions, Barbara Chase-Riboud explores the vexed relationship between race, belonging, freedom, and subjectivity during the nineteenth century and within a larger transhistorical context. Drawing upon historical events while concomitantly employing postmodern and feminist techniques and interventions, Chase-Riboud deconstructs the very notion of "otherness"—namely, through tropes of belonging and disbelonging—as it relates to social constructions of race and national identity. Whereas "Others" of society are marginalized to putatively maintain social and ideological "boundaries," as the opening epigraphs delineate, those same individuals are paramount: serving as sites and "counter-discourses" that define, if even by seeming contrast, the paradoxes entrenched in society and its varied structures. Chase-Riboud's fictionalized historical account of the Amistad revolt, and the ensuing trials and debates concerning slavery and the Constitution, strategically foregrounds individuals on the "margins" to expose the disparities and contradictions inherent in United States articulations of universal equality. Through her characterizations of individuals—black and white, African and American, captured and free—who ultimately serve as metonymical entities within the text, Chase-Riboud illuminates, I argue, the vexed relationship between democracy, citizenship, and freedom. They are, that is, neither fixed nor universal, but rather mediated by race and constructed as invariably at odds with black agency and humanity. Not only does she illustrate the inconsistencies of United States and New World discourses, but she simultaneously redefines "blackness" and the politics of belonging within an American, as well as larger global, context. [End Page 845] Redefining Race, Identity, and Nation Throughout the Enlightenment, modernity, and beyond, Continental Africans have both denotatively and connotatively "come to signify," as Toni Morrison avers, "the entire range, views, assumptions, readings and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learnings about the[m]" (7). Constructed in diametrical opposition to "whiteness," which came to embody civilization, enlightenment, and order, black bodies were associated with a different set of semiotics: as inherently uncivilized, disorderly, pagan, and primitive. Mythologized as such to uphold constructions of Western identity, black identity was relegated to a state of inferiority, whereby blackness came to function symbolically. "For the West," as Michelle M. Wright contends, conceptualizations of the "Black Other" and "Black inferiority" are a "result not of objective observation but instead the need for self-definition. In order to posit itself as civilized, advanced, and superior, Western discourse must endlessly reify Africa and the Black as its binary opposite" (27). Such ideologies dehumanized and stigmatized black people to, in turn, justify their exploitation through a transatlantic slave trade, which, as Cornell West asserts, marks "origins of Western modernity and the criminal foundations of American democracy" (51). In Echo of Lions, Barbara Chase-Riboud questions both American democracy in relation to race and the very stigmatization of black identity as it intersects with transatlantic and New World slavery. Challenging the ways black bodies function historically within a politics of difference and "Otherness," she dramatizes African culture and society, specifically via her protagonist Sengbe Pieh, to redefine black identity outside its customary constructions within Western discourse. Her delineation of Mende society at the onset of her novel subverts particular mythologies propagated about blackness during the Enlightenment, modernity, and beyond. Contrary to myopic constructions of Africa in the West, Chase-Riboud characterizes Mende society—and, by extension, continental Africa—as replete with order and civilization; familial, legal, and moral structures; aristocratic lineage and socio-economic class strata; and political astuteness and intelligence. Not only does her concentrated focus on race, identity, and nation within an African context humanize black people, but it also significantly ascribes to them subjectivity, order, and autonomy prior...

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Capital: In Barbara Chase Riboud's "Central Park"

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Capital: In Barbara Chase Riboud's "Central Park"

On Her Own Terms: An Interview with Barbara Chase-Riboud

On Her Own Terms:An Interview with Barbara Chase-Riboud Suzette A. Spencer (bio) This interview took place in January 2006, at Barbara Chase-Riboud's home in Paris, France. Follow-ups were conducted via email. SPENCER: Would you tell us about your background? CHASE-RIBOUD: I'll tell you an anecdote that I begin with. I really can't tell you why I do the things I do or why I've had these two careers. I have to tell you that the literary career came very, very late in life. It's not as if I started out writing, although I did write something when I was eleven years old and I was accused of plagiarism. SPENCER: Is that why you stopped writing? CHASE-RIBOUD: That's why I stopped. This was when I was eleven, and I didn't go back to writing again until I was in my thirties, late thirties as a matter of fact. The first collection of poems was a collection which spanned maybe six or seven years. SPENCER: Did your parents think that the plagiarism accusation was race related? CHASE-RIBOUD: It was race related in the fact that the teacher obviously thought that no little black girl was capable of writing this poem about falling leaves and death and what have you. SPENCER: Was there poetry and lots of reading in your home? CHASE-RIBOUD: There was a lot of reading. I was one of these kids that read under the covers with a flashlight. I read everything that I could find. SPENCER: What were some of the things that you read? CHASE-RIBOUD: I don't really remember. A lot of romances, a lot of novels. There must have also been some art history books in there. My father was a painter. The way I discovered my father was a painter was that I went down to the cellar one day and I saw all [End Page 736] these paintings that I had never before [seen], very beautiful paintings, sort of Manet-like paintings, big landscapes of people working, [paintings] that I never knew existed. What happened was that he wanted to go to architectural school. He wanted to be an architect, and of course he couldn't. He was rejected [because of race], and he couldn't get into architectural school, so he went to work for my grandfather at a construction company as a kind of rag-time architect. That is, somebody else would have to sign his drawings because he didn't have a license. SPENCER: Let's talk about your time at Yale for a moment. During your first year as an art student in 1959, you were commissioned to design an art piece, a fountain, for the Wheaton Shopping Plaza in Maryland. It served as a partial portion of your master's thesis. This was quite an extraordinary achievement. How did this project come about? CHASE-RIBOUD: I had a friend whom I had met in Rome who had been very influential in getting me into Yale in the first place. She was a landscape architect. She was working in New York, and she called me up one day in New Haven and said that she had this shopping center to design and would I like to do the fountain. I said sure, and I did the scale. It wasn't a submission; it was a commission. I thought it was a pretty good idea for a piece. Then I had to find a factory, and I found an airplane factory to produce it. I had to do all the molds. I had to do the drawing, the molds, and I had to write up the whole thing. I had to over [see] the work, and I had to install it. So I figured that was a pretty good thesis. But I didn't ask anybody permission to do it, and I didn't tell anybody that I was doing it, so what happened with the administration was that at the last minute, two weeks before graduation, they said, "Your thesis, although it's very interesting and it's very good, was not done under...

The Iron Fettered Weight of All Civilization: The Project of Barbara Chase-Riboud's Narratives of Slavery

The Iron Fettered Weight of All Civilization:The Project of Barbara Chase-Riboud's Narratives of Slavery Ashraf H. A. Rushdy (bio) In three important ways, Barbara Chase-Riboud stands out from the post-civil rights generation of writers who produced contemporary narratives of slavery. First, over the course of almost a quarter-century, from the publication of Sally Hemings in 1979 to Hottentot Venus in 2003, she has consistently focused each of her five novels on the subject of slavery; no other writer has so insistently made slavery the primary topic and setting of her entire narrative oeuvre. Second, Chase-Riboud has expanded the geographical scope of American writers taking up the subject of slavery. She has explored the dynamic of enslavement in the usual settings chosen by American writers—ships during the transatlantic voyage and American plantations in the South—as well as places not usually associated with narratives of slavery—New England and Philadelphia. Even more significantly, though, she has brought an unparalleled attention to the practice and effects of slavery in Africa and Europe and Asia. Again, no other novelist of her generation has attempted to understand the global scope of slavery with the kind of attention Chase-Riboud has devoted to the subject. Third, in the course of a quarter-century and five novels devoted to the subject of slavery, Chase-Riboud has produced the most extended, searching, and subtle meditations on the curious place of enslaved people in the dynamic of power. Indeed, her five novels can be said to be nothing less than lyrical and candid examinations of the profound dialectic Hegel described between "slave" and "master" in The Phenomenology of Mind. These three distinctive accomplishments—her career-long focus on slavery, her attention to global manifestations of enslavement, and her pointed Hegelian meditations on the master-slave dialectic—suggest to me that there is another way to read the total body of Chase-Riboud's prose fiction. Rather than seeing each novel as a discrete work concerned with particular characters and examining specific conditions (which of course each novel is), we can also see them all together as ongoing ruminations in the large-scale philosophical project on which Chase-Riboud is embarked, a project in which her primary subject is precisely the complex, fragile, and contradictory dynamic of the master-slave dialectic. I do not wish to suggest that we should ignore or downplay Chase-Riboud's works as distinct novels, with distinct subjects, but rather that we can deepen our understanding of the trajectory of her work by probing into the dynamic she makes central to each of her novels. Nor am I suggesting that Chase-Riboud is attempting to produce a universal or uniform formula explaining the master-slave dialectic whenever and wherever it is manifest. Rather, Chase-Riboud's scope (different cultures, different national and international settings, different systems of enslavement) is meant to demonstrate both the shared and unique imperatives that drive some to claim ownership over others. [End Page 758] In this paper, I will attempt to trace the major terms of her project—the way she teases out implications of the master-slave dialectic—by looking at her first, second, and fifth novels. In these three works—Sally Hemings, Valide (1986), and Hottentot Venus—Chase Riboud explores three different kinds of enslavement and asks three related but different questions about the meaning of slavery and its effects. In Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud examines the master-slave dialectic within a personal relationship; her primary question in that novel is how slavery distorts human and sexual intimacy. In Valide, she explores the ironies and contradictions in a society in which slavery is imbricated with power, not as the necessary precondition of power (mastery) but rather as an involved agency in the structure of power. In Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud exposes the deeper meanings resonating from the coincidental rise of scientific knowledge and slavery during the European Enlightenment. In these three novels, Chase-Riboud delineates the various and devious ways slavery is involved in personal relationships, cultural systems, and epistemic models. What makes this a "project," I propose, is Chase-Riboud's nearly-systematic exploration of how slavery as...