Dessa Rose Research Articles

Holding the Pen: Visions and Revisions of the American South in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

ABSTRACT The paper traces the trope of partitioning and de-partitioning in Sherley Anne Williams’s neo-slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) to argue that the richly structured, polyvocal narrative reveals a political impetus: it privileges the protagonist’s voice and vision in order to comment on the representational paradigm endemic to mainstream cultural representations of the American South. Dessa Rose challenges those well-known, white-authored representations of the South that either emit or distort the Black perspective. Its structure, especially its initial reliance on the monocular, fragmenting white gaze and its subsequent disruption of this mode of seeing ultimately allow Dessa to emerge as the only reliable narrator, thus amplifying – what is more, enabling – the eventual catharsis while producing a complexly fragmented vision of the South.

Unsentimental Historicizing: The Neo-Slave Narrative Tradition and the Refusal of Feeling

AbstractRooted partially in the US sentimental tradition, neo-slave narratives often feature lyrical language, emphasize the emotional experience of enslaved characters, and evoke the reader’s sympathy and empathy. Highlighting the use of sentimental conventions in neo-slave narratives including Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2007), and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), this essay explores the tension between sentimentality and the radical political goals of neo-slave narratives. This essay analyzes Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) as a neo-slave narrative that rejects rather than revises sentimental conventions. The novel’s central conceit, a literal subterranean rail network, illustrates how anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism interlock to materially and discursively enable the US nation-state and liberal citizenship; sentimental conventions facilitate processes of containment and capture that allow this infrastructure to function smoothly rather than disrupting it. In contrast, Underground foregrounds the prosaic over the lyrical, veils the interiority of its characters, and unsettles the reader’s desire to feel with or for the humanity of the enslaved. The novel models an alternative way of engaging slavery as an infrastructure, gesturing toward a mode of fugitive affiliation premised on acts of tangible care rather than affective identification or the possession of interiority.

Virginia Woolf by Ira Nadel

 Reviews American reality. Wilson, the study argues, employs sympathetic but ultimately ineffectual characters to condemn kindness without justice and utilizes images of childhood innocence and naturalism to subvert conceptions of black unworthiness. A novel interpretation of Keckley’s memoir, reflecting her time as the Lincolns’ seamstress and servant, views black female textile production as a critique of white, normative aesthetics devaluing black creation, and the memoir’s deliberate use of epistolary evidence as exposing the unspoken racist and misogynistic notions beneath seemingly supportive assertions of liberalism. eories of sonicity and aurality are brought to bear on Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, as Fox argues that music serves as an alternative rhetoric countering the vacuity of abstract political ideas that yield no meaningful social reform. Sherley Anne Williams ’s Dessa Rose is framed as the response to the call of the earlier texts. rough a politics of sound embracing spirituals, love songs, and call and response, the novel is seen as undermining conventional sign systems that demean black women. Placing these works in conversation reveals black women as activist theorists, not merely the objects of theory. At some points, the language of Resistance Reimagined is more complex than it needs to be. For instance: ‘e domain of resistive praxis subsequently takes on a proprietary cast, as an entity irretrievable beyond the bounds of outwardly incendiary transgression at the hands of embattled masses or of charismatic/celebrity male leadership via authorized avenues of dissent’ (p. ). Frequently one has the sense that new terminology is being applied to prevailing ideas. While not always novel, however, Resistance Reimagined is always informative. Photographs of the Sojourner Truth memorial and the Underground Railroad monument in Battlecreek , Michigan, of the Harriet Wilson monument in Milford, New Hampshire, and of a portrait of Anna Julia Cooper in doctoral regalia are among the items of visual evidence that add to an edifying argument. Relegating black women’s critiques to the societal margins will be impossible aer engaging with Fox’s analysis of the multiple forms through which black women contested injustice. E U V B Virginia Woolf . By I N. (Critical Lives) London: Reaktion Books. .  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Biographies of Virginia Woolf cover a small but substantial shelf. Ira Nadel’s recent Virginia Woolf in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series contributes to this abundance by participating in the ‘spatial turn’ in literary studies. As Warf and Arias note in their Introduction to e Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, ), ‘space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs [. . .] where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen’ (p. ). We might see Woolf, especially in To the Lighthouse, prefiguring at least one of the emphases in this field: ‘the notion of the autonomous subject standing apart from the world he/she observes has come under question’ (p. ). Nadel structures the MLR, .,   biography into chapters focused on Woolf’s residences throughout her life—from  Hyde Park Gate as a child to Monk’s House in the last years of her life. is spatial organization allows Nadel to consider ‘Woolf’s use and need of place’ (p. ), for example in A Room of One’s Own, but also how ‘where she was defined who she might become’ (p. ). Nadel makes the most of this methodology. His chapter ‘ Gordon Square, –’ summarizes well the significance of this period to Woolf and her siblings by stressing how changes of London neighbourhood, architecture, and household arrangements—along with a string of family deaths—led to what we know by the spatial designation ‘Bloomsbury’. Using varied sources, including essays, memoirs and autobiographies, and critical works, Nadel provides a compressed and readable overview of the founding of Bloomsbury. One of the strongest sections of the volume is the exploration of photography’s meanings for Woolf; this appears in the final chapter, ‘Monk’s House II, –’. Nadel offers tantalizing biographical details: Woolf was ‘thrilled with Leonard’s purchase of a [. . .] Zeiss camera’ in  (p. ); she ‘refused to be photographed by Cecil Beaton and was furious at appearing in a collection of his images’ (p. ); she ‘asked Vita for [a photo...

Surviving the Impossibility of Black Motherhood: Trauma and Healing in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

Surviving the Impossibility of Black Motherhood: Trauma and Healing in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

Subtle Resistance: On Sugar and the Mammy Figure in Kara Walker's A Subtlety and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose

Subtle Resistance:On Sugar and the Mammy Figure in Kara Walker's A Subtlety and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose Raquel Kennon (bio) I could never arrive at the heart of the thing through placards or language. —Kara Walker, Interview (2014) Mammy ain't nobody name, not they real one. —Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (1986) Kara Walker's 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, offers a stunning twenty-first-century artistic rejoinder to the infamous 1923 proposal to erect a statue "in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South" on the National Mall.1 Renowned maker of the provocative cut black paper silhouettes affixed to sprawling white gallery walls depicting seething antebellum scenes of racial violence, Walker claims agency over a haunting tradition of racist imagery and stereotypical caricatures embedded in American visual culture.2 In this essay, I analyze primarily the hybrid representational valences in A Subtlety within and against the peculiar historical precedent of white Southern congressmen's nostalgic longing to memorialize the enslaved African American woman caretaker in a monument for posterity at the Capitol of the United States to reveal the stakes of remembrance, race, representation, and resistance. Secondly, I revisit a pivotal scene in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) to interpret a hotly debated moment of contested identity of a Mammy figure between two main characters, Dessa and Rufel, enslaved and free, which makes interracial collaboration against patriarchal systems possible during slavery. I argue that reading these distinct genres together—Walker's monumental sugar-coated Mammy-Sphinx sculpture, A Subtlety, alongside Williams's novel Dessa Rose—presents a strong critique of the cult of Mammy and larger memorialization projects articulated in the 1923 congressional Mammy monument proposal.3 Neo-slave narratives or contemporary narratives of slavery rework, reimagine, and "reinvigorate the slave narrative form," according to Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman in Against the Closet, "to provide more complete accounts of slave life at times us[ing] the trope of silence or impossible disclosure to get at the sexual violence at the heart of slaves' experience" (30). While Williams's Dessa Rose clearly falls within this recuperative genre, Walker's œuvre famously commingles image and textual influences and visually embodies the neo-slave narrative, revealing and revising the perverse subtexts and contexts of classic literature, historical records, and personal experience. As Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw contends in her masterful Seeing the Unspeakable, Walker creates "a fantastically horrific narrative out of racial stereotypes, nostalgic themes, and historical mythology" (5). Walker's large-scale, evanescent public sculpture and the complex scene in Williams's novel, then, problematize enduring impulses to memorialize a fictive icon of the loyal, enslaved black woman. This resistance exposes the Mammy figure as "a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions," to borrow Hazel V. Carby's insightful formulation (15), and registers the intriguing ways producers of imaginative literature and visual culture at once transgress and reconfigure Mammy by denying her existence in racist iconography. [End Page 143] The magnitude and iconic urban setting of Walker's A Subtlety at once engage cartographies of suffering and resistance. Walker constructs this monumental structure, measuring a towering 75½ feet long by 35½ feet tall—its hypervisibility a coy play on its title—to occupy nearly the entire 30,000-square-foot space of the legendary Domino Sugar Refinery located on the industrial waterfront of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a site already set to be demolished from the inception of Walker's piece.4 Built in 1884 and shuttered in 2004, this cultural landmark with the neon forty-foot rooftop Domino Sugar sign, once the world's largest refinery and processing one third of the nation's refined sugar, received its raw material from various sugar-producing countries, including Jamaica and Cuba ("Through a Sugar Refinery" 607-09).5 Installing A Subtlety at this symbolic location, then, invokes the antebellum history of sugar as a dominant consumable good and the geopolitical slave economies of labor, cultivation, refinement, and circulation that rendered it profitable. Walker's installation strikingly presents the stereotypical visage of a bandana-wearing enslaved domestic servant atop a mammoth Mammy-Sphinx hybrid figure, assembled with eighty tons of...

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis

Reviewed by: Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis James Arnett POSTHUMAN BLACKNESS AND THE BLACK FEMALE IMAGINATION, by Kristen Lillvis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 144 pp. $44.95 cloth. Kristen Lillvis's Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination demonstrates how emergent theories of posthumanism and black humanism provide generous new angles through which to look at contemporary African American literature. In this critical work, Lillvis elaborates a genealogy of black women's literature and culture that takes us from canonical neo-slave narratives of the 1980s, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Sherley Ann Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), through the funhouse mirrors of Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu, to the works of Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, and Julie Dash. Ambitiously covering literary, musical, and visual narratives, this text productively periodizes contemporary black women's writing and demonstrates continuities between past-facing and future-oriented narratives. Lillvis's text is a welcome addition to the creative, critical, and theoretical work surrounding the current moment in black literatures, which we might characterize as Afrofuturist—while acknowledging important critiques of the term—and which urgently calls for an evaluation of literature, culture, and politics of the present as it looks towards an increasingly uncertain future. Lillvis explains in the introductions to the book and to each chapter how contemporary eruptions and flashpoints of racial tension call for a reconsideration of some texts whose scholarly criticism and apparatus has unfairly burdened them, limiting an appreciation of their contemporary applicability and vitality. Indeed, Lillvis's work consistently engages with the weight of literary critical discourse on each of these texts, doing due diligence to situate each within the field of scholarly secondary texts. In the first two chapters in particular, Lillvis strives to bridge the gap between black humanisms and posthumanisms to demonstrate how these artists are "transforming the past into a present source of power for black women authors and characters" (p. 6). In her reading of Morrison's Beloved and her more recent A Mercy (2008) in chapter one, Lillvis endeavors to explain the "posthuman liminality" of Beloved and Sethe and how both characters experience "liminal temporalities" in the continuities of past, present, and future in their fraught mother-daughter relationship (pp. 11, 13). In chapter two, Lillvis focuses on the possibility of black-white solidarities in spite of historical and ideological contingencies and violences in Williams. In chapter three, she turns to the fierce theme of reproductive justice and self-narration in Jones's Corregidora (1975) and, in chapter four, the horizon of multiple gendered temporalities and racialized consciousnesses in Butler's Kindred (1979). Chapter five explores the communicative transversality of black womens' relationships in the short fiction of Sheree Renee Thomas [End Page 246] and Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991). This final reading points out how, for instance, multiply constituted and temporally and subjectively liminal consciousness is "developing through connections to others—particularly mothers—across space and time" (p. 116). Lillvis's stated project—to draw together black humanism and post-humanism into a hybridized and generative "posthuman blackness"—is ambitious; she wants to describe the "boundary crossings that exist within posthuman cultures [that] enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic history in the present and also imagine the future as a site of power" (p. 8). There is great difficulty in preserving the ambivalence between a poststructuralist, posthumanist rejection of binaristic thinking in favor of multiplicities and Lillvis's focus on primarily biological, feminine gendered kinship structures. She acknowledges that there are inherently some difficulties in her project: "locating power within the bonds that exist between mothers and children in diasporic cultures can be a dangerous project" (p. 116). Nevertheless, Lillvis capably situates a Deleuzean posthumanist multiplicity as an evolution of DuBoisian double consciousness and Fanonian triple consciousness (chapter four) and then goes further, implicating Glissant's notion of transversality (chapter five). Perhaps the shortcoming of the work is not in what it fails to do but in what it fails to name itself doing, if that is not too fine a point to make. The productive labor of mothering is the central focus of nearly all...

Language and Humanity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose

Language and Humanity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose Jennifer Ryan-Bryant (bio) The titular narrator of Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel Dessa Rose concludes the book by emphasizing the importance of recorded histories. Now that she is old, Dessa observes, "my mind wanders. This why I have it wrote down, why I has the child say it back. I never will forget Nemi trying to read me, knowing I had put myself in his hands. Well, this the childrens have heard from our own lips. I hope they never have to pay what it cost us to own ourselfs" (Williams 236). Here Dessa describes the processes through which storytelling occurs: she recounts her history, asks her son to write it down, and interprets its complex social meaning for future audiences. Most importantly, she frames herself as a text, a living embodiment of the past. This commentary also highlights the work that her story has done to preserve the realities of slavery; in recording these details, she reclaims language itself from her white oppressors. Such strategies work in large part because Williams is able to "combin[e] the discourse of history with that of fiction," thus contesting the restrictions inherent to "the linguistic system of slavery" itself (King 358). Nemi's—white pro-slavery writer Adam Nehemiah's—assumption that her body and voice are texts that he can use for his own purposes disintegrates in the face of Dessa's determination to be and to own herself. As Ashraf Rushdy suggests, she "uses her voice to achieve her liberation from the prescriptive pen of Nehemiah's written record" (366): the command that she exercises over her story enables her both to discredit his version of events and to explore the advantages of blending oral and written representations of her history. Both Williams's critical and her creative work privilege the notion that choices about language use—its shape, style, dissemination, occasions, and subjects—are central to real political and aesthetic innovation. Her two collections of poetry, The Peacock Poems (1975) and Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982), focus on women's efforts to maintain their sense of self in the midst of romantic or social conflict. Many of the individual poems employ blues forms and themes, including portraits of classic-blues singer Bessie Smith, to suggest that even the most painful situations in life produce new sources of beauty. Williams also wrote several examples of literary criticism, among them "The Lion's History: The Ghetto Writes B[l]ack" and "Some Implications of Feminist Theory," that locate real social change in new uses of language and in revisionist histories. In many ways, Dessa Rose represents Williams's most complex exploration of this concern with linguistic definition and power, to some extent because it "questions the privileging of certain voices over others" by positioning multiple voices in sometimes conflicting dialogue with one another (King 353). Dessa begins the novel as the nearly faceless subject of Nehemiah's scrutiny; the title of [End Page 87] the book's first section, "The Darky," reflects his dismissal of her humanity and the control he asserts over the language that defines her. However, Williams devotes the majority of all three sections—"The Darky," which Nehemiah narrates, "The Wench," which a white woman relates, and Dessa's own "The Negress"—to following the emergence of Dessa's influence over the language that has been used to define her. By the end of the story, she is able to refute the notion, in the words of Williams's contemporary Toni Morrison, that "definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined" (Beloved 225). Luckier in the end than Morrison's Sixo, who found that the argument "Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work" was not enough to spare him another beating (224), Dessa wrests control away from the other speakers who try to constrain her in order to become a "demythologizer" and "self-actualizing human being" (Davis 552). As a means of asserting her linguistic acumen, she chooses a set of specific narrative techniques through which to frame her story's personal and historical complexities: song, storytelling, naming, and public performance. Finding Dessa...

“bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored”: The Metaphysical Dilemma in Ntozake Shange, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison

This essay is an analysis of three literary works by black women writers from the U.S.: Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sherley Ann Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In my analysis, I use Shange’s trope of the “methaphysical dilemma” to consider the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in these writers’ textual representations of black women’s bodies. Writing against a historical legacy of colonialism and domination that defined black bodies as “primitive” or “unbridled” (bell hooks 1991), I argue that these works illustrate some of the artistic/literary strategies contemporary black women writers use to re-claim the power of voice/voicing as they depict black women’s subjectivities as unfinished, complex, but self-fashioned creations.

The Restored Literary Behaviors of Neo-Slave Narratives: Troubling the Ethics of Witnessing in the Excessive Present

The Restored Literary Behaviors of Neo-Slave NarrativesTroubling the Ethics of Witnessing in the Excessive Present Jesse A. Goldberg (bio) Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. —Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl When I'm telling you something don't you ever ask if I'm lying. Because they didn't want to leave no evidence of what they done—so it couldn't be used against them. And I'm leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And you children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. —Gayl Jones, Corregidora Early in Gayl Jones's 1975 novel Corregidora, the protagonist Ursa remembers her Great Gram's charge to her descendants, a charge which is instructional for reading the neo-slave narrative genre. Great Gram signifies on the convention by which antebellum slave narratives' authors (and those who wrote their paratextual authenticating documents) had to (re)assert throughout their writing that they were not lying. Such (re)assertions both reinscribed and sought to defy the charge that the enslaved subject could not be trusted to bear witness to truth, whether in a court of law or otherwise.1 Great Gram's slap and assertion trans/re-figures Harriet Jacobs's (et al.) insistence on veracity from a plea for readers' sympathy and trust to an attempt to, as Christina Sharpe emphasizes, "make redress to the law itself" (Monstrous Intimacies 40). Insofar as Great Gram's slap and assertion both repeat and revise the antebellum slave narrative's insistence on truth and call forward in time to a deferred moment of future justice, they illustrate a model for what I call restored literary behaviors. Restored literary behaviors trouble the linear temporality and "social logic" of rupture which are implicitly present in the neo in the phrase neo-slave narrative and explicitly appealed to in Ashraf Rushdy's insistence on figuring the Black Power movement not only as a moment of inspiration, but as a moment of "origin" for the form itself in his seminal 1999 book, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Rather than reading neo-slave narratives as encompassing a genre with a defined moment of origin, as Rushdy does, I argue through a close reading of Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel Dessa Rose and Toni Morrison's 2008 novel A Mercy that neo-slave narratives embed the past, present, and future together in an "excessive present" within their texts and thus enact both [End Page 57] continuity and rupture through literary acts which reach back in time in order to call into the future through engaging with and making demands on the immediately present readers to bear the burden of witnessing. And then, given the familiarity of the invocation of "witnessing" as an ethical demand in African Americanist literary studies, I also, through Fred D'Aguiar's 1997 novel Feeding the Ghosts, gesture towards the limits of witnessing as an end in itself, such that "making demands" in this sense denotes witnessing as a means, not an end, of ethics. In other words, witnessing is not the point, but rather the actions that follow from witnessing are. Of course, the notion of texts making demands on their own readers is a signal attribute of the nineteenth-century slave narrative. While the specific techniques used by authors of slave narratives vary too much to suggest uniformity in mode of appeal, it is clear that slave narratives were aimed towards abolition and therefore explicitly addressed readers through the use of second-person interpellation, thus creating a dialogue between narrator and reader. To use Toni Morrison's words: "Whatever the style and circumstances of the narratives, they were written to say principally two things. One: 'This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but that also represents the race.' Two: 'I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human beings worthy of God's grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery'" ("The Site of Memory" 66...

“Memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind”: The Gothic in Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

MATTHEW TEUTSCH Auburn University KATHARINE HENRY UNC Chapel Hill “Memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind”: The Gothic in Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ONE DOES NOT TYPICALLY PERCEIVE ERNEST J. GAINES AS A GOTHIC, OR more technically, Southern Gothic, author. Instead, readers tend to see him as a historical realist and regionalist writing, in Faulkner’s words, about his “little postage stamp of native soil” in South Louisiana. Reading Gaines through these lenses serves an important purpose since one of his major goals is to tell the stories of the people he knew, people whose voices were absent from literature and history until he began writing. We would like to provide an alternate lens to consider when approaching Gaines’s texts. Rather than limiting him as a regionalist or a realist, we propose studying him as a Southern Gothic author who highlights the changing South and the loss of its governing rules in ways that rival Faulkner’s examinations of the decaying South. Herman Beavers makes this move in Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson when he notes the Gothic elements in Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and In My Father’s House. For this essay, we expand upon Beavers’s observations to focus on how southern codes affect the psyche of Gaines’s white characters. In 1971, Theodore L. Gross observed that African American texts “instinctively adopted the Gothic tradition of American literature and given its more supernatural and surrealistic characteristics a realistic basis, founded on actual lives often lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrifying” (184). While the fearsfacedbycharacters in the works ofCharlesBrockdenBrown,NathanielHawthorne,EdgarAllanPoe,and others carry with them “supernatural and surrealistic characteristics” that represent society, the terrors that Gaines’s characters encounter are found in their own lives through firsthand experience, creating, in 512 Teutsch and Henry essence, what Maisha L. Wester calls a “gothic existence” (35). Wester expounds upon Gross’s observation when she writes that “the horror in [Toni Morrison’s] Beloved is different—it comes from reality—and so, is that much more threatening and terrifying” (1). The tangible aspects of such Gothic lives lead African American authors to “appropriate and revise the genre’s tropes in unique ways to both speak back to the tradition’s originators and to make it a capable and useful vehicle for expressing the terrors and complexities of black existence in America” (1-2). Gaines does this in his novel In My Father’s House (1978), a narrative that traces the lost relationship between Phillip Martin and his son Etienne. The text strongly correlates this familial loss with the continued effects of slavery and segregation. In one scene, the novel takes on a particularly Gothic tone as Etienne hides in his tomb-like bedroom while Chippo Simon speaks with Joanna about Phillip. Chippo senses Etienne’s ghostly presence from the other side of the wall with an eerie feeling that Etienne is listening even though he does not make his presence known. When Gaines’s work incorporates elements of the Gothic, it is not necessarily to speak back to the originators of the tradition but to reply specifically to William Faulkner and his representations of the South. Wester argues that American culture, whether it realizes it or not, makes a concerted turn towards the Gothic: “This is largely because of the nation’s tendency to exclude and repress counter narratives from its dominant metanarrative” (4). If Faulkner, and as some critics note, Quentin Compson, has become the “universally acknowledged spokespersonforthesouthernpsyche”(Kreyling99),thenGainescreates a counternarrative that draws upon the genre to highlight Faulkner’s myopic representation of the South that addresses the African American presence but ultimately relegates it to white spaces. Part of Gaines’s response to Faulkner comes through his examination of the psychological effects of slavery and segregation on the white landowners who worked to preserve their way of life. In this way, Gaines’s deployment of the Gothic differs from that of Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Sherley A. Williams’s Dessa Rose, all of...

Cultural Appropriation for Mainstream Consumption: The Musical Adaptation of Dessa Rose

Analyzing Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 2005 musical adaptation of Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose , this essay suggests that mainstream consumption of black cultural expression is substituted for meaningful social change, highlighting the musical’s investment in a colour-blind ideology that reproduces the very erasures against which Williams wrote.

“I Kill White Mens … Cause I Can”: The Rewriting of Liberation and Mastery in <em>Dessa Rose</em>

Introduction: Freedom and MasteryIn their quest for autonomy and freedom, Black1 writers in nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had to struggle with agonistic inception of Black identity in America. To be Black in America did not, of course, simply mean that one had African ancestors. To be interpellated as Black American additionally meant that one played pivotal role in symbolic production of white American identity. Toni Morrison explains that we cannot understand genesis of American identity without recognition thatnothing highlighted freedom - if did not create it - like slavery. Black slavery enriched country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of and enslavement could be found not only but also, with dramatic polarity created by skin color, projection of not-me. The result was playground for imagination.2Morrison identifies not only that American society was built upon slave labor, but that central principles of American identity, including ideal of freedom, took shape around symbolic economy in which blackness played foundational role of the not-me.3 To be Black was by definition to be excluded from principle of personal and collective principle that took shape in relation to its ideological counterpart, slavery.* The quintessential (white) American identity was made possible by, shaped by, activated by complex awareness and employment of constituted Africanism that was strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego reinforcing, and pervasive.5 Blackness generally, and enslaved Black bodies in particular, became location in American imaginary where anxieties, fears, and inconsistencies of symbolic (white) self could be projected or displaced in order to constitute self-consistent vision of autonomous American individual. To be American was to be to extent that ideals of autonomy, authority, and ultimately absolute power6 could be enacted upon slaves, not-free, ideological antithesis of free white citizen.7In effort to define and claim principle of freedom as their own within this historical context, many Black male writers have struggled with and, to varying degrees, adopted this symbolic economy in their own conceptualizations of freedom, and power, transferring role of not-me, dialectical counterpart of autonomous individual, from Blacks generally to Black women. Speaking of maleauthored slave narratives, Angela Davis explains that lurking within definition of black freedom as reclamation of black manhood is obligatory suppression of black womanhood.8 bell hooks traces this tradition of imagining Black male freedom into recent scholarship on slavery, where she notes predominance of belief that the subjugation of black women was essential to black male's development. According to this myth, Black men could not become proper patriarchs, and thereby develop a positive self-concept, without rite of passage of controlling Black women.9Yet, this very reality - that suppression of Black female agency has so often served as condition of freedom for Black male writers - has led many Black feminist writers and critics to suggest that unique possibilities for rethinking notion of freedom might emerge from Black female subject position. Hortense Spillers argues that because Black women's bodies have been site at which freedom as mastery has been ritualistically enacted, these bodies have served as degree of social for freedom and power, state of social being to which she refers as flesh.10 As ground zero for creation of autonomous individual, flesh offers a praxis and theory for new kind of writing and new conceptualization of freedom. In this essay, I examine how Sherley Anne Williams revisits and rewrites tradition of imagining Black (male) freedom through control of Black women in her neo-slave novel, Dessa Rose (1987). …

Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance Carol E. Henderson Jennifer L. Griffiths.Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2009. 134pp. $39.50. Anyone who picks up a copy of Jennifer Griffiths’s Traumatic Possessions will be struck by the image on the cover—a taped picture of three women looking back at you. These women—who vary in age and temperament—appear to embody different ways of knowing. That is, their body language and clothing suggest that they have a story to tell . . . a story that one might wish to know—a story that could tell us something noteworthy about the lived experiences of black women. But it is the central figure in the photograph that arrests the viewer. Her eyes are piercing. She is the one figure whose eyes tell you that her story won’t come easy. Her direct gaze into the camera asks: Should I trust you? Or better yet, Should I trust you with my story? [End Page 732] Although seemingly a roundabout way to address the nuances of Griffiths’s book, these women stand in, for me, as caretakers of the intimate and sacred everydayness of living black and female in America. These voyages are sojourns of discovery, ones that assay the ability of the mind and spirit to balance the haunting realities of misdeeds done to the flesh. As Griffiths makes clear in her preface to the book, the writers and playwrights she examines in Traumatic Possessions test our notions of a split between body and voice, as the survival of the characters examined hinges on our understanding of the cultural imprints etched on the flesh. Specifically, figures like Dessa Rose, Rodney King, Ursa, and the Hottentot Venus have to negotiate their moments of truths in public spaces that appear to place limits on their ability to speak their social injustices. Thus, one’s figurative struggle with a racialized social script becomes a complicated process of testimony as the dynamics of intersubjectivity place memory and body in direct dialogue with each other. One must draw on the other to accommodate the refiguring of the limits of language in order to speak into existence the body’s pain. Another important element of Griffiths’s theoretical analysis of trauma and the black body is her attention to the process of meaning-making through the memory of the flesh. As Griffiths delineates, the repetitive recitation of survivor narratives in African American culture appears to be an effort to get the reader/viewer not only to listen with an empathetic ear to the nuances of a story, but to also become a sentinel of the process that enables the listener to help author/character fashion meaning from the chaos of trauma. “Challenging traditional narratives that restrict form and content,” writes Griffiths, “they build new forms from memory fragments and bodily states” (12). Hence, private histories reinforced in the discursive limits of the black body create a dialogue between the dominant culture’s version of the “official” narrative of a moment and the personal meaning trapped in the painful silence of singular and communally weighted legacies. Griffiths’s Traumatic Possessions situates itself squarely within other modes of trauma enquiries found in Holocaust studies and postcolonial and critical race scholarship. Her efforts at affecting the more universal aspects of human suffering are efforts to move away from the false projection of cultural anxiety mapped onto the survivors’ tales and bodies, acknowledging the individuality of the traumatic experience while creating a tapestry of dis-cursive reinterpretations that probe and critique the spectacle of reading/witnessing the language of the body in multiethnic public spaces. Griffiths’s analysis relies heavily upon a reconsideration of the vestiges of slavery and its aftermath. Three of the five chapters included here deconstruct, and then reconstruct the memories of chattel bondage. They also reconstruct the memories of the wounded female ancestral figures who testify to the ways traumatic memory possesses the living bodies of their progeny as that memory simultaneously renders impact upon the material lives of those it possesses. In chapter one...

African American women writers' historical fiction

Contexts: 'I would like to do something of lasting service for the race' Setting the Record Straight History as Birthmark: Gayl Jones's Corregidora 'The Undocumentable Inside of History': Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose 'her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing': Toni Morrison's Beloved and Phyllis Perry's Stigmata

"A Seeping Invisibility": Maternal Dispossession and Resistance in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and The President's Daughter

Beginning in 1966 with publication of Margaret Walker's Jubilee, African American writers—as Barbara Christian, Caroline Rody, and Ashraf Rushdy, among other scholars, have demonstrated—revolutionized genre of historical novel, achieving, in Rody's words, collective return to story of slavery unimaginable in preceding decades and strategic recentering of American in lives of historically dispossessed (157-58). 1 Christian has placed black at forefront of this literary devel- opment, suggesting that Sherley Anne Williams's highly acclaimed Dessa Rose (1986) and, especially, Toni Morrison's masterpiece Beloved (1987) represent aesthetic pinnacle of what Rushdy famously named neo-slave narrative, but that neither (Williams's or Morrison's) novels would be what they are if it were not for previous historical fiction by African American women (338). More recently, Bo G. Ekelund has also credited mainly, but not only, female black writers with mid-century turn in historical novel, af- firming that transition from historical romances featuring white heroes and Southern Belles in antebellum South to serious contemporary fiction centered on histories of discrimination and oppression has permanently transformed American literary landscape (140). Shifting focus of historical novel from larger-than-life heroes to daily lives of an oppressed people, African American brought a new gravity and political engagement to a genre previously associated, according to Ekelund, with an antiquarian and conservative perspective (140). Both Christian and Rody cite Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings (1979)—a novel that, as Christian demonstrates, digs into myth (335) of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved concubine—as an important precursor for Morrison's Beloved. Chase-Riboud creates a complex portrait of an African American woman whose role in American history, as Suzette Spencer maintains, had heretofore been constructed in scholarly and public discourse primarily through scandal and through her negation as unhinging excrescence in Thomas Jefferson's sexual history (507). Offering a long-overdue corrective to white-authored portrayals of still-disputed relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, Chase-Riboud humanizes iconic figure of Hemings and provides her, through medium of fic- tion, with a speaking voice. However, author dramatizes historically obscured life of Hemings not as a way of getting at the truth behind controversial legend; this truth, she suggests, remains inaccessible. Instead, Chase-Riboud recreates Hemings's shadowy past as a means of throwing slavery's sinister legacies into sharp relief, as she indicates in author's note to 1994 edition of Sally Hemings: If Thomas Jefferson

Why Does the Slave Ever Love? The Subject of Romance Revisited in the Neoslave Narrative

Why Does the Slave Ever Love?The Subject of Romance Revisited in the Neoslave Narrative Angelo Rich Robinson [Blacks] are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. —Thomas Jefferson, 1787 Until . . . [the emotional capacity for romance] is thoroughly established in respect to Negroes in America, . . . it will remain impossible for the majority to conceive of a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding love and not just the passion of sex. . . . As it is now, this capacity, this evidence of high and complicated emotions, is ruled out. —Zora Neale Hurston, 1950 Like Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Sherley Anne Williams' white male antagonist, Adam Nehemiah, in her novel Dessa Rose (1986) also believes that African Americans are incapable of experiencing romance in their intimate relationships. Nehemiah is of the opinion that blacks are capable of achieving only the most innate form of physical desire: lust. The idea of black romance, even if fictionalized, is for Nehemiah, a nineteenth-century writer, a joke, a ridiculous notion. His thoughts in response to the romantic relationship between Dessa and Kaine portrayed in Dessa Rose reveal his utter disbelief. He rejects the idea as preposterous and outlandish: "Had he but the pen of a novelist—And were darkies the subject of romance, he thought sardonically, smiling at his own whimsy" (39). Are Nehemiah's thoughts simply [End Page 39] the bigoted perceptions of one man, or are they more than that? This essay argues that Nehemiah's attitude points to the complicated reality of African American romance as it was shaped by slavery. According to the enslaving white culture, which Nehemiah embodies, African American romance was an absurd possibility; thus, for white society, it could not exist. However, within the culture of enslaved blacks, romance was an unavoidable aspect of human life. Thus, within the black community it became a reality, though often hidden. In one respect, therefore, Nehemiah's comments are an apt reflection on African Americans in antebellum America. They were not the literary "subject of romance," for white people denied black people the space for romance, while black people often hid the fact of its existence. This essay will investigate the reality of black romance during slavery through the literary genre of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century neoslave narrative. The examination will specifically explore the importance of the neoslave narrative1 in providing a window into the reality of black romance during slavery, one often obscured if not hidden in the slave narrative. It is, in fact, interesting to note that the further removed from slavery they were, the more apt former slaves were to speak of romance. Thus, WPA testimony is replete with love stories.2 However, the fugitive narrative, as it was a part of antebellum literature, is less forthright in its discussion of black romance. The reasons for this are no doubt numerous, not the least of which is the fact that the enslaveds' priorities changed. For instance, during slavery the priority was to bring about slavery's abolition, thus it was more important to reveal its horrors. Consequently, they would be more apt to speak of those ways in which slavery denied their humanity than to speak of the ways in which they were able to claim their humanity despite the circumstances of slavery. Whatever the reasons may be for the paucity of romance,3 it is not fully explored in fugitive slave narratives. In this regard, the inclusion of romance becomes yet another way in which the neoslave narrative completes the picture of the people who were enslaved. In doing so it affirms the existence of romance for the enslaved African Americans and hence its importance to the full expression of their humanity. In this instance, it becomes the task of the neoslave narrative to provide what slave narratives could not or did not provide in their firsthand accounts of slavery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In order to understand the significance of romance in the neoslave narrative, we must first appreciate why romance was a forbidden reality for blacks in antebellum...

Touching the Taboo in Sacred Space: Reading Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose as a ‘Catalyst for a Sexual Discourse of Resistance’ in the Black Church

Sex-talk is often differentiated or eradicated from God-talk within the Black church in America; as a result, many pertinent issues like androcentrism, heterosexism, homophobia, and violence against women continue to flourish because of the lack of dialogue regarding sexuality. Because of this womanist theologians like Kelly Brown Douglas have convincingly argued that people of African descent must engage in a ‘sexual discourse of resistance’, particularly the Black church in America, if true wholeness is to be achieved. This paper will explore themes present with Sherley Anne Williams's novel, Dessa Rose, which may be useful as catalysts for such a discourse.

The slave's rebellion: literature, history, orature

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Hegel's Burden: The Slave's Counter Violence in Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Literature 2. Nat Turner and Plot Making in Early African American Fiction 3. Reverse Abolitionism and Black Popular Resistance: The Marrow of Tradition 4. Slave Rebellion, the Great Depression, and the Turbulence to Come for Capitalism: Black Thunder 5. Distilling Proverbs of History from the Haitian War of Independence: The Black Jacobins 6. Slave Rebellion and Magical Realism: The Kingdom of This World 7. Slavery in African Literary Discourse: Orality contra Realism in Yoruba Oriki and Omo Olokun Esin 8. Prying Subaltern Rebellious Consciousness Out of the Clenched Jaws of Oral Traditions: Efunsetan Aniwura 9. Reiterating the Black Experience: Rebellious Material Bodies and Their Textual Fates in Dessa Rose Conclusion: What Is the Meaning of Slave Rebellion Notes Bibliography Index

‘You just can't fly on off and leave a body’: The Intercorporeal Breastfeeding Subject of Toni Morrison's Fiction

In the attention that feminists have given to the discourses surrounding women's embodiment, breastfeeding has emerged as a continuously contested cultural practice.1 Debates on the topic often ove...

Dessa and the crazy white woman: Cross-racial breastfeeding in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose

(2004). Dessa and the crazy white woman: Cross-racial breastfeeding in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 19, No. 45, pp. 329-339.