The Repeating Body by Kimberly Juanita Brown

8/20/2019 The Repeating Body by Kimberly Juanita Brown

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T H E R E P E A T I N G B O D YT H E R E P E A T I N G B O D Y


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Te Repeating Body

’

Kimberly Juanita Brown

Durham and London 2015


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-free paper ♾

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

ypeset in Quadraat by seng Information Systems, Inc.

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Kimberly Juanita, [date]

Te repeating body : slavery’s visual resonance in the

contemporary / Kimberly Juanita Brown.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

978-0-8223-5909-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5929-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7541-8 (e-book)

1. African American women. 2. African American women

in literature. 3. African American women in art. 4. Human

body. 5. Human body in literature. 6. Human figure in art.

7. Slavery. 8. Collective memory. I. itle.

185.86.69745 2015

305.48′89607—dc232015008878

Tis publication was made possible [in part] by financial

assistance from the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund,

a program o the Reed Foundation.

Cover art: When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla, María Magdalena

Campos-Pons. Courtesy o the artist.


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Contents

ix

: Visualizing the Body o the Black Atlantic 1

1. Black Rapture 18

Corporeal Afterimage and ransnational Desire

2. Fragmented Figurations o the Maternal 57

3. Te Boundaries o Excess 96

4. Te Return 138

Conjuring the Figure, Following the Form

: Photographic Incantations o the Visual 177

195

229

245


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Acknowledgments

I came to this project from several different angles and avenues, differ-ent mediums, genres, and theoretical points o view. All have had their

human guideposts and beacons. All have brought me to this place. Te Re-

peating Body began in the African American Studies Department and the

American Studies Program at Yale University. My dissertation commit-

tee had much to contend with as I moved closer and closer to the end o

the project. Teir grace and consistency made a difficult task that much

easier. My dissertation chair, Robert Burns Stepto, is the epitome o ex-

ceptional humanity: a wonderful scholar, a probing and exacting adviser,an exuberant teacher, and a flawless writer. He gave me poetry at Yale,

and I am not soon to forget what that means. Te scope o this project

is a testament to his interest, patience, and dedication. Laura Wexler’s

insight and attention to detail allowed the project to reach its fullness.

Matthew Frye Jacobson provided the steady pace and encouragement I

needed and will always remember. I thank you all for your patience and

hope this book is a small token o my appreciation.

My time at Yale brought me many gifts, most in the form o friend-ship and collaboration. Brandi Hughes, Kaysha Corinealdi, Lyneise Wil-

liams, Nicole N. Ivy, Robin Bernstein, Qiana Robinson-Whitted, Heather

Andrea Williams, Sarah Haley, Courtney J. Martin, isha Hooks, Laura

Grappo, Dara Orenstein, Megan Glick, Erin D. Chapman, Lara Langer

Cohen, Shana L. Redmond, and G. Melíssa Garcia—I want to thank you

for your individual and collective brilliance, the multiple times you have

each saved me from myself, and the future we have before us. My conver-

sations with Erin D. Chapman consist o both laughter and intense con-cern for the future o black feminism in the academy. I want to thank her


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x

for an unrelenting code o honor, which I hope to one day emulate. Lara

Langer Cohen has had my full and complete admiration since we shared

a booth on a train from Durham, England, to London. I thank her for

those important moments we contemplate our academic lives in an off-the-beaten-path café. I have G. Melíssa Garcia to thank for our continued

(and continuing) conversations about our interlocking interests in gen-

der studies and visual culture, and Kaysha Corinealdi for the import o

thinking diasporically at all times.

At Rice University I was given the opportunity to pursue research and

writing at my own pace, supported by a humanities postdoctoral fellow-

ship at the Center for the Study o Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Rose-

mary Hennessy and Lora Wildenthal made my time there an intellectual joy. I will be eternally grateful for the time I spent there and the work it

has produced. My sincere thanks to Helena Michie, Betty Joseph, José

Aranda, and Kirsten Osther. I was especially lucky to be a part o a group

o humanities postdoctoral fellows invested in the preservation o both

research and sanity. Mary Helen Dupree, Voichita Nachescu, Gordon

Hughes, and Jeanne Scheper were my entrée to both Houston and a writ-

ing group that rotated from café to café throughout the city and created

a camaraderie I can only hope will find a way to continue.I have had the great fortune to be mentored by Carla Kaplan, who leads

by exuberant example. Her dedication has enriched this project, and I

am fortunate to have her encouragement and advice. Elizabeth Maddock

Dillon and Nicole N. Aljoe share my concern for all things transatlantic,

literary, and visual. I hope our conversations continue and become ever

more expansive. Elizabeth Dillon introduced this project to Duke Univer-

sity Press, and for this she has my enduring thanks. I thank Marina Leslie

for craft-influenced kindness, laughter, and wit.I want to acknowledge the many people whose work, time, and men-

toring have been instrumental to my scholarship and the way I am think-

ing about my work in its present manifestation. Ann duCille, Junia

Ferreira Furtado, Tadious Davis, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Jennifer

DeVere Brody, Shawn Michelle Smith, Vera Wells, Wai Chee Dimock,

Jennifer L. Morgan, Paul Gilroy, O. Hugo Benavides, Lloyd Pratt, and

Christina Sharpe—thank you for the many gifts I have received from you.

Lisa Cartwright has made mentoring a mission statement, full o genuineinterest and enthusiasm. For Saidiya Hartman in particular, I want you to


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xi

know that I have taken your words and your deeds as a cartography o the

life o the mind that I am still mapping out, slowly.

My research has been supported by the Mellon-Mays Foundation;

the Center for the Study o Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice Uni- versity; the Woodrow Wilson Foundation; the Pembroke Center for Re-

search and eaching on Women at Brown University; the Ruth Landes

Memorial Grant (the Reed Foundation); and the Gilder Lehrman Cen-

ter for the Study o Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. I

have appreciated the time, the resources, and the conversations afforded

me by the generosity I found at each o these institutions. A portion o

the first chapter o this book was published as an essay in the fall 2007

issue o . I thank the Feminist Press for allowing me the opportunityto deepen my engagement with the essay in this book. Elizabeth Ault,

Sara Leone, and Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press have my profound

appreciation and thanks for a process that was efficient, smooth, and

utterly civilized. I thank the readers at Duke (both known and unknown)

for their interventions and thoughtful comments on the book. Tis is a

stronger project because o your serious engagement with it.

In Boston I was exceptionally fortunate to be a part o the New Eng-

land Black Studies Collective. I am humbled by the friendships thatbegan there—with Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Alisa Braithwaite, Monica

White Ndounou, Sam Vasquez, Stéphanie Larrieux, and Sandy Alexan-

dre (“dance, dance”)—and am blessed to continue to know you. Marcia

Chatelain, Samantha A. Noel, and Shirley Carrie Hartman are the gifts

that keep on giving, and I thank them for that. I have known Shirley

Carrie since we were both undergraduates at Queens College, and our

fifteen- year-old friendship is still blossoming. Caroline Light is a trooper,

a guidepost, and a friend. Tis work is enriched by the members o TeDark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar, a group o schol-

ars who have elegantly altered the trajectory o my thinking. For this I

am forever in your debt. My graduate students teach me every day how

to imagine my work through their engagement with it, and I remain im-

pressed by the stunning intellectual projects they produce as they move

through the program.

In Providence (the city, that is) my good fortune has been good com-

pany. anya Sheehan and Daniel Harkett, oby Sisson, Françoise Hamlin,Esther Jones, Patricia A. Lott, Karida Brown, Rebecca Louise Carter, Lara


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Stein Pardo, and Courtney J. Martin make an already creative and vibrant

city so much more than that. May we continue to find pleasure and solace

in this space o boundless energy.

My success as a scholar is a testament to my family and their collectivededication to me. My father is the man I most admire, and in more ways

than I can count he makes me proud to do this work. My sister Yolanda

is my best friend and the mother o three o my favorite people in the

world. Tank you for always reminding me that there is a larger purpose

to this work.

I have Vanessa M. Liles and Nadine Adjoa Smith to thank for my con-

tinued attempts at rooted activism, rimiko Melancon for unreasonable

laughter and bawdy behavior, and Sarah Haley (sahaley) for determinedand consistent humanistic endeavors (to think o others more often than

I think o mysel ).

I thank Adebola Asekun for decades-long care and affection. And for

patience.

Finally, this book was written to music. From the first few scrambled

thoughts on slips o paper to the crazed final moments o revision, we

have formed a rhythmic synthesis—a melodious understanding carved

out o easy isolation and submersion: the music, the book, and me. I want to thank the gifted artists who have made this journey image-rich,

provocative, and eclectic. My appreciation goes out to Roberta Flack,

Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Marisa Monte, John Coltrane, Africando, the

Roots, Amy Winehouse, Alice Smith, Anthony Hamilton (dap, Vanessa),

Concha Buika, Maxwell, Janelle Monàe (turn thanks, Shana), Zap Mama,

Rokia raoré, Leela James, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Mos Def,

Meshell Ndegeocello, Lila Downs and Susana Baca (gracias, Melissa),

Phyllis Hyman, Marvin Gaye and Beres Hammond (always, daddy), FelaKuti, Damien Rice, Lhasa de Sela (obrigada, Kaysha), Sade, and Cassandra

Wilson. I absolutely could not have done it without you.


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Introduction

What did they do to your memory

Tat makes my quiet walk unknown to you.

—Cristina Cabral

Audre Lorde’s poem “Afterimages” takes the murder o Emmett ill and

its famous photographic representation as a key moment o black mem-

ory and makes the poem take the place o the photograph, creating a last-ing image o history and engaging the power o the eye in the word, in the

body. “However the image enters,” the poem begins, “its force remains

within.” Te speaker attempts to contain and release the tremendous

burden o black subjectivity when that subjectivity is tethered to sight.

o think o the afterimage in its plurality, in the collectivity o vision it

renders, is to engender a discourse o the visual in the service o violated

black bodies—both past and present. “My eyes are always hungry,” the

speaker continues, “and remembering.” Memory here measures the dis-tance o “the length o gash across the dead boy’s loins / his grieving

mother’s lamentation / the severed lips, how many burns / his gouged

out eyes.” Te import o collective visibility cannot be separated from

the gendered nature o the speaker’s witnessing. Her eye absorbs the im-

print o the event, and it haunts her, filling her eyes with images both

violent and lingering. Words drip from the poem, slowly paced but with

precision, and imbued with the range o racial violations set against black

people and over black flesh. Lorde’s racialized and gendered subjectivityenters the frame and invests the image with a totality o vision. In this


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way she orients the eye o the viewer so that there is no way for the viewer

to remain outside the framework o vision when that vision is gendered—

no way not to see i that field o vision includes black women.

Fred Moten hears in the visualization o the ill photograph an audi-tory impulse that propels the urgency o the image it hopes to frame. “Te

fear o another castration,” Moten writes, “is all bound up in this aversion

o the eye.” In the “dissonant, polyphonic affectivity o the ghost,” he

declares, “there is the trace o what remains to be discovered.” Lorde is

invested in this trace as well. Te afterimage as familiar distortion, as at

once different and familiar—“dissonant” and “polyphonic”—is a space

o imagery unfolding. Te time-elapsed significance o this unfolding

is also a part o its force. aking the shape o the image before it, onlyaltered, the afterimage requires the work o the viewer in order to be de-

cipherable. o be known.

But “however the image enters” the black imaginary, “its force re-

mains.” For Lorde it is a moving carousel o violated black flesh that

the poet encounters when she walks “through a northern summer,” her

eyes “averted / from each corner’s photographies.” Her particular “aver-

sion” has a sound that matches Moten’s. And for her it is “louder than

life” and circular, leading from “pictures o black broken flesh / used,crumpled, and discarded / lying amid the sidewalk refuse / like a raped

woman’s face,” to the “flickering afterimages o a nightmare rain.” “I

wade through summer ghosts,” she writes, “betrayed by vision / hers and

my own.” Tis betrayal o vision is one o severe iteration, as “summer

ghosts” populate the speaker’s ocular canvas, vying for her attention.

Mamie ill, Emmett ill’s mother, is the other “her” who forces

a photographic engagement with the murder o her only child, and in

Lorde’s poem Mamie ill is also the “her” who “wrings her hands / be-neath the weight o agonies remembered,” and her son’s famous photo-

graphic imprint lingers over and through Lorde’s articulation. In the

doubling properties o her use o “refuse” (“lying amid the sidewalk

refuse”), Lorde locates an urban iteration o a southern horror steeped

in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife o slavery.”

“Te site o memory is also the sight o memory,” Katherine McKittrick

contends, invoking the oni Morrison essay that places blackness in the

landscape o the racial formation o the United States. For McKittrick,then, “imagination requires a return to and engagement with painful


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places, worlds where black people were denied humanity, belonging, and

formal citizenship.” o enter this engagement and its “painful places”

requires an examination o transatlantic slavery and black women’s nec-

essary positioning within it. It requires a totality o vision—the imageand the afterimage—in order to grapple with all o the ways in which

black women fail to be seen with any clarity or insight.

What Mary Ann Doane refers to as the “persistence o vision,” the

photographic afterimage, is embodied in the literature o the African di-

aspora with its insistence on visually rendering the potency and force

o the transnational imaginary. Tis afterimage is also present within

the visual culture o the black Atlantic and forms a layering o contin-

gent imagery therein. It is the place where black women’s enduranceshave been used against them, and their bare survival is reconfigured as a

strength that cannot be altered, damaged, or destroyed. Te force o rep-

resentation enters a collective consciousness and remains within—seen,

though distorted—and therefore remaining unknown. Part o the pur-

pose o this project is to follow the trace o slavery’s memory in black

women’s literary and visual representations. I am specifically interested

in the realm o the visual and the proliferation o imagery seeking to ad-

dress the impossible duality between black women’s representations andslavery’s memory.

I turn to John Edgar Wideman’s novel Te Cattle Killing (1996) to con-

sider the import o the afterimage in this work o fiction. Early on in the

novel, the unnamed narrator speaks briefly with Rowe, a former slave

physically and emotionally scarred by the oppressive system he endured,

“his whole dark body a map o torture.” Te narrator wonders how Rowe

still manages to possess a smile that “positively glows” against the reality

o his present existence. When Rowe is asked to share “the vision thatbeams” in his gaze o subtle satisfaction, the former slave happily agrees.

“Sometime I looks at the sky and close my eyes and I see the whole world

startin over again,” Rowe begins. In this space o internal visual cre-

ation, the ex-slave observes “a black man and a black woman and a white

man and a white woman laid side by side fresh out o the oven and theys

the only people God done made. Black man he wake up first this time.

Remember everything. Quick. Grab ax. Chop white man head.” Rowe

continues his reimagining o the biblical story o creation by next figur-ing the black man and the white woman in a narrow lock where he sexu-


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ally possesses her but ensures that she will bear no children—that, in the

future, “ain’t gone be no more white peoples cept this one woman.”

Rowe spends the majority o this monologue concerned with “ramming”

and “fixing” the white woman and ends by turning to the narrator, say-ing, “And that, scuse me Reverend, what I see sometimes when you see

me smiling up at Heaven, Amen.”

In this unsettling and violent liberation narrative, the phrase “remem-

ber everything” is key. It is at once a rhetorical statement (“I remember

everything”) and a command, delivered in the imperative (“remember

everything!”). Embedded within an imagined momentary yielding, Rowe

fantasizes about trading places with his white patriarchal counterpart

and severing his competition in one fell swoop. Remember everything.Within the phrase, buried silently beneath the dichotomous repulsion/

desire left lingering and barren inside the body o the white woman, is the

assumed acceptance and collusion o the black woman, who, we are to

imagine, shares her memory with Rowe and understands his inclination

toward violence. Is the former slave truly working within the process o

memory? He moves seamlessly between an act o physical liberation to

“chop white man head” and shifts immediately onto his next concern, the

white woman, lying prostrate, eager to receive him. She is envisioned asa version o evil he must destroy by giving “a good ramming.” For a man

musing over his ability to “remember everything,” the passage is con-

veniently forgetful o the black woman who is integral to the narrative

but ignored within it. She is a visual necessity, but a logistical inconve-

nience. Te black woman in this example is an afterimage o all she has

witnessed and experienced—a ghost o representation. She is both “be-

trayed by vision,” in Lorde’s imagination, and “lying amid the sidewalk

refuse,” awaiting her articulation. Te passage situates her within Rowe’snarrative and tangential to her body: a visual vessel for Rowe’s imagina-

tion and an apt illustration o his need to return to the origin o man’s

creation and begin again.

If, as Doane asserts, the afterimage proves that “vision was subject

to delay,” and that “the theory o the afterimage presupposes a tem-

poral aberration, an incessant invasion o the present moment by the

past,” what is to be made o the black Atlantic body forgotten? Doane’s

useful articulation, “the idea that temporality invades vision,” is one thatlends itsel to the machinations o the afterimage o slavery, and the


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interactions that locate themselves between the hyperpresence o black

women within the slave system and the particular experiences that con-

tinue to present them as “marked women,” to borrow from Hortense

Spillers, that “render a kind o hieroglyphics o the flesh” and “whosedisjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color.” In

order to “remember everything,” Rowe would have to acknowledge the

black woman who emerged with him “fresh out o the oven” as an entity

imbued with a history o infliction and capable o considering hersel

deserving o a recognized history—a “remember everything” o her very

own. In this recognition, her story would be told from her specific van-

tage point; her concerns, her desires, and her observations would rise to

the forefront.Te negotiated trajectory o tortured flesh is explored most fully in

oni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), which depicts three generations o

women related through blood, slavery, and death. For Sethe, a woman

with bodily scars ever present but not easily seen, her obsessive attempt

to control memory frames her engagement with the world. Negotiating

multiple traumatic violations against her body (physical, sexual, psycho-

logical, generational, scopic, maternal), she retreats into a world o word,

sound, and image, vacillating between the material and the ethereal asher long-dead daughter returns to her in the flesh.

Te generational lineage o black pain, literally “written on the back”

o black female subjectivity, is a repetition o imagistic concern in the

novel. In Sethe’s world, there is the scarred back that she cannot see and

the killed daughter made flesh again (and this she can see). Slavery’s vio-

lent proximities, its aggressive intimacy is mapped out in Morrison’s

novel with a particular attention to the world o the visual. Tis is an

intimacy and proximity that provides breast milk to other people’s off-spring, features a negotiation o sex within violence, and conflates and

elongates temporality, and therefore pain. o remember everything in frag-

ments and pieces. Te marking o Sethe’s flesh happens against her will,

and the physical scars, the keloids she possesses on her back, rise out o

the physical and sexual violence she has sustained and thicken instead o

disappearing. Te residue o this slave experience is a part o Sethe’s “re-

memory,” a reframing o the particular and the general that she utilizes

in order to hold firm to her subjectivity and to get other people to see itas she does.


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Sethe’s witnessing is thus communal and interactive, and though her

pain is her own, she articulates it outward as a less evolved part o her

subconscious that she must nevertheless appease. Sethe attempts to cur-

tail illegible torture at the point o the narrative visual. Beloved offers usa “rememory” for Rowe’s “remember everything” and, in doing so, a

unique way o seeing the force thatremains within. Sethe reorganizes tem-

poral order as she remembers events and emphasizes the intimate contin-

gencies others may miss when, for instance, they focus on one aspect o

her physical presentation (the tree on her back) as opposed to others that

are less visible (her stolen milk, her missing husband, her dead child). In

Beloved there are unique and expected corporeal repetitions: two Denvers

(Sethe’s daughter and Amy Denver, the white woman who helps Sethegive birth to her last child); three Beloveds (the baby, “crawling already,”

the ghost in the home, and the woman who returns to 124 Bluestone

Road to take the baby’s fleshed-out and grown adult female form); and

several Pauls (the brothers: Paul D, Paul A, Paul F). Bodies repeat in the

narrative in an attempt to grasp the enormous weight o slavery on black

Atlantic subjects. Te repeated bodies, narratives, and names make clear

that it takes many generations to grasp the horrendous event o slavery.

And in order to “remember everything,” black women, alive, dead, andin-between, linger and loiter, waiting to have their stories told. My inter-

est in this project is to trace out these repetitions as they move across par-

ticular genres o representation and to think through these renderings

that have so encapsulated the black imaginary within a narrow contain-

ment o black women’s visibility.

In his introduction to Te Repeating Island: Te Caribbean and the Postmodern

Perspective, Antonio Benítez-Rojo graphically utilizes the symbolic power

o imperial violation through the rhetoric o birth- through-conquest.“Te Atlantic is the Atlantic,” he writes, “because it was the painfully

delivered child o the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between

continental clamps.” During this process o violation, Benítez-Rojo as-

serts, “after the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh

and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then

the febrile wait through the forming o a scar.” Here gendered hyper-

presence, indeed, the gendered hyperavailability o particular bodies, is

treated to both a violent birth and a kind o postmortem examination, with all o the clinical investigation the event necessitates. In this space


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o birth without female subjectivity, the gendered body is one o total

and complete physical (and violent) utility. o think o the “painfully

delivered child” as having a birth mother would necessitate a consider-

ation that was both observant and inclusive. “Te integrity o the raceis thus made interchangeable with the integrity o black masculinity,”

Paul Gilroy writes, “which must be regenerated at all costs.” Again we

see what it looks like when women are a visual and corporeal necessity

but a logistical inconvenience. Like Rowe’s silent black woman, they are

mostly objects o articulation for men to write through. While I share

with Benítez-Rojo an interest in what happens when the ruptures o em-

pire and slavery form the threading material o culture and identity, my

purpose here is to stay with the symbolic figure o this impact when sheis no longer just symbol, but subject. Mine, then, is an emphasis that

employs the photographic trace to retrieve women from the margins o

slavery’s framing mechanisms.

As James Elkins argues in Te Object Stares Back , “We prefer to have

bodies in front o us or in our hands, and i we cannot have them, we

continue to see them, as afterimages or ghosts.” Terein lies the diffi-

culty in attempting to wrest black women from the trace o the corporeal.

Where could they go without bringing the past along with them? Where would we let them go without our perception o their bodies’ utility in

an ocular world? Part o the work o this book is to make legible the mul-

tiple enactments o hypervisibility black women cannot escape, and to

highlight artistic attempts at using opacity, framing, fragmentation, and

repetitions o the visual to illustrate a desire for black subjectivity that in-

cludes black women within it.

Tis project gathers at the intersection o literature and visual culture

studies, building on the work o Saidiya Hartman in Scenes o Subjection:error, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Avery Gordon’s

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and Christina

Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Sharpe’s inter-

vention in particular brings into focus many o the contemporary traces

remaining after slavery’s demise that I also interrogate. Hartman and

Gordon measure the meaning o embodiment: how, in the words o

Hartman, its very “fungibility” is the key to envisioning black subjectivity

through its requisite deployments and representational iconographies.Te Repeating Body is a book informed by black feminist theory, visual


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culture studies, literary criticism, and critical race theory. It is with this

determinedly interdisciplinary lens that I endeavor to investigate the phe-

nomenon o black women’s representational late contemporary restruc-

turing. I am interested in Jennifer DeVere Brody’s attendant portrayals ogrammatical structure and the traces o violence located in fictional nar-

ratives; Katherine McKittrick’s engagement with black women, bodies,

and the geographic resonance o space; Jenny Sharpe’s diasporic interro-

gation o narratives o resistance; and Jennifer L. Morgan’s analysis o

slavery’s reproductive and reproducing mechanisms. Within this well-

established rubric o black feminism, I want to privilege the centrality o

the visual as a prevailing feature o black Atlantic literature, using con-

temporary visual culture as another way to engage this discourse.When Sethe allows others to see the scars on her back, she conceals

and reveals all at once. As she exposes her previous physical pain and

makes hersel vulnerable and open to reading, she also obscures a visual

reading o her face. Te corporeal refusal she enacts here engages in the

vernacular discourse o black Atlantic metaphoric communicating (“I got

a tree on my back . . . I’ve never seen it and never will”). It is a call-and-

response interaction that reads (or allows others to read) the body and

its narrative. o refuse (by turning your back to someone) is to moveoutside the realm o racial and corporeal familiarity and “knowing.” It is

to turn your back (refusing a full entrance into the frame) on those who

would propose to know you, to put mystery in the place o that knowing.

An emphasis o black feminist articulation gives us a totality o vision,

attuned to the visual properties o slavery’s memory. Te resonant echoes

o slavery’s memory have a genealogy that is repetitive, and rituals and

gestures that are cadent and fluid. Tey allow us to see how black women

must occupy the center o the frame o a system that literally gave birthto modernity. “Slavery has ended,” Avery Gordon writes, “but something

o it continues to live on in the social geography o where people reside

. . . in the veins o the contradictory formation we call New World moder-

nity.” Tis “contradictory formation” masks the import o the very cen-

trality (o black women and their bodies) organizing transatlantic slavery

and its resonant imprint.

o give birth to modernity is no small order, particularly i that very

act is considered a masculine feat, devoid o women. In one o Carrie MaeWeems’s more provocative examinations o creation, subjugation, and


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the continuing conundrum o , she engages in a genealogical trace

that is historical, imagistic, and national. Te fifth panel o the six-panel

series called Te Jefferson Suite is the only one that includes a representa-

tion o both Tomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings as the foci othe frame (figure I.1). Jefferson’s quill pen draws the viewer’s eye to the

center o the frame, as it appears that he creates Hemings out o the re-

cesses o some previous declaration—over certain bodies, out o others.

While both subjects have their backs to the viewer, Jefferson is visualized

as someone who is free and open, intimated by the position o his arm

and the quill, the apparatus o his legibility. Weems-as-Hemings repre-

sents self-portraiture’s resurrecting possibilities within a black Atlantic

self-reflective imperative. She is a figure o both mystery and mastery.Arms crossed in front and with her head facing the direction o a window

the viewer cannot see, the faint appearance o light the only indication

o a reprieve from total enclosure, Weems offers the slight inference o

a failure o communication between the two. Not just quill against ges-

ture, Jefferson is illustrated as fully clothed while Hemings’s shoulders

and arms are bare, an errant shoulder strap either absentmindedly or pur-

posely drawn down, illustrating the framing mechanism’s perspective o

choice. If, as Saidiya Hartman claims, “the discourse o seduction obfus-cates the primacy and extremity o violence in master- slave relations,”

Weems-as-Hemings delineates this concept as a failure o the archive, or

an available archive that others refused to see.

Te Jefferson Suite illustrates racial ambiguity, merging it to the slave sys-

tem Tomas Jefferson symbolized through rhetorical inconsistency, lust,

and lineage. Here, “suite” connotes an interior, private space where lovers

come together (hotel suite), a connected set o musical notes or chords,

or, as in its auditory configuration, a pleasing smell or taste (sweet). I we think o Te Jefferson Suite and the bodies presented as “types” collected

and cataloged like the human and animal possessions marked in Jeffer-

son’s famous Farm Book , the suite becomes an ironic play on words, the

sweetness dissipates. What remains, though, is the question o affect and

effect, the sentimental attachments o the visual and the familial and their

lingering imaginaries. Severing the viewer’s ocular comportment while

making malleable the corporeal dimensions o slavery’s legacy, Te Jeffer-

son Suite contains the delineations o the evidentiary photograph, linkingit to past presidents and plantations, science, possession, and lineage.


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I.1. Re-enactment o the Jefferson-Hemings Affair, Carrie Mae Weems, 2003.

Courtesy o the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.


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11

Tat Hemings’s body is the text upon which democracy stands and

modernity forms allows Weems the ability to perform a postemancipa-

tion declaration o slave visibility. With her back turned to the viewer,

Jefferson’s articulation, and the mismanagement o history, Weems-as-Hemings seeks to interrogate the place o the known historical narra-

tive and its always-embattled counterconstruction. Using Hemings and

her famous master as symbolic precursors to photography’s duplicating

prerogatives, Weems’s self-portrait underscores the contemporary obses-

sion with as biological proo along with its concomitant imagery,

prephotographic temporally, but inferred with a force o visuality all its

own. o envision, then, slave subjectivity within the structure o slave

agency and limited mobility is to splice the narrative and reorganize it.For this, a negotiation o word and image brings the body into focus,

brings history into the frame, and whether the work is literary or visual,

the pattern o repetition remains the same.

A repetition o corporeal refusal within the photographic frame sets

the visual trajectory in opposite motion—controlled and taut, slowly re-

leasing the narrative deployments o the visual and corporeal that are

often neglected. Weems fashions an archive out o the visibility o her

skin. She brings to the center o the frame a woman who would have beenrelegated to the footnote o history had it not been for the insistence o

her archival embodiment. Her descendants ultimately provided the ar-

chive that now registers her legibility. Before that she was a ghost like

the fictional Beloved—a haunting that marred the good name o the third

president o the United States.

In the sheer repetition o imagery associated with this one figure

(from William Wells Brown to Natasha rethewey, Carrie Mae Weems,

and Robbie McCauley), there has been a refusal to forget, a refusal tobend to the will o nearly two hundred years o fierce rhetorical denial.

Sethe describes events like this to her daughter Denver as “a thought pic-

ture” that both is and is not. Instead, it is more like a collective event, like

“when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” I

we think o the afterimage as a violation o the gaze, the “force that re-

mains within,” the repetition o this force creates a visual circle that can

seem unyielding. Te afterimage as temporal motif, then, is the organiz-

ing mechanism suturing black women to the cultural narratives that havebeen used to placate black Atlantic subjectivities in flux.


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12

Symbolic o the corporeal register o subjectivities in flux, María

Magdalena Campos-Pons’s When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla (plate 1) envisions

a diaspora that is bilingual, black, female, and the end product o the

transatlantic slave trade. It is a representation o the riverain goddess Ye-mayá, the traveling deity o reproduction, resurrection, and reckoning.

In the anonymity o the fragment there is also the imprint o a diasporic

return. Tis return is a frontal assault o corporeality and visuality, en-

gaging the viewer in a layered construction o all that the image cannot

contain, and that which flows out from the body.

Sea waves envelop a woman’s body, fragmenting her form. From the

neckline through her waist she embodies the Atlantic Ocean, its organic

properties, and the mechanized reproduction (via the bottles o milkdraped around her neck) facilitated by and through slavery’s birth and

rebirth. She occupies the bifocality o the black diaspora, the left and

right hemispheric alignment that locates itsel on black women’s bodies.

In the self-portrait other bodies enter the frame with Campos-Pons. Tey

slip in under the rubric o black Atlantic haunting. Since the image also

invokes the Middle Passage deity Yemayá, there is an otherworldly ele-

ment here that conflates the temporal demarcation o slavery’s transmis-

sion. In the circular logic surrounding slavery’s “eternal return,” oceansmeet bodies in flux and alter the trajectory, the sway, and the movement

o the transatlantic slave trade.

I am interested in the rhythm and the extension o this movement, in

the many disparate locations that allow it to glide through cartographies

o violence that “though they were unspeakable . . . were not inexpress-

ible.” In the multiple temporal possibilities engendered by the produc-

tion o slavery in the New World, I focus on those that hover as they drift,

a skulking metaphor for the past that is, according to Christina Sharpe,“not yet past.” In doing so, I offer not a definitive and linear trajec-

tory o cultural production in the Americas but instead a gathering o ar-

chival intent, that which places all o the conflations and displacements

o the visual at the center o contemporary engagements. I do this be-

cause studies o the black Atlantic and its subjectivities have always been

studies o visual culture(s), whether or not they have been received as

such.


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13

What can encompass this haunted house o empires and nations, this

transnational narrative o silence and strength hovering over represen-tations o slavery in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil? Repe-

tition. I have structured as a thematic production the repetitive quali-

ties o the black Atlantic that hover somewhere between the past and the

present. Each chapter o Te Repeating Body is informed by an aspect o

repetition that provides insight into the visual, material, and gendered

iterations o slavery’s indelible memory. Whether it functions as after-

image, double exposure, hyperembodiment, or the ocular and auditory

meditation o a diasporic riff, repetition brings the figuration o slaveryinto being with the force o modernity. Tis is a phenomenon o the con-

temporary and is particularly suited to explore and expand on slavery’s

gendered modulations. For this reason I have incorporated multiple geo-

graphic locations, multiple genres o representation, and multiple repe-

titions o the ocular. I have also employed some textual repetitions and

duplicating extensions so that it is possible in this text that a novel like

oni Morrison’s Beloved, with its uncanny mutating abilities, will occupy

space in multiple chapters. In Te Repeating Body, Morrison’s novel be-comes the threading text, a novel that painfully lays bare the reiterative

qualities o slavery’s burdens.

Te first chapter o the book positions repetition as afterimage—as

the figurative register o what gets left over when the eye no longer has

the image before it. I begin by considering articulations o slave women’s

sexual agency, particularly when these women are the mothers o both

slavery and freedom, giving birth to the children o slave masters. Spe-

cifically, I examine the place o whiteness moving through slave women’sbodies and the postmodern inversion o this phenomenon. In chapter 1,

“Black Rapture: Corporeal Afterimage and ransnational Desire,” I use

Mary Ann Doane’s theory o the photographic afterimage and Saidiya

Hartman’s critical engagement with the performative space o the planta-

tion as a way to situate slave women’s bodies as corporeal “sites o mem-

ory” wherein white men visit their patriarchal predecessors’ handiwork

in the bodies o their own slaves and yearn to make a mark o their own.

Te afterimage is an ocular residue, a visual duplication as well as analteration. One could call it a burning image that eventually fades. And


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that image is based on another, the one before the after o the image.

Te myth o black women’s sexual supremacy furthers this cause, as it

is precisely the marking o their flesh that serves as the racial coding to

the planter class, while making the intense violence o the system diffi-cult to discern. As visual phenomena, afterimages represent slavery’s pro-

found ability to linger throughout the diaspora. Tey linger in the archi-

tectural structures built for the system to self-proliferate: landscapes o

myriad mechanical testaments to enslavement, the racial fetish o a by-

gone era, and family portraits illustrating the height and depth o prop-

erty relations—inanimate and human—that perpetuate the visuality o

hegemony.

Visual imagery becomes particularly useful here, solidifying represen-tation and directing the trajectory o the discourse. Tis chapter juxta-

poses contemporary artistic representations o Sally Hemings, Margaret

Garner, and Brazil’s Chica da Silva and concerns the visual positionality

these women enter. Te imagistic lens o slavery confronts the space

whiteness occupies within repetitive sexualized violence. I examine nar-

ratives o nonbiological, familial connectivity crafted by artists who see

little space between the violations o the past and their present diasporic

bodies. Robbie McCauley’s play Sally’s Rape links the corporeal legacyo her great-great-grandmother Sally with that o hersel as well as the

“Sally” o Jefferson folklore. Faith Ringgold, in her thangka print Slave

Rape Series, challenges the anonymity o sexually exploited slave women

by marking the canvas with her own image as a pregnant slave woman

fleeing a lascivious overseer.

In the after o these images, there is the temporal instability that

weaves the past onto the present, visually representing a conflation o

imagery writ across time. In this book I attend to the contemporary nego-tiation o slavery that tethers itsel to the world o the visual. It is within

the realm o repetition, its looping and determined return, that black

Atlantic subjectivities are able, in all o their profound and disparate in-

vectives, to be seen.

o be seen. Double vision and sight conspire here, in this space o in-

sistent recognition, the ocular comportment o engagement. Rendered as

simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, black women function within

the register o externally imposed enclosures. What is it that brings theevent o slavery out o the archive and into the plain sight o the late con-


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15

temporary? What tethers its import, its tendency to reverberate into the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In slavery’s heightened visible reg-

ister, gender delineates the force and future repetition o the usable cor-

pus, a double marking that has reverberations throughout and beyondthe Americas. Tey tell us how to see the beneath and beyond o the sys-

tem o slavery, the “visions and revisions” fueling poetry, fiction, and

visual art practices. Te afterimage here occupies the space o stubborn

insistence and transcultural haunting, the pathos o diaspora.

Chapter 2, “Fragmented Figurations o the Maternal,” presents repe-

tition as the double exposure o the black diaspora, as the suture be-

tween production, reproduction, and counterproduction. Te concept

o double exposure (as I am articulating it here) structures violent anddiscordant interactions within the contemporary as continually fraught

with the tonal frequencies o slavery’s remains. Repetition functions as

and through this bifocality, a layering o contingent imagery embodying

both sight and sound.

In this chapter I argue that processes o black maternal longing limit

the ability o black women to self-possess; this is a disjuncture that artists

highlight through fragmentation, sectioning off parts o black women’s

bodies (and often their own) imagistically to mark the collective “pars-ing” out o black maternal capacities. Tis is always negotiated through

a cultural reinforcement o surrogate mothering or, to use Patricia Hill

Collins’s term, “othermothering.” Along with the collective request that

black women participate in repetitions o maternal sacrifice, there are

representations that challenge the siphoning o black women’s power

through the maternal, literally marking the place o maternal dependence

and visual impossibility.

In the synesthetic quality o this productive deployment, visual andauditory impulses converge, performing through the matter and the

mode o the black Atlantic. “Te question o racial terror,” writes Paul

Gilroy, “always remains in view when these modernisms are discussed

because imaginative proximity to terror is their inaugural experience.”

Within this “inaugural experience” are the pace and proximity o the

black maternal, the mode and manner o its diasporic iteration. Bound

to this iteration o the diaspora, repetition as reproduction offers us im-

provisation and agitation, movement within the visuality o maternal re-trieval and within a constant state o loss. Utilizing a flood o imagery


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associated with black women’s conflicted maternity, I emphasize the role

o fragmentation in illuminating the ruptured nature o postslavery ma-

ternal processes.

Chapter 3, “Te Boundaries o Excess,” deploys the visual register ohyperembodiment and disembodiment in order to investigate the ever-

expansive corporeal tether that binds black women to the framework o

slavery’s making. Here I use visual shielding and the gender transference

o slave women’s bodies as a way to read the corporeal trajectory o di-

asporic movement and loss as a narrative o excess. Tis chapter looks

at artistic representations o physical prowess in American abolitionist

Harriet ubman and Brazilian slave deity Blessed Anastácia. I argue that

certain historical figures o the black Atlantic are symbolic body armorand are portrayed as such; their representations are created to serve as vir-

tual/visual protection to black masses. For ubman, this is done through

rhetoric and rifle, as literary and visual images reinforce a hypermascu-

line performance o collective protection. Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding

the Ghosts imagines the male historical survivor o the throwing overboard

from the slave ship Zong as a woman who climbs back onto the ship after

being tossed off and subsequently plans an insurrection. Hyperembodi-

ment and disembodiment extend the visuality o the boundary betweenutility and excessive use, delineating the marker o black women’s corpo-

real availability as continually shifting beyond and beneath the horizon o

the grand spectacle that is slavery’s contemporary representation.

Te final chapter, “Te Return: Conjuring the Figure, Following the

Form,” concerns the materiality o the event o slavery that seeps through

cultural productions o the black diaspora with force. In the tumultuous

rendering o both subject and object, slavery creates/anticipates the Du

Boisian structure o double-consciousness that, had it a visual register, would always be photographic. Te stereograph, a photographic image

popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intimates

this doubling with slant repetition. It is the mechanism that mimics

both the eye and the ear, pairs o visual and auditory encompassing that

function as a methodology for survival. Tis survival engenders a future

fraught with slavery’s duplication: formerly enslaved people who are not

yet free, and whose “freedom” bears the violence, marginality, and hyper-

visibility o slavery’s tether. o step out o the shadow o slavery in thecontemporary means gazing back onto the haunting o its varied past.


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It is an event that is always invoking, always evoking. And like any other

haunting, it has the desire to be seen.

In this final chapter I prioritize the matter o diaspora, the depen-

dent methodology o the black Atlantic that taps into the bare survival oothers in order to highlight the liminal status o both the enslaved and

the marginally free. Tis bare survival deepens the discourse o the ocu-

lar that slavery manipulated; it is a large part o the reason black women

still exist under a rubric o repeated and excessive use. Here, I focus on

iterations o ethereal haunting in literature, imbued with a hyperdepen-

dence on black women’s “resurrecting” qualities. Mystics, preachers, and

god figures maintain the black diasporic space between the living and the

dead and drift in out o the black Atlantic imaginary as purposeful mar-tyrs negotiating their place within a structured narrative o what Avery

Gordon calls “ghostly matters.”

Standing between Western productions o stasis and movement,

slavery ruptures a linear trajectory in favor o flux: the flux o subjectivity,

o permeability, and the flux o protection and possession. Literal move-

ment places the body in a position o external whim, coercion, force, and

self-theft. If, as many critical race and slavery studies scholars assert,

black Atlantic subjectivities force an engagement with death that is re-petitive and unrelenting, these engagements survive off o the riff and the

moti o New World slavery. In the contemporary there can be no ac-

counting for the total enclosure o slavery and its aftermath without being

attuned to the aural and imagistic mandates that locate themselves at the

site o the event. Tere can be no telling o this story without making black

women central, no way to see the indexical force o the horrendous event

o transnational slavery unless the way o seeing, the sight and the sound

o it, is rearticulated and black women are at the center o the frame.Sethe’s created recollecting, her “rememory,” mirrors Rowe’s inter-

nal mandate (from Te Cattle Killing) to “remember everything,” placing

the event that is slavery and its afterlife at the center o a visual and cor-

poreal retrieval. For this retrieval to reach its fullest invocation we must

pay close attention to what black female artists are showing us, how, in

the words o Anne Cheng, “we do not master by seeing; we are ourselves

altered when we look.” I hope Te Repeating Body works within the vein

o the camera lucida, allowing multiple vantage points through which tolayer slavery’s recurring and repeating visions.


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Notes

Introduction. Visualizing the Body o the Black Atlantic

1. Audre Lorde, “Afterimages,” in Collected Poems (New York: Norton, 2000), 339.

2. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339.


4. Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin,’” in Loss: Te Politics o Mourning (Berkeley: Univer-

sity o California Press, 2003), 64.

5. Moten, “Black Mo’nin,’” 62–63.


7. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339–41.

8. Mamie ill- Mobley (1921–2003), after the murder o her son, Emmett ill,

insisted upon publishing postmortem photographs (most famously in Jet maga-

zine) and having an open-casket funeral for ill, stating, “I want the world to see

what they did to my boy.” Tis insistence upon the indexical evidence o her son’s

mutilated body contributed to the already- present outrage concerning the grue-

some, racially motivated murder. ill- Mobley’s inability to receive justice in the

space o the law is illustrated in the title o Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “A Brownes-

ville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.”

9. “I, too, am the afterlife o slavery,” Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother:

A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007),

6. Tis afterlife has a past and a past tense, a forward haunting and a resurrection.

Lorde, “Afterimages,” 339–41.

10. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies o

Struggle (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2006), 33; oni Morrison,

“Te Site o Memory,” in Inventing the ruth, ed. William Zinsser (New York: Hough-

ton Mifflin, 1995), 91.

11. Kat herine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 33.

12. Mary Ann Doane, Te Emergence o Cinematic ime: Modernity, Contingency, the Ar-

chive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 71.


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196

13. In her poem “Memory and Resistance,” the Afro-Uruguayan poet Cris-

tina Cabral writes, “Sometimes legend reminds me / But never history.” Cristina

Cabral, “Memory and Resistance,” in Daughters o the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers,

ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), 396.

14. John Edgar Wideman,Te Cattle Killing (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 63.

15. Wideman, Cattle Killing, 66.





20. Doane, Emergence o Cinematic ime, 74, 76.

21. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar

Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (summer 1987): 65, 67.

22. “Te patient cannot remember the whole o what is repressed in him,”

Sigmund Freud writes in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” stating, “What he can-

not remember may be precisely the essential part o it.” In Morrison’s Beloved, the

improvisational space o re-created memories, or “rememory,” privileges a collec-

tive accounting and rearticulating rather than a clinical or individual remembering.

Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Te Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay

(New York: Norton, 1989), 602.

23. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Te Repeating Island: Te Caribbean and the Postmodern Per-

spective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 5.

24. Paul Gilroy, Te Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 194.

25. Tese men writing through include Gabriel García Márquez, Nicholas

Guillen, Fernando Ortiz, and Alejo Carpentier.

26. Mitochondrial is almost exclusively inherited through the maternal

line in mammals. Tough my study is not scientific, it is purposely invoking a gene-

alogical trace (that I read photographically) in order to bring black women into

the center o the framework o slavery’s memory. I am also interested here in what

happens to the offspring o this “violation” when the offspring is also female. Te

Repeating Island follows the forceful reproduction o a Caribbean subjectivity, one

that is curiously imagined as a female vessel producing male subjectivities in flux.

27. James Elkins, Te Object Stares Back: On the Nature o Seeing (New York: Harcourt,

1996), 132.

28. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, “Te deployment o visuality and visual technolo-

gies as a Western social technique for ordering was decisively shaped by the ex-

perience o plantation slavery in the Americas, forming the plantation complex o

visuality.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, Te Right to Look: A Counterhistory o Visuality (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 48.

29. oni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 15–16.


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197

30. “From our very first introduction to the scar on Sethe’s back,” Sandy Alex-

andre asserts, “we already begin to hear how conversations surrounding the scar

suggest that it does not belong so much to Sethe alone as it does to everyone else

who has better viewing access to it. Because the scar is on Sethe’s back, she never

actually gets to see it herself; she alone experiences the pain associated with having

acquired the scar, but after that ‘scene o subjection,’ she neither has the authority

nor the ability to describe how that scar has exactly ensconced itsel on her back.”

Sandy Alexandre,Te Properties o Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations o Lynch-

ing ( Jackson: University Press o Mississippi, 2012), 131.

31. “Such endings that are not over is what haunting is about,” she writes. Avery

Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity o Minnesota Press, 1997), 139.

32. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes o Subjection: error, Slavery, and Self-Making in

Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81.

33. Tese artistic repetitions take on multiple genres: a novel, a poem, a photo-

graph, and a play, respectively.

34. Morrison, Beloved, 36.

35. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 73.

36. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham,


37. My readings will investigate the absence o slavery as a traumatic event in

the transnational imaginary. As it has developed in the United States and Europe

since the 1980s, trauma theory (see: Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Mari-

anne Hirsch) has had a necessary connection to the event o the Holocaust. Tis

emphasis has moved the discourse o slavery even further out o the framework o

possible trauma theory applications, and made it more difficult to imagine (despite

all o the evidence provided by critical race theorists) slavery as a traumatic event.

38. I take as an example o this Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes o Subjection (1997).

Tese “scenes” that she lays out in the text are multimodal and heavily performa-

tive. Tey locate an ocular investment at the critical crux between subjectivity and

subjection.

39. Articulating a move that both imbibes Sigmund Freud’s “repetition com-

pulsion” and creates a sonic space o black Atlantic performative splicing, James A.

Snead argues that “repetition in black culture finds its most characteristic shape in

performance: rhythm in music, dance, and language.” I would add visual culture

to this demarcation as well, as artists (literary, visual) continue to riff on disparate

moments and events from the black diaspora that they cannot or will not forget.

James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure o Black Culture,” in Black Literature and Lit-

erary Teory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1987), 68.

40. I register these “repetitions” as containing the trace o the photographic

that allows for a multigenred articulation o slavery’s residual markings.


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41. Te “world o the visual” as I delineate it for this project, is one that has sen-

sorial properties that though they move beyond the realm o visuality (that which

can be seen), still conform to an ocular comportment, placing race and gender (that

which must be discerned) at the center.

42. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 73.

43. See Vincent Brown’s book Te Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World o

Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jennifer L. Mor-

gan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: Uni-

versity o Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Mary Francis Berry and John Blassingame’s

Long Memory: Te Black Experience in America; Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman:

Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Paula Giddings’s When

and Where I Enter: Te Impact o Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William

Morrow, 1984); Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory: Visual Representations o Slavery in Eng-

land and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000); David Blight’s Race and Re-

union: Te Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2001); Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American

Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Hilary Beckles’s Natu-

ral Rebels: A Social History o Enslaved Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 1989); Barbara Bush’s Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Jacqueline Jones’s Labor o Love, Labor

o Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic

Books, 1985); and David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: Te Rise and Fall o Slavery in

the New World.

44. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2011), 21.

1. Black Rapture: Corporeal Afterimage and ransnational Desire

1. Zahid Chaudhary argues that “there is something deeply directive . . . about

certain juxtapositions o images.” Tese “juxtapositions” formulate the suture be-

tween the empire and the bodies it hopes to conquer. Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage

o Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (Minneapolis: University o Minne-

sota Press, 2012), 54.

2. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 60.

3. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post- Slavery Subjects (Durham,


4. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Ursa” refers to the northern con-

stellation o stars called the “Great Bear,” as well as “one whose sign or symbol is a

bear.” Corrige is an Old English word for “correct” or “chastise.”

5. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 31.

The Repeating Body by Kimberly Juanita Brown

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