Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Perverse Modernities) - Softcover

Sharpe, Christina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822346095 ISBN 13: 9780822346098

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2010

Synopsis

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

About this title

About the Author

Christina Sharpe is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Tufts University.

From the Back Cover

""Monstrous Intimacies" is a remarkable study, lucid, engaging, and thoroughly engrossing."--Sharon Patricia Holland, author of "Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

MONSTROUS INTIMACIES

Making Post-Slavery SubjectsBy CHRISTINA SHARPE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4609-8

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Making Monstrous Intimacies Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom.................................................1ONE Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Reading the "Days That Were Pages of Hysteria".............................................27TWO Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation.....................67THREE Isaac Julien's The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life.............................................111FOUR Kara Walker's Monstrous Intimacies.....................................................................................153NOTES........................................................................................................................189BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................223INDEX........................................................................................................................243

Chapter One

Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Reading the "Days That Were Pages of Hysteria"

Slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship. -SAIDIYA HARTMAN quoted in Butler 2002, "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?"

When the pro-slavery Mississippi statesman Henry Hughes wrote in A Treatise on Sociology: Theoretical and Practical (1854) that "Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters. The law of nature is the law of God. The same law which forbids consanguineous amalgamation forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest," he performed an alchemical change whereby to break the different taboos of either incest or amalgamation-of morality and nature, blood and ethnicity-was to break the same law. Hughes was reinforcing an already accepted natural division of black from white, further delineated in a system that he called warrenteeism (a precursor to Plessy v. Ferguson's [1896] so-called separate but equal mandate). His logic rested on the prior articulation of a black and white crisis in race, property, and labor relations in southern slavery in the mid-nineteenth century.

When a number of late-twentieth-century critics read Hughes's curious statement and arrived at a similar conclusion that "The taboo of too different (amalgamation/miscegenation) is interchangeable with the taboo of too similar (incest), since both crimes rely on a pair of bodies which are mutually constitutive of each other's deviance, a pair of bodies in which each body is the signifier of the deviance of the other," it is because they read incest and amalgamation as reciprocal. As incest and amalgamation are paired in Hughes's polemic, however, their relation is not, or not only, one of reciprocity or of a metaphorical or rhetorical doubling. In Hughes's polemic the terms seem to have a relation in which to contravene either taboo is to break exactly the same law. That Hughes arrives at an equation in which too different is the same as too similar by a series of denials and displacements is incontestable. In the interest of reading this alignment psychoanalytically as well as historically, I suggest that "Amalgamation is incest," a phantasmatically powerful conjunction, also marks out a rhetorical space that might be recognized in the present as a marker of the juridical law, a "commemorative site of law ... [which is] not simply textual, but ... also involv[es] particular kinds of materialization of legal power" (Dayan 1999, 19). That is, in Hughes's polemical alignment of amalgamation and incest we glimpse a midcentury semantic and legal reorganization of kin and property that occurred, and was concealed, under the sign of slavery. Slavery provides both a time and space (real and fantastic) where to commit incest or amalgamation is to break the same law and the imminent rupture and onset of forgetting that break around which some cultural or national formation has taken hold. It is important to recognize that Hughes's conjunction and fusion of amalgamation and incest (each term fraught in itself) and their collapse into a singular understanding marks one nodal point around which subjectivity in the New World was reorganized and around which it cohered.

The Hughes quotation and the anxieties and shifts that it hints at initiate a theoretical context in which to begin my discussion of Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975/1986) as a text in which the primal scenes of slavery emerge as those familial and legal entanglements that were central to the transformative enterprise of making some persons into kin and some into property. Thus the statement "Amalgamation is incest" and all that it assumes, disavows, makes equivalent, and differentiates is central to the formation of the modern American subject. Let's return to the epigraph with which this chapter began and about which Judith Butler writes, "If, as Saidiya Hartman maintains, 'slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship,' it is because African-American kinship has been at once the site of intense state surveillance and pathologization, which leads to the double bind of being subject to normalizing pressures within the context of a continuing social and political delegitimation. As a result, it is not possible to separate questions of kinship from property relations (and conceiving persons as property) and from the fictions of 'bloodline,' as well as the national and racial interests by which these lines are sustained" (2002, 15; emphasis mine). If "slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship," it is in part because under slavery, system and sign, lexico-legal acts of transubstantiation occur in which blood becomes property (with all of the rights inherent in the use and enjoyment of property) in one direction and kin in another. With the force of the law and the gaze brought to bear on the institution of slavery, we witness what Hortense Spillers has called one of "the richest displays of the psychoanalytic dimensions of culture before the science of European psychoanalysis takes hold" (2003c, 223). Reading Corregidora's exploration of profound intersubjective sexual violence (incest and amalgamation) within slavery and the family we see how (African American) kinship is lived and we get a clarification of an American slavery and post-slavery unconscious. Jones writes out something like a Corregidora complex; an Oedipus complex for the New World.

Corregidora helps us think through how the naming of amalgamation as a taboo on the order of incest and then their fusion into one undifferentiated concept might work; how, in other words, this conjunction might function. What desires (national, individual, social, cultural) are simultaneously forbidden and compelled, produced and masked in this doubled taboo if we accept that "the 'prohibition of incest' must bear on a structure -a relation between subject and object-that is distinct from biological relations"? What unspoken sociocultural relations distinct from but not exclusive of biological relations are both conceded and disavowed by the collapse of "Amalgamation is incest"?

Set in Kentucky in the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, Corregidora focuses on a blues singer named Ursa Corregidora, who is the fourth generation in a family of women with the same surname. This surname, the name of the Portuguese seaman and slaver who settled in Brazil on land and with slaves that he received from the Portuguese king, is part of what each woman retains and passes on to her daughter (who will also retain the name, and so on). A slave owner and "whoremonger," Corregidora (whose proper name we never learn) was the master of Ursa's great-grandmother and the father of at least her grandmother and her mother. After Brazilian emancipation in the beginning of the twentieth century, Great Gram and a pregnant Gram leave Brazil in 1906 and settle in Kentucky after living for a while in Louisiana. But the details of this move as well as the complex interpersonal relationships (between and among the women, the women and Corregidora, the women and other men) mostly inhere in the phantasmatic family narratives or are largely absent from the text. It is precisely those absences, those narrative breaks that power the novel.

The novel begins with one of those absences as Ursa introduces us to an earlier self, who is twenty-five years old, married, and one month pregnant. She recalls that it was April 1948 and she was leaving Happy's Caf?after her final set when she and her husband, Mutt Thomas, had a violent confrontation that ended when he pushed or threw her or she fell down the stairs. (The ways that the incident is recollected throughout the novel situate Ursa as pushed or thrown and also falling-desirous of a means to end reproduction. The question of agency is complicated here, and the unconscious plays the largest role in this text.) The fall down the stairs results in hospitalization, a miscarriage, and then a hysterectomy for Ursa. Very soon after she leaves the hospital she divorces Mutt and soon after that she marries Tadpole McCormick, the owner of Happy's Caf Ursa is an only child, the only daughter in a family in which there are only daughters. Since birth she has been told by each of her foremothers that her duty (her raison d'tre) is to "make generations to bear witness to the horrors of slavery" in order to keep "it as visible as the blood" (18, 72). The gaps in the narrative itself and in reproduction with which the text begins, position Ursa from the outset as unable or unwilling to fulfill the Corregidora women's demand to carry their history into the future. The history of the women unfolds in passages that are at once Ursa's memory of the family narrative and the family narratives being channeled through her. As it unfolds we discover that Ursa is conflicted about fulfilling the command "to make generations to bear witness" before the miscarriage and hysterectomy and that the hysterectomy realizes a profoundly real intrafamilial rupture that already has taken place even before Ursa's birth and has been repressed. At the same time that the plot follows Ursa's life, Corregidora is also a collective narrative of those four generations of female descendants of chattel slavery. The text maps their unconscious repetitions and their conscious, determined repetitions of "evidence to hold up against [the enslavers]," which is driven by the destruction of historical documents ("the provisional government ordered the slavery archives burned in 1891"), and it bears witness to an almost universal repression of the fact of slavery's extreme domestic violence.

As the last woman in a series of women who carry the Corregidora name, Ursa reconstructs and realizes a historical and familial narrative. A handed-down photograph that she possesses of "old man Corregidora," master/father/grandfather, stands as an object outside of her own body that she can point to as evidence of enslavement, emancipation, and her and her ancestors' survival of one or both. This photograph of their slave master/father that gains much of its value from some future understanding is weighted with a past that is not yet past and a connection to a past and future that are not yet visible. As Great Gram explains, "I stole it because I said whenever afterward when evil come I wanted something to point to and say, 'That's what evil look like'" (12).

The photograph now in her possession, Ursa is the current Corregidora generation meant to bear and carry forward the memories of what Corregidora has done and been to her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, as well as a resemblance to and distance from him. Though she is not directly touched by him in the ways that Great Gram, Gram, and even Mama have been, Corregidora is nonetheless present for Ursa through the photograph, through the mothers' stories, their shared relationship to the law, reproduction, and justice, and through the reproduction of a series of desires and relationships in their own lives. Jointly the memories made flesh and the photograph work to make a particular experience of slavery real to the generations after Great Gram, and the time and the spaces of her enslavement are extended into the present. Not only does their embrace of "the potentially disabling proximity between antagonism and identification (taking the enemy's place, internally as well as externally, as the only way of ensuring his defeat)" (J. Rose 1996, 11) dictate the Corregidora women's lives, but slavery's laws have been incorporated into the daily instrumentality of the law post-slavery. By exploring the narrative of the history of the women as they are fucked and fathered by Corregidora and by looking into this patriarchy under slavery we can begin to articulate what is going on in Hughes's declaration "Amalgamation is incest" and to understand the Corregidora complex.

In Corregidora this fusion of the course of the narrative and the symbolic law occurs at the levels of form and content. Calling the slave narrative "a genre ... and a truth of the American experience" in which there are "truths ... that haven't already been told" (Rowell 1982, 42), Jones writes a neo-slave narrative in which she explores the power of the narrative (legal, familial, and social, to secure one's place in the nation, family, hierarchy) to inscribe and also to erase. Corregidora allows us to explore how the family's demands on the subject to keep visible (but also keep repressed) horrific experiences of violence in slavery-in this case, the demands of the formerly enslaved on their descendants-become congruent with the law of the (slave) master. The "proximity between antagonism and identification" in the demands of and on the Corregidora mothers and daughters to keep visible and to reproduce evidence of slavery's horrific violence inhere in slavery's legal arrangements and the internalized logic of the slave master through which they were able to survive and through which they were originally wounded.

Generational "Genital Fantasies"

How many generations had to bow to his genital fantasies? -GAYL JONES, Corregidora

In 1839 the New England-born South Carolina politician and slave owner James Henry Hammond purchased two enslaved people: eighteen-year-old Sally Johnson, a seamstress, and her one-year-old daughter, Louisa. Married, a father, a plantation owner, and a vocal critic of miscegenation who believed in the absolute inferiority of the enslaved, Hammond nevertheless engaged in long-term sexual acts/relationships with both Sally and Louisa Johnson-immediately with Sally and with Louisa when she reached the age of twelve. In 1858, nineteen years after purchasing the Johnsons, now Senator Hammond delivered his famous "Cotton Is King" speech to the U.S. Senate, in which he declared the supremacy of the South, derided the North's rejection of chattel slavery, and called the North's embrace of white wage labor slavery by another name. In his staunch defense of slavery's proper order Hammond declared that unlike the North, the South was home to a "race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes" (quoted in Bleser 1988, vii). He continued, "We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.... Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood."

Two persons of that "inferior race" (not his "brothers of one blood") that Hammond used for his purpose and called slaves were the Johnson mother and daughter. The Johnsons left no written records of their own lives, and Hammond largely records only their status as property, the children he believed he fathered with them, those he maintained he did not, the disruptions these "relationships" (particularly with Louisa) caused in his marriage to Catherine Fitzsimons, and his sense of what would be "good and fair" to them. According to Carol Bleser, the editor of Hammond's diaries, Hammond is "almost alone among the planter aristocracy [in actually documenting] his proclivity for sexually exploiting his female slaves" (1988, xvi). Known for this, for other sexual proclivities, and for a more generalized cruelty to enslaved people, Hammond nevertheless transforms ownership, rape, sex, and other relations with Sally and Louisa Johnson into a narrative of benevolent paternalism. He confides in a letter to his eldest son, Harry, that in the event of his death, "Nor would I like that any but my own blood should own as Slaves my own blood or Louisa." Of freedom, specifically freedom in the northern states, he writes, "I cannot free these people and send them North. It would be cruelty to them." Juxtaposing these two instances of "my own blood" (Harry and the Johnson children) and his reference to blood in his "Cotton Is King" speech, Hammond recasts the domination of Sally, Louisa, and their children in the following way: "Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition. Ever affectionately, J. H. H." (19; emphasis mine). This concealment of the violence of domination in the terms of affection is, as Saidiya Hartman contends, how the master narratives of seduction in enslavement are structured. "Seduction," she writes, "erects a family romance-in this case, the elaboration of a racial and sexual fantasy in which domination is transposed into the bonds of mutual affection, subjection idealized as the pathway to equality, and perfect subordination declared the means of ensuring great happiness and harmony" (1997, 89). When the one cast as seductress is white and kin, as we shall see, this particular legal and ethical alchemy cannot occur.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0822346095
• ISBN 13: 9780822346098
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272