slavery

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

payal — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Christina Sharpe’s work Monstrous Intimacies is concerned with reading how the Euro-American and African-American post-slavery subjects are constructed. An academic text, and at times quite dense with analysis, this work will be of interest mostly to academics working in the fields of critical race theory, post-colonial theory, or literary and cultural theory. Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. In this, Sharpe turns away from ‘freedom’ to consider the “unfreedom in freedom”—or in other words, the way that the “desire to be free requires one to be witness to, participant in, and be silent about scenes of subjection that we rewrite as freedom.”

In the first chapter, Sharpe considers Gayl Jones’ neo-slave narrative Corregidora as a text that deals with the demands of generational witnessing to the horrors of slavery. She considers how the scenes of rape and impregnation at the hands of the slave owner Corregidora become a means of survival for the Corregidora women—the continuation of their family ensures witnesses to their trauma. Sharpe reads this as one way in which the ‘space of enslavement post-enslavement’ is reproduced.

In the second chapter, Sharpe turns to consider Saartjie Baartman or the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ a Khoisan woman who was exhibited around Britain and France in the 19th Century as a sexual oddity, and then dissected upon her death. Sharpe contests that the pleas for the return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa itself continue to objectify Baartman, as she is “once again overwritten with multiple histories and used in the service of a number of national and political agendas that involve not the emergence of history but its repression.” Thus, Sharpe examines how what is ostensibly an act to ‘right’ history, is in fact intimately connected to the monstrous treatment of Baartman under colonialism.

Her third chapter on Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant serves her purposes particularly well and gives her space to continue to flesh out how practices of historical remembrance and display interact with everyday violences of black life. Finally, in perhaps her most engaging chapter, Sharpe looks at Kara Walker’s silhouette art work and its reception to continue to read how the violence of slavery manifests itself in post-slavery subjectivity—particularly concerned with how critics have been reluctant to read Walker’s invocation of whiteness in her work.

Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.

Written by: Sam McBean, December 27th 2010

Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Michael P. Bibler

University of Virginia Press

As Michael Bibler mentions in the introduction to Cotton’s Queer Relations, it seems impossible that there could be enough material out there to serve as the basis for such depth of criticism on an incredibly narrow topic. There are a few notable classics that have homoerotic undertones and even some more overt mentions of homosexual encounters that are discussed in works like The Confessions of Nat Turner, but these queer moments seem like blips in what appears to be an otherwise overtly heterosexual literary scape. Is Bibler reading too much into plantation literature? Are his examples only the result of the passionate desire to find queer meaning in texts where none exists? The answer to both questions seems to be no.

Bibler’s arguments are focused and supported with strong evidence from the texts and the work of other critics. But the argument by Bibler is more complex than a simple acknowledgment of the existence of queerness in plantation literature; he argues that the queer subtexts in plantation literature expose wider social injustices in plantation life, and that queer relations also move racial inequality and sexism to the forefront.

Bibler wants to make it clear that same-sex relations here do not necessarily mean homosexual relations. I will allow the reader of Cotton’s Queer Relations to delve more deeply into the complex reasoning behind his assertion; but in a nutshell, he essentially pleads that the closeness of same-sex relations in the textual examples he uses stand in such conflict of the heterosexualized and paternalistic structure of the plantation that they can be defined as queer even if they are not directly homosexual. It is an interesting take, and one that may initially sound like a bit of a stretch.

Terminology notwithstanding, Bibler offers fresh readings of literary classics like Absalom, Absalom! and gives contemporary insight to controversial texts like Styron’s Nat Turner. He digs deep into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is able to juxtapose Big Daddy’s simultaneous tolerance of homosexuality with his unabashed lack of respect toward the black servants he employs, effectively layering new meaning on a well-worn text. He picks apart the relationships of white women and their black servants in the works of Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Margaret Walker, describing them as “romances”—and supports his logic—even though none of the women in the stories share an erotic lesbian moment, or even a kiss. While there are a few minor stretches here and there in Bibler’s text, he overall pleads his case. He certainly does not appear to be afraid of stirring controversy, and does a remarkable job of defending his arguments while he discusses each point.

Written by: Emily S. Dunster, July 16th 2010

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:04:00 +0000

By Maryse Condé

University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 20th 2010

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Catherine Adams, Elizabeth H. Pleck

Oxford University Press

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved people themselves is an urgently needed remedy.

Love of Freedom is grounded in two observations: that slavery was certainly not exclusively southern—that New England, too, had a terrible legacy of enslaving African people, although the circumstances of slavery in this region were distinctive in many respects. The second starting point is that while the people kidnapped and enslaved in New England were disproportionately male, African women’s experience of slavery and of the complicated legacies of African and colonial American patriarchy were similarly distinctive and should be studied independently.

Foremost, Love of Freedom is a thick description of the legal and social status of slavery in the northeastern American colonies and, as such, will serve as an important resource for anyone doing research in the field. The authors point out that the first kidnapped African people were taken to Boston only six years after its founding. Only five years later, in 1641, the Massachussetts Bay colony had the dubious distinction of becoming the first British colony to codify slavery legally. By 1700, the authors estimate a black population of one thousand, half living in Massachusetts. Fortunately for historians, the legal status of enslaved people, particularly women, seems to have been a source of continual legal challenge. The result is that we have a surprisingly rich record of direct testimony from enslaved women.

Directly from the voices of women such as Hagar Blackmore we get an account of being kidnapped away from her family in Angola, transported to Barbardos, and sold to a wealthy merchant in Cambridge. From this woman we learn of the vulnerability of enslaved women to rape, and we get some sense of what it meant to be a survivor. The authors point out that the principle of coverture, a convention of English common law in which women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands, further guaranteed the absence of any sort of reasonable legal protection for enslaved women—or even for free married black women.

As a part of laying to rest the myth of slavery in the north as a benign institution, the book illustrates one manifestation of the idea of coverture. A wife’s killing her husband was, because of established notions of hierarchy, worse than ordinary murder and was, in fact, given a special designation: “petit treason,” for which burning to death was the punishment. Killing a husband—or a master, in the case of enslaved people, was almost—if not quite—on the scale of regicide and was punished accordingly. The book lays out the grim details of human suffering: the archaeological evidence showing widespread malnutrition among black children in the region; the spinal deformations evident among women forced to do laundry, ironing, and household heavy lifting; the forced breeding.

Among the most important archival sources is the record of “freedom suits,” women “seeking possession of their liberty” through manumission or some sort of legal process. Through the testimony extant in these cases, the reader gets a powerful sense of exactly what freedom meant to these women—and what slavery meant. As the authors conclude from these records, “Being stolen from kin and homeland was the central wrong African men and women cited time and again.” And to rectify this crime entailed the re-possession of the self by its rightful owner.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 28th 2010

Who Do You Think You Are?

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:11:00 +0000

By NBC Entertainment, Ancestry.com

Genealogy has never been so entertaining. Making its debut this evening, Who Do You Think You Are? explores the family history of a celebrity who travels about to find missing information and reconnect with their ancestors by seeing for themselves the location of their family’s historical events. Sponsored by Ancestry.com, the celebrities, of course, use the website as a primary source of their research. (Don’t worry, the tie-in is natural and not overly advertorial.) It’s an emotional experience to discover one’s roots and feel a family connection like never before.

Having received a screener of the entire season, which will unfold weekly for NBC viewers, the first episode staring Sarah Jessica Parker was the most gripping. She discovers that she has an ancestor who was involved in the Salem witch trials. As she waits for whether her ancestor was an accuser or a victim to be revealed, it’s most incredible to watch her conviction and sense of responsibility. She’s quite nervous about the results, and unsure which way it would go, but it was admirable that she felt the need to make things right in some way should her ancestor turn out to be an accuser.

However, the flip side is that she’s horrified by the idea of having an ancestor unjustly accused of being a witch. It’s fascinating to see her instant love for the relative and her immediate connection with the historical nature of the events. It's as if these were her own life events unfolding. It goes to show that there is a bond among families that surpasses time, distance, and even death.

The journey that most surprised me was that of Emmitt Smith. All I knew about him was that he used to be a football player. It was amazing to watch this bighearted man connect with his family despite the harshness of his genealogical roots in slavery. Most inspiring was his powerful respect when he learns that his grandmother successfully used her strength, intelligence, and strong protective instincts to make the best of a tough situation. He’s enormously impressed with her accomplishments and reveres her effect on his family's posterity. To watch a man view the power of a woman with such honor is truly beautiful.

Other celebrities featured in this first season of Who Do You Think You Are? are Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Broderick, Brooke Shields, Susan Sarandon, and Spike Lee. Lisa Kudrow's Jewish ancestry leads right into the Holocaust, and this is by far the toughest episode to watch. But if you can bear with Lisa through the heartbreaking journey, the ending turns out to be a small miracle in the midst of tragedy. Matthew Broderick's family history is full of war heroes, and Matthew’s research into his lineage helps to solve a 150 year old mystery. If you watch the show for its travel aspect, be sure to tune in for Brooke Shields' episode. She has an exciting family tree that leads to beautiful locations. Having a very unique family history, Susan Sarandon has always felt a connection with the grandmother she never met yet believes she inherited her best qualities from. The search for the truth of this women, who disappeared many years ago, is a challenging treasure hunt and the family connection through strong women is wondrously insightful. Spike Lee discovers a truth about his ancestors that he wishes weren’t true. It’s a look into genuine emotion, though with a tough exterior, as he tries to accept his family history, blemishes and all.

Who Do You Think You Are? gives you a mix of history lesson, travel show, and human interest documentary with a touch of reality TV. It’s a good mix that keeps the audience entertained while educating and enlightening them as well.

Written by: Sarah Eve Nichols-Fulghum, March 5th 2010

Incivilities

admin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:02:00 +0000

By Barbara Claire Freeman

Counterpath Press

With her first collection of poetry, Incivilities, literature and theory professor-turned-poet Barbara Claire Freeman excavates the vagaries of an American narrative—“how it became, what it began,” as one of her poems says. Like men counting bodies on a battlefield, exploding the absurd order of the data they have collected, Freeman’s poems rebel against the aftermath of the atrocities (the title puts it mildly) they insist on recognizing. It’s that rebellion that makes them so compelling. It is also the playful way in which they confuse the manufactured order of a manufactured history.

“One Down, Seven to Go,” for instance, hints at the emptiness of narrated traditions, from the fanfare of presidential elections to the sanitized nursery school tale of the first Thanksgiving: we shrink from responsibility for both yet beam proudly at their trappings. (Meanwhile, in the poem, a still-lit supermarket has already cleared of shoppers, and an onlooker imagines charming scenes inside.) The poem observes:

...We forgot

the narrative was supposed to make us whole. The main thing was to tell the story.

Freeman’s reassembled American history is one of stock trading, gold mining, Louisiana Purchases, slaves, the revolutionaries who kept them slaves, shoddy intelligence and the ways in which we seek to forget. It is told through fragments of George Washington’s speeches and descriptions of newspaper photographs of staged townscapes.

These poems’ heterogeneous forms suggest that poems, too, are artifacts to be referenced in other pages. The denser, longer ones move in cadences and sentence fragments that recall Lyn Hejinian; the sudden spaces and surprising inversions of the narrower ones gasp elegiacally around the textbook-ready rhetorical platitudes they try to dismantle. All of them shudder at the brutality of infrastructure (“Most of the ideas we’re talking about are bridges and roads”), the permanence of debt (“America will not let/her children deleverage”), the complicity of the poet and the caprice of communication:

_...   if now you cannot hear me_

it is because the sound of this night no one will remember no one else.

Written by: Samantha Schulz, February 20th 2010

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:33:00 +0000

By Edlie L. Wong

New York University Press

In this superb book, Edlie Wong analyzes the territorialization of freedom and slavery in the antebellum Atlantic. While reading it, I frequently recalled Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Yet Wong’s work also suggests the converse is true: the existence of free blacks threatened institutionalized slavery on practical and moral grounds, while the continuation of legal slavery in any jurisdiction challenged core notions of freedom, including freedom of movement and travel. This conflict played out in courtrooms and the court of public opinion as slaves sued for legal emancipation—a strategy fraught with its own contradictions.

Wong considers not only American struggles, but also how freedom on European soil and slavery in the West Indies influenced and was influenced by American slavery. Slave narratives, novels, popular press, and legal documents are the material from which Wong makes a dialectical critique of pro- and anti-slavery thought as it crystallized around legal cases. As befits her topic, she organizes the book locally rather than chronologically.

Chapter one deals with nationalistic British abolitionism, which championed freedom while confining it within British borders. Chapter two moves across the Atlantic to northern American free states, which offered southern slaves traveling there a choice: sever social ties and gain individual freedom, or return to home and slavery. Chapter three focuses on the Dred Scott decision and examines legal emancipation in the southwest U.S. Chapter five and the concluding chapter again take a transatlantic standpoint. The former examines the criminalization and de facto enslavement of free blacks—both American and foreign-born—who traveled into southern slave states as sailors. The latter briefly treats the question of American citizenship after emancipation and travel abroad.

Throughout, Wong sharply analyzes the rhetoric of pro- and anti-slavery literature. Whites on both sides generally acceded to the “chattel principle” that slaves are an extension of their masters' wills. Thus, unlike fugitive slaves, American slaves brought by their masters onto free soil might sue for their freedom precisely because the masters had made the decision, effectively consenting to their emancipation. Paradoxically, the movement onto free soil instilled slaves—now to be considered free agents—with their own wills, and any who returned with their masters to slave territory were argued to have chosen re-enslavement. Slaveholders, thus, saw their slaves as will-less objects, at the same time considering their enslaved status was the slaves' own choice. On the other side, White abolitionists constructed a rescue narrative in which they heroically spoke for slavery's helpless victims. Slaves whose active resistance challenged this gallantry were censored in the liberal media, or left out altogether.

Not surprisingly, Wong finds this paternalist viewpoint particularly strong where Black children and women are concerned. In the case of six-year-old Med, both lawyers claimed to speak for the girl, one presuming her desire to remain in free Massachusetts while the other argued her best interest was returning to Louisiana and her enslaved mother. Slaveholders vilified abolitionists for tearing apart families whose members were not all emancipated, while abolitionist literature suppressed the difficult decision of emancipated or escaping slaves to leave still-enslaved kin.

Wong seeks to restore the Black actors missing from these accounts. Some slaves turned the legal principle partus sequitur matrem (“the offspring follow the mother”) to establish emancipation for themselves and their children. Harriet Scott, for instance, wife of Dred, simultaneously sued for her own freedom and in so doing also established the legal emancipation of her two daughters. Thus matrilinear arguments could subvert paternalistic slave laws.

A foreknowledge of antebellum history and law would be helpful to the reader, but isn’t prerequisite. Including a timeline might have been useful, but that hardly detracts from the intelligence of the argument and the important recovery of overlooked source material. Though Wong refrains from drawing explicit connections to modern racial profiling, incarceration, migration, and an evermore tightly entwined global economy, the parallels lie on the page for any modern reader to draw.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, October 26th 2009

Blonde Roots: A Novel

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:34:00 +0000

By Bernadine Evaristo

Riverhead Books

Blonde Roots begins with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche that partly explains Bernadine Evaristo’s motivation for writing the book:

All things are subject to interpretation: whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Most students of history now realize that it is the story of the victor; oppressed peoples often have that oppression continued through the erasure of their past. In an interview, Evaristo, of mixed English and Nigerian descent, mentions the UK’s lack of acknowledgment of its participation in the slave trade, her Portuguese last name, and migrations endured by her father’s family as evidence of this collusion of language and silence.

Blonde Roots is a novel that sheds new light on the atrocities of the slave trade through two interesting devices. The first and most obvious is the exchange of Africa for Europe. Evaristo’s uncivilized “whytes" are captured by Black slavers with a myriad of technological advantages. This exchange, as Evaristo intends, helps the reader to discover anew some of the ridiculousness of the logic of real-life slave traders.

In a scene that contains many of the book’s more readerly pleasures, protagonist Doris Scagglethorpe’s primary owner, Bwana, makes his first journey to the “grey continent.” His colleague Byakatonda, in the manner of Kurtz in Hearts of Darkness, has gone native in a primordial Eden. Instead of a sweating, starched British man with an unnamed wife, we see a man who has taken to wearing an uncivilized amount of “shit-colored” clothes and has married a savage named Pamela. Bwana, of course, would rather get frost-bite and would never touch a woman without the capacity for language. Details like this seem ridiculous until one considers the historical parallels. Coupled with compelling descriptions of the middle passage, the complicity of locals and neighboring countries, and the condition of Doris’ back after a lifetime of whippings, one feels fresh shock at what once passed for civilization. Readers easily root for Doris and remember the spirituals of American slaves as she is encouraged by others to “wade in the water” and attempt her escape.

A second device that Evaristo employs is the anachronism. While the England of the novel seems to still be struggling through a feudal system complete with armored knights and cabbage farmers, the continent of New Ambossa has guns. This difference can be explained as an attempt to show the reasons for African advancement, ala Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. If one compares lack of clean drinking water in today’s Africa and to the waste of the United States, Evaristo’s world isn’t much of a stretch. Further, British feudal lord and all-around pompous ass Percy has a foreign madwoman in his attic, which, in addition to being delightful, could with other clues place the novel’s setting somewhere in the nineteenth century.

However, Evaristo inserts technologies and references from hundreds of years in the future, and describes her book as “atemporal.” For example, Doris’ first attempt at escape is through an underground railroad that is actually an abandoned tube system, and the Africans delight in their “chocolate cities” surrounded by impoverished vanilla suburbs. I appreciated the intent of this device—Evaristo states that she wanted the novel to take place out of time, so we can see how it is always occurring—but because some markers were in fact deeply rooted in time and current affairs, I found myself searching for a temporal anchor that was not to be found.

In addition to the obvious structures of these devices, some of the internal plotting was contrived. I found myself annoyed by obvious clues as to how and when important characters would reappear. Refreshingly, the ending was organic and realistic. Because of earlier contrivances, I began to lose my fear for Doris’ safety and well-being, but I was happy to learn that she did not, in fact, live happily ever after in an absolute sense.

Ultimately, Blonde Roots is successful, both as a work of fiction—I couldn’t put it down—and as an experiment with political implications. Evaristo humanizes the victims and, in some cases, the perpetrators of the slave trade and gives readers who thought they knew all of the answers about this important piece of world history new questions to think about.

Written by: H. V. Cramond, August 12th 2009

The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:03:00 +0000

By Kevin Bales, Ron Soodalter

University of California Press

Before starting this book, prepare yourself. Bales and Soodalter take an in depth look at slavery in America, and they reveal some dark stories that some people may find too disturbing. Slavery, unfortunately, did not end in the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. It exists throughout the world through house, field, and sexual servitude. Many of the victims of slavery go unheard or receive little support; if they are afraid to report or do not have the proper paperwork, they face deportation and returning home in shame. Others do not get the necessary psychiatric help after the devastation they endure.

The treatment of the slaves described in this book is deplorable. One of the first stories given is about Maria, who was lured from Mexico with promises of an education, and then was enslaved. The young girl was ordered to do housework and was subject to physical and sexual abuse. When she was not working, she was chained outside and sometimes was forced to eat dog feces. If a neighbor had not seen Maria (the yard had an eight-foot concrete fence), she might have died. The sad part is Maria's story is not uncommon; what is rare is her being rescued.

Would you be able to identify someone held in captivity? Would you know what to do? Many people may say that it could never happen in their town, but it exists everywhere. You may be surprised. Bales and Soodalter referenced cases in Connecticut, which I've never heard of, even though I have lived in the state for fifteen years. However, besides describing the serious offenses of slavery, Bales and Soodalter offers stories of Good Samaritans who have made a difference. In addition, at the end of the book, resources are provided if you want to get involved in fighting human trafficking. The Slave Next Door provides an exceptional view of slavery in the world, and is a valuable tool for human trafficking activists.

Written by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, July 19th 2009

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life

admin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:53:00 +0000

By Catherine Clinton

Harper Collins

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life by Catherine Clinton, is a fascinating account of this very complicated and very misunderstood woman. I knew little about Mary Todd prior to reading this book and what I did know was mostly based on my own mythical ideas about Honest Abe and his wife Mary. Catherine Clinton’s work had me shaking my head many times; it was quite astonishing to see what this woman endured as the wife of the man who was probably our most beloved president.

The book opens dramatically with Abraham Lincoln lying on his deathbed, while close by, his wife sobs uncontrollably. She is eventually taken from the room, never to be summoned again before Lincoln passes away. And from this you are forewarned of the difficult life of Mary Todd because she lost both her husband and the position of first lady.

Both Mary and Abraham were born and raised in Kentucky, but their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. Lincoln is famous for his poor, humble beginnings in a log cabin, whereas Mary Todd grew up in a family that was well-connected both politically and socially. As a result of these familial associations, she received a good education. Mary Todd craved recognition and prestige; she was also headstrong, and these traits would often have extremely negative effects during her stay in the White House.

The one thing that surprised me was that even in 1860, politics were politics and the public press was ruthless in their reporting of the first couple. These “Westerners” were not well received and not well liked among the Washington high society and political community. Mrs. Lincoln was shunned by many women in the prominent social circles, which was a severe blow. She craved the respect that should have gone along with being the first lady.

Because of the Lincolns' position in favor of abolition, the president received death threats during the Civil War, creating severe stress for Mary. She also experienced the loss of many close relatives during her time at the White House, which contributed to the incredible obstacles that she faced on a daily basis.

However, in presenting these facts, Clinton is not trying to garner sympathy for Mary. She shows the reader a complicated woman who gives her political advice to Lincoln’s cabinet. She could be unpleasant in public situations, but she also had the compassion to visit wounded soldiers in the local hospitals, and fought for abolition.

The friendships that Mary developed with other women were an essential part of how she coped with her day to day living. They were an integral part of her life until her later years. There is still controversy over the mental state of Mary Todd. In 1863, on her way back to the White House, she was thrown from a carriage causing her to hit her head on a rock which might have contributed to her mental state. She was also prone to depression, and Lincoln scholars continue to debate on her mental health.

When the last page of Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life is read and the book is closed, the reader cannot help but sympathize with this underappreciated woman.

Written by: Su Lin Mangan, April 29th 2009

Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist - One Woman's Spiritual Journey

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:18:00 +0000

By Jan Willis

Wisdom Publications

Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist is a beautifully written memoir in which Jan Willis charts her spiritual life’s journey towards self-love. An exceptionally gifted intellectual and a gentle soul by nature, Willis tells the story of having her self-worth consistently undermined by racism. She grew up in a Southern, Black rural town terrorized by the Klu Klux Klan, where she observed the “crippling effects” of the KKK on her community’s self-esteem. As a child, Willis’ mother referred to her intelligence as evil. Years later, even Willis’ full scholarship to an Ivy league college came with the cost of tokenization and criticism from her town. Willis’ spiritual path is a journey of self-acceptance and fulfilling her potential in spite of the oppressive effects of racism.

Her experiences of racial oppression in Docena, Alabama are vivid and disturbing. Her life’s story serves a reminder that some living African Americans carry these hateful memories with them today. Hers is a traumatic experience of racism many Americans would like to think of as an ancient history. This oppression spans from a girlhood memory of watching through the window as the Klan burns crosses in the nearest alleyway, to recent research on her family lineage, in which she speaks with a living local historian, a librarian who makes the cutting remark that Willis’ intellect is accounted for by a certain White male in her ancestry. Willis portrays racism as such a dominant force throughout her early life in particular, that when reading the book, I wondered when the focus on spirituality was going to kick in.

It comes during her undergraduate studies, starting when Willis spends a year living in India. She finds herself especially at home amongst the Tibetans there. After her study abroad, she and several friends travel to Nepal, where Willis stops to visit a Tibetan stupa. Willis meditates at the stupa, experiencing intense inner peace during her visit. A monk residing there invites Willis to stay and study at the temple. Though Willis returns back to college in the states to finish her undergraduate degree, she remembers her experience at the shrine and the monk’s invitation.

Upon graduation, Willis finds herself faced with the most difficult choice she would ever have to make: work for the Black Panther Party or return to the Tibetan monastery, the choice between, in Willis’ own words, "a 'piece' or peace?" Out of a commitment to following her own path, and with a university traveling scholarship from her Master's program, Willis returns to the stupa, where she spends a year dedicated to her spiritual practice. There she learns to live with both pride and humility, a challenge which, she remarks, is made additionally difficult for all African Americans due to the trauma of slavery.

She finds what she is seeking in Buddhism. Willis spends a year in Tibet living at a Buddhist monastery, and eventually goes on to teach Buddhist Studiesin order to give the gift of believing in oneself to others. Ultimately, as an adult, Willis settled into a life she chose for herself. She revisits her family, her hometown, and her father’s Baptist church. Having come full-circle, Willis expands the concept of her spirituality identity to see herself as a Baptist-Buddhist.

I found Jan Willis’ story astonishing, in part due to the opportunities which open to her at pivotal moments in her life. Looking back on her life’s accomplishments, receiving the praise of her students and her spiritual guide, Lama Yeshe, upon her teachings in the classroom, Willis recognizes that she has always had a lioness spirit, longing to really roar. This book is a powerful and vulnerable telling of a phenomenal woman’s life. Neither Black, Baptist, nor Buddhist, I found this autobiography beautiful and enlightening. I imagine that for readers who can more closely identify with Jan Willis’ experience, Dreaming Me offers a model of profound hope and inspiration.

Written by: Kathryn Berg, March 1st 2009

Letters From Black America

admin — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:51:00 +0000

Edited by Pamela Newkirk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

While it would help to appreciate and admire the historical importance of preserved letters, you don’t have to be history buff or correspondence enthusiast to delight in Letters From Black America. In a time of quickly typed emails and SMS, tangible letters hold weight for many who value thoughtful, deliberate communication. In this compendium, Pamela Newkirk skillfully compiles an assortment of missives from the past three centuries that shine a light on the humanity and continued struggles of ordinary and exceptional African American men and women.

Divided into seven sections, the collection of 200-plus letters examines family dynamics during and after slavery, education as a locus for social activism, and Black military service from the Civil War to Iraq. In everyday yet often poetic language, details are revealed about married couples separated by the slave trade and babies born without the presence of their fathers. Open letters previously published in newspapers are included to showcase a wide range of letter writing and how it can be used as a tool to promote public discourse. Prominent Black artists and academics correspond and share visions of hope. One man proposes marriage and later asks to set a date, confirming his lady’s affirmative answer, though the reader never knows what else was actually said.

While the collection does include an interesting cross-section of letter writers and receivers, many are notable figures in Black history, and many—like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Derrick Bell Jr., and Booker T. Washington—have letters included in several sections. This is not without merit, but letters to and from prominent, highly educated Black leaders are more common than those passed between ordinary citizens. This does not diminish the significance of the selections. At times, it is rather helpful—if not necessary. The often-lengthy writings of Frederick Douglass, for example, comprise a significant part of the letters about politics and social justice. This is not a burden, but an opportunity. Many of these letters are not easily found, even in a time of ubiquitous technology and information. Each letter is introduced with background about the writer and recipient, and these small but critical details make Letters From Black America an incredible reference guide.

While many of the book’s sections are enthralling—love letters from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Coretta Scott (King) and a coming out letter from Joseph Beam to his parents are particularly noteworthy—the climax of the compilation is the third section, “Politics and Social Change.” Some of the most formative communication of our time is found here, including letters between Shirley Du Bois and Langston Hughes, Bayard Rustin and Eldridge Cleaver, and Toni Morrison to then-Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

To address the changes in communication over time, the book ends with letters from “Across the Diaspora.” Communiqués between Pan-African leaders of the last hundred years, across oceans and decades, remind us that even as we move into a time when travel and the Internet make our work easier, we have come very far and yet have so very far to go.

This review is cross-posted on Girl w/ Pen.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 7th 2009

The Emperor Jones (1/07/2009)

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:48:00 +0000

The Goodman Theatre

Chicago, Illinois

"I learn more when I'm being entertained," a student wrote in a journal last year. The Wooster Group is known for subversive provocation, so if that is your idea of entertainment—if you find ideas entertaining or meta-performance inevitable and intriguing, not pretentious or contrived—bring the whole chain-gang of your internal critics and cultural conscience down to this staging of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 work when next performed.

Brutus Jones, the self-anointed king of a West Indian island, faces insurrection by his "fool bush nigger" subjects. There is nothing comfortable in seeing a white actor in blackface perform the dialect of minstrelsy for an hour, but it might be more uncomfortable for a contemporary Caucasian audience to hear the same script from the lips of a black man. I became excruciatingly aware of the degree to which performance is a contract between the actors and the audience: the payment and the acquiescent listening in exchange for the promise of amusement or edification.

The Wooster Group earns its reputation not only through Kate Valk's astoundingly dedicated recitation, a virtuosic testimony to commitment and craft, but also through its visual and musical components. The minimalist set, elaborate Kabuki-influenced costumes, limited palette, upstage televisions offering intermittent grids or pulsing blobs, choreographed sequences, and soundtrack that intersperses drumming with segments more reminiscent of Tangerine Dream all combine to present an interpretation that engages and enlightens through raising more questions than it answers. Current events make O'Neill's lines resonate: “For the small stealing, they put you in jail. For the big stealing, they make you Emperor.”

The demographic of the press night crowd at the Goodman also underlined Jones' plaintive cry: “What are you looking at, white folks?” Can anyone transcend essentialism? History dictates that a black actor performing in whiteface in no way carries the same impact as the reverse, just as there is nothing that I can say on the street in response to a catcall that is fully retaliatory. There is no such thing as neutral speech.

In theory, we are entering a post-racial society. In reality, the fact that this production is a powerful event, even with its cool self-aware certitude, indicates that we have not. Jones knows the Baptist Church, and the Bible says that the sins of the fathers are visited for four generations (Exodus 34:6-7). Legal slavery in the United States ended in 1865. It persists on the planet today. There is no shortage of human inhumanity to humans. What is the statute of limitations on atrocity? Perhaps all of us, like the Emperor, can declaim: "Forgive me, Lord. Forgive this poor sinner," or "Lord, I done wrong."

Photo credit: Paula Court

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, January 19th 2009

The Hanging of Angelique

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:54:00 +0000

By Afua Cooper

University of Georgia Press

The history of Canadian black slavery is a story quite often untold. The Hanging of Angelique opens the doors to the unknown. After fifteen years of research, Afua Cooper brings to light the “untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of Old Montreal”.

Cooper weaves together crucial historical facts that are often unspoken, and similar to the many stories that Americans have heard over time. The sad and intricate life of a black woman who, at only 29 years young, was full of despair and discovered a longing within herself to be set free. But at what cost? After a catastrophic fire was set to old Montreal, Marie Joseph Angelique, a Portuguese black slave, was accused of setting the fire.

Cooper leaves the ending unspoken: “Did Angelique set the fire? Your guess is as good as mine.” But her intricately detailed research tells the story for her. It’s the writing of Cooper that is pleasantly appeasing as you dive deep into a historical conundrum of right versus wrong.

The detailed filled story offers a new look into the life of Angelique and gives readers a well defined idea of exactly what slavery was like in Canada in 1734. It allows the reader to see a glimpse of the life that Angelique struggled with on daily basis and leaves the unspoken whisper in the back of your mind: Did she do it? What would I do?

Cooper tells the story of a woman who refused to fit into the role that has been chiseled for her and her sad demise while creating the big picture that shows what exactly it meant to be a black slave woman in Canada.

Considered to be the “oldest slave narrative in the New World,” The Hanging of Angelique will leave you with a saddened and somber idea of what a black Canadian woman’s place was at that time, and the lack of identity that you were free to call your own. Cooper gently nudges the readers through the novel and as you turn the final page, you’ll feel the oppressive hands of slavery around your ankles, slowly pulling you underwater until the light has completely dimmed.

Written by: Megan Blair, April 30th 2007