Christine Cynn and Kim F. Hall,
"Introduction"
(page 2 of 5)
The first section of this special issue, "The Art of History,"
addresses the production of history and institutional memory, along with
the effacements and elisions enabling it. Important recent archival work
has focused on compiling demographic and economic information about
slavery and enslaved persons, particularly through the compilation of
data from ships' records. In "'Heartsore': The Melancholy Archive of
Cape Colony Slavery," Yvette Christiansë foregrounds the politics of the
archive and the foundational ambivalence of its structure. As she notes,
records of the Cape Town Archive, where she conducted her research,
constitute national, official memory and history that "appear as truths
or facts" but were "conceived in anticipation of the future's arrival."
Christiansë traces the tangled, inconsistent, and often contradictory
record of Sila van de Kaap, an enslaved woman convicted of the December
24, 1822 murder of her nine-year-old son in the Cape Colony (which would
later become part of South Africa). Through a focus on the gendered
subaltern, Christiansë's account supplements and shows the limitations
of the demographic approach to slavery studies, while contesting the
privileging of the male subject of black diaspora. It simultaneously
draws attention to Indian Ocean slave traffic and to slavery in
settlement colonies in Africa, under-analyzed sites of both diaspora
studies and of studies on slavery. However, the singular female black
subject visible in the historical record only through forms of silencing
and negation cannot be recuperated, "for the cause of resistance and the
history of Western subjects-in-the-making" or "runaway triumphalism of
late twentieth-century readerly practice." Christiansë concludes with a
reminder against the dangers of archival research as recovery or
affirmation of presence or individual agency and resistance.
In contrast, in "'She Better Off Dead than Jest Livin' for the Whip':
Enslaved Women's Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Nation,"
Celia Naylor examines the possibilities for reconceptualizing
resistance, through her study of another often neglected aspect of the
black diaspora: people of African descent enslaved by Native Americans
in nineteenth-century United States Indian Territory (now northeastern
Oklahoma). For Naylor, accounts of enslaved women's resistance to the
conditions of their enslavement in the Cherokee Nation provide important
correctives to dominant narratives of black-Indian relations that figure
Indian enslavement as a more benign form of bondage, or that emphasize
collusion between enslaved people and the Cherokee nation. They might
also compel a "reconceptualization of slave resistance that speaks to
the dynamic power relations between enslaved and enslaver that are
informed and problematized by notions of race, gender, place, and
nation."
The next two authors foreground gendering in diaspora through their
creative work. In the videos Quarantine and Savoneta, shot
in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, choreographer/filmmaker Gabri Christa
renders what she describes as "the complexity that comes from being a
member of a crossroads culture." The pieces formally and thematically
enact the creolization that Christa traces in the history of Curaçao, a
Dutch Caribbean trade center and former slave depot; her videos
incorporate music and dance performances blending black U.S. American,
Euro-American, West African, and Caribbean influences "to create an
interpretation of place and history." Christa's work attends to the
gender, sexual, color, and linguistic fractures in colonial history that
inform the present, even as it seeks to transform cultural identity,
history, and memory.
Through their literary production, the Ugandan Women Writers'
Association, a women's writing cooperative known as FEMRITE, effectively
redefine Ugandan literature. As Kathryn Tobin notes, "Simultaneously,
the organization has addressed and redressed the historic absence of
women from literary production, by prioritizing women as writers,
advocating and supporting a reading culture, and continually emphasizing
a national setting and focus." The editors of this issue offered a prize
to the member of FEMRITE whose work was selected for publication in
S&F Online. Jackee Budesta Batanda's winning entry, "Holding on to
the Memories," frames questions of nation building and nationalism in
postcoloniality from the perspective of Naboro, the young female
protagonist and narrator. Nelson Mandela's status as "African hero,"
triumphant emblem of black resistance, contrasts with the narrator's
account of her own father's complicity with Idi Amin. Batanda's story
concludes on a note of suggestive ambiguity: it is unclear whether or
how Naboro will reconcile with her father and the legacies of violent
repression that she must confront.
In "Alma Latina: The American Hemisphere's Racial Melodramas," Hiram
Perez focuses on the circulation of media across the Americas. He
interrogates the melodrama, defined as the dominant mode of U.S. cinema,
but which Perez argues is "also a hemispheric—regional, transnational,
extranational—mode or symbolic structure that in the excesses and
peregrinations of its performances may indeed reinforce nation-state
racial formations but also subverts (or at least recodes) those
formations." Perez tracks the many iterations of Imitation of
Life in the United States and Latin America, particularly the
staging of the black maternal body and of the tragic mulatta. As he
argues, the ideological contradictions generated by these melodramatic
female figures complicate accounts of Latin American telenovela
spectatorship in relation to North American media and economic
imperialism as either passive or resistant. Instead, melodrama
constitutes a "complex site of mediations" productive for an American
studies attentive to the constantly shifting, multilayered hemispheric
myths of racial origin.
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