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.
