{"id":22621,"date":"2012-04-22T21:43:06","date_gmt":"2012-04-22T21:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=22621"},"modified":"2016-04-03T02:19:52","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T02:19:52","slug":"imagining-jefferson-and-hemings-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=22621","title":{"rendered":"Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

TransAtlantica: American Studies Journal<\/a>
\n1 | 2011 : Senses of the South \/ R\u00e9f\u00e9rendums populaires<\/a>
\n10 pages, 20 paragraphs<\/p>\n

Suzanne W. Jones<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of English
\nUniversity of Richmond<\/em><\/p>\n

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics,<\/em> cultural critic bell hooks<\/a> argues that \u201cno one seems to know how to tell the story\u201d of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: \u201cthat story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women.\u201d Narratives of white exploitation and black solidarity have made it difficult to imagine consensual sex and impossible to imagine love of any kind across the color line in the plantation South. hooks predicted that the suppressed story, if told, would explain how sexuality could serve as \u201ca force subverting and disrupting power relations, unsettling the oppressor\/oppressed paradigm\u201d (57-58). By rethinking and reimagining the relationship between Thomas Jefferson <\/a>and Sally Hemings<\/a>, contemporary novelists, filmmakers, and historians have exposed this \u201csuppressed story,\u201d the bare bones of which were first made public in 1802 by journalist James Callendar<\/a> during Jefferson\u2019s first term as U.S. President and then covered up by professional historians for almost 175 years.<\/p>\n

As novelist Ralph Ellison<\/a> pointed out, historical fiction must sometimes serve as the repository for historical truth when the collective historical memory has repressed the facts. In 1979 Barbara Chase-Riboud\u2019s<\/a> best-selling novel Sally Hemings<\/em> allowed readers to enter the mind and heart of the shadowy figure that historian Fawn Brodie had brought back into the public consciousness in 1974, and in so doing enabled readers to believe that Jefferson might have had a long-term relationship with her. Chase-Riboud\u2019s fictional portrait clearly upset Jefferson\u2019s defenders, but the word that CBS might make the novel into a miniseries unnerved them, causing historians Virginius Dabney<\/a> and Dumas Malone<\/a> to intervene. Although they claimed that they were worried about historical accuracy, historian Annette Gordon-Reed<\/a> believes that they were even more worried by the nature of the medium itself: \u201cIf a beautiful woman appears on screen as a capable and trustworthy person, [\u2026] all talk about impossibility [of a liaison] would be rendered meaningless\u201d (Jefferson and Hemings<\/em>, 182-83). Over fifteen years later, the film and the miniseries that eventually were produced have proved Gordon-Reed right. Today visitors to Jefferson\u2019s Monticello<\/a> routinely view, seemingly without surprise or dismay, a twenty-minute documentary that briefly mentions the liaison…<\/p>\n

Read the entire\u00a0article in HTML<\/a> or PDF<\/a> format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris TransAtlantica: American Studies Journal 1 | 2011 : Senses of the South \/ R\u00e9f\u00e9rendums populaires 10 pages, 20 paragraphs Suzanne W. Jones, Professor of English University of Richmond In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, cultural critic bell hooks argues that \u201cno one seems to know how to tell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,28,459,8,20],"tags":[918,10494,709,477,10495],"class_list":["post-22621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-europe","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-sally-hemings","tag-suzanne-jones","tag-suzanne-w-jones","tag-thomas-jefferson","tag-transatlantica-american-studies-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22621"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46462,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22621\/revisions\/46462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}