{"id":8190,"date":"2010-08-30T22:00:48","date_gmt":"2010-08-30T22:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=8190"},"modified":"2017-02-11T20:53:04","modified_gmt":"2017-02-11T20:53:04","slug":"monstrous-intimacies-making-post-slavery-subjects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=8190","title":{"rendered":"Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Duke University Press<\/a>
\nAugust 2010
\n264 pages
\n21 illustrations
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4591-6
\nPaperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4609-8<\/p>\n

Christina Sharpe<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies
\nTufts University<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a> and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those \u201cmonstrous intimacies\u201d and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass\u2019s<\/a> narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester and Essie Mae Washington-Williams\u2019s<\/a> declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond<\/a><\/em>, as well as the \u201cgenerational genital fantasies\u201d depicted in Gayl Jones\u2019s<\/a> novel Corregidora<\/em> and a firsthand account of such \u201cmonstrous intimacies\u201d in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina<\/a> senator, slave-holder, and vocal critic of miscegenation<\/a>. Sharpe explores the South African-born writer Bessie Head\u2019s<\/a> novel Maru<\/em>\u2014about race, power, and liberation in Botswana<\/a>\u2014in light of the history of the Khoi San<\/a> woman Saartje Baartman<\/a>, who was displayed in Europe as the \u201cHottentot Venus\u201d in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien\u2019s<\/a> film The Attendant<\/em>, Sharpe takes up issues of representations of slavery, display, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of the black and white silhouettes created by Kara Walker<\/a> and the subtexts of the critiques leveled against the silhouettes and the artist.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n