On Imagined Innocence: Emerging Black Feminist Approaches to Slavery Studies (Review Essay)

Feminist Studies

Building on the scholarship of historians like Thavolia Glymph, who challenged depictions of chattel slavery as a (literally) paternalistic institution within which white planter women were reluctant participants, the three reviewed texts each continue this project of grappling with the nuances lost and the violences erased when slavery is regarded as the ultimate expression of patriarchal violence rather than a manifestation of white supremacy that traversed gender.

Spanning the diaspora, with Fuentes rooting her work in urban Caribbean spaces, Jones-Rogers locating hers in the pre-Emancipation U.S. South, and Young looking to “the wake of the Black Atlantic and the sea tack toward the Indian Ocean” (12), these texts underscore that, across geographical contexts, the exploitation of Black women’s bodies and labor was not specifically the domain of white men; rather, such exploitation was often the means by which white slaveholding women sought to negotiate their own social and financial freedom. Collectively, these three works constitute a shift in the literature toward investigations of slavery’s histories that complicate presupposed notions of agency, power, solidarity, and innocence.

Pynk Parlance, A Glossary

(Afterword)

in Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival

This text begins as it now ends, with deep gratitude for the work of Black femme-inist forebearers such as Alice Walker, whose writing has constituted, for generations of Black femmes, a particular kind of purple-tinted litany for survival. The necessity of these interventions is more evident than ever, as we continue, in a…social landscape still marked by anti-Blackness, transphobia, femmephobia, and queer antagonism, to mourn those for whom that survival did not manifest. From icons we’ve lost without ever truly knowing them at all to friends taken for daring to imagine alternate modes of existence, we are forever being reminded that “we were never meant to survive,” at least “not as human beings.” There are other possibilities, however…

Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space

Feminist Studies

This article analyzes the narratives of several African American women born into slavery in order to grapple with ways these women worked to situate themselves and their intimacies in self-defined geographies both physical and conceptual; in so doing, it becomes possible to grapple also with the diversity of those intimacies. Using as a touchstone the recollections of formerly enslaved seamstress Elizabeth Keckley (whose years-long relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln both speaks to and exposes the circumscriptions of queer agency), Behind The Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space attends to the types of stories it becomes possible to tell once enslaved Black women are seen not as “dispossessed bodies…naturally in place” (McKittrick, Demonic Grounds) but rather insurgent geographers negotiating space.

Iterative Intimacies: Refusing Legacies of the Changing Same

(Editorial Introduction, Co-Authored by Sophia Monegro)

E3W Review of Books

This year’s Review invites readers to begin the necessary work of untangling the intimacies of continents, of bodies, of nations, and of history. Our contributors urge you—to borrow from Audre Lorde—to interrogate the origins of your deepest intimacies and “see whose face [they] wear…Then the personal as the political”—or rather, the intimate as the political—can begin to illuminate all our choices (Sister Outsider, 1984).

Mary Todd Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and the Queer History of the Old Clothes Scandal

Not Even Past

In 1867, less than three years after the assassination of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, his (now widowed) wife and former first lady, Mary, traveled to New York in hopes of securing funds to cover her mounting expenses. Having acquired a significant amount of debt prior to her husband’s reelection and finding herself in an even more tenuous financial situation following his untimely death, Mary Todd Lincoln had resigned herself to selling off pieces from her famed wardrobe, which throughout her time in the White House had garnered much praise and attention. She was joined in this venture by the modiste who had designed much of the clothing Lincoln was looking to auction off, a formerly enslaved seamstress by the name of Elizabeth Keckley. The two had become acquainted after Keckley’s work for several notable D.C. society women (including the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis) brought her to Lincoln’s attention in the months leading up to the American Civil War.

Film Review: The Harder They Fall, Directed by Jeymes Samuel

Not Even Past

In one of the final scenes of Jeymes Samuel’s gripping 2021 Black Western The Harder They Fall, androgynous outlaw Cuffee (played by Danielle Deadwyler) says a teary goodbye to her comrade “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). The two share a long, not-quite-chaste kiss goodbye as Nat Love, Mary’s main romantic interest in the film, shifts uncomfortably in his saddle. Mary responds with a coy “What you looking at?” before mounting her horse a final time and literally riding off into the sunset with Love, leaving Cuffee behind. The film, which follows Nat Love and his gang of outlaws on an epic revenge quest across the American southwest, encompasses a litany of historical elisions and inaccuracies, culminating in this moment between Mary and Cuffee. It cements the movie’s final and most glaring lapse: while The Harder They Fall’s vision of the Old West is brazen, bold, and Black, its queer notes amount to little more than whispers.

Black Women’s Studies: A World-Altering Praxis

E3W Review of Books

Black feminist studies are inextricably bound and, in some ways, foundational to the theme of this year’s Review, “Everyday Anarchy,” as the study of Black women’s lives, histories, and movement over time is always necessarily the study of insurgency, resilience, and resistance. Taking seriously the Combahee River Collective’s claim that “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression,” Black feminist studies map the means by which Black women have worked to stage that freedom and continue to do so in our contemporary moment (1977).

A (Queer) Rebel Wife In Texas

Not Even Past

In 2001, many of Lizzie Scott Neblett’s diaries and letters were published in a volume entitled A Rebel Wife In Texas. The text provides a harrowing glimpse into the desperation, brutality, and minutiae of everyday life in antebellum Texas from the perspective of a landed, slaveholding, Southern wife. Letters written to Neblett prior to her May 25, 1852 wedding to aspiring attorney William H. Neblett, however, lend an entirely different type of insight into the “rebel wife’s” intimate affairs, one that unearths a wealth of decidedly queer complexity.

Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation

Not Even Past

In the spring of 1852, Benjamin Roper, overseer to Galveston area plantations Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote a short letter to his employer to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife…He is now and has been since his misfortune at Dr. Whiting’s and will remain there until…”