Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2221943
S. Mccormick
Abstract This essay explores how, in her memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward confronts Mississippi’s pervasively anti-Black landscape and maps an oppositional geography that documents Black life in the landscape while also accounting for the constant movement brought on by slavery’s afterlives. Throughout the work, Ward engages in what the author terms Black feminist reaping, which operates as a cartographic practice that makes visible Black subjects situated at the margins of places that are designed to suppress and confine them. Through Black feminist reaping, Ward enacts a Black gathering—a countermobilization against the ways the plantation and its politics continue to reemerge in Mississippi’s geography and US geographies more broadly. In the process, Ward produces new geographic knowledges that highlight a Black viability, which undergirds sustainable communities and complex Black subjectivities.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2222484
Kimberly D. Blockett
Why mapping? Maps are active, ongoing processes of documenting place and space because geographies, and the histories they carry, change over time. Terrains, boundaries, and communities shift. We map landscapes as they appear, and we map landscapes to plan for new spaces. We map to record, to preserve what is “here now” before “now” becomes the past. Maps can fix things in place, but they can also map out routes—the throughways and byways for people to traverse spaces. Maps, then, are archives of spaces from which we can storify all manner of human experience. They help us to see what was, what is, and what can be. Mapping how Black lives shape places and make spaces (through movement and fixity) spatializes Black experience; it documents Black geographies. The essays within map Black women by tending to the recovery of their practice and theory. Each explores the work to be done when places like archives, museums, courthouses, and neighborhoods do not bear witness to the joys, horrors, quotidian experiences, and endurance of Black life. The authors probe and answer how Black women moved through and beyond systemic barriers and physical dangers while placing themselves at the center of change through their work and writing. Each essay maps a way to build archival and theoretical spaces to interrogate all the ways in which a Black woman might navigate, as Anna Julia Cooper said, “when and where”1 she enters contested spaces. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2222484
{"title":"Finding and Mapping Black Women in the Interstices","authors":"Kimberly D. Blockett","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2023.2222484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2222484","url":null,"abstract":"Why mapping? Maps are active, ongoing processes of documenting place and space because geographies, and the histories they carry, change over time. Terrains, boundaries, and communities shift. We map landscapes as they appear, and we map landscapes to plan for new spaces. We map to record, to preserve what is “here now” before “now” becomes the past. Maps can fix things in place, but they can also map out routes—the throughways and byways for people to traverse spaces. Maps, then, are archives of spaces from which we can storify all manner of human experience. They help us to see what was, what is, and what can be. Mapping how Black lives shape places and make spaces (through movement and fixity) spatializes Black experience; it documents Black geographies. The essays within map Black women by tending to the recovery of their practice and theory. Each explores the work to be done when places like archives, museums, courthouses, and neighborhoods do not bear witness to the joys, horrors, quotidian experiences, and endurance of Black life. The authors probe and answer how Black women moved through and beyond systemic barriers and physical dangers while placing themselves at the center of change through their work and writing. Each essay maps a way to build archival and theoretical spaces to interrogate all the ways in which a Black woman might navigate, as Anna Julia Cooper said, “when and where”1 she enters contested spaces. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2222484","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"417 - 422"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90043698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2221951
Tiera Tanksley
Abstract This essay considers the erasure and visceral laceration of Black women’s herstories from white, masculinized archives, timelines, and cartographies of the past. It simultaneously centers the identity-oriented and historically anchored ways everyday Black women collect, curate, and pass down personal archives for the purpose of intergenerational survival and uplift. In centering the life writings and oral narratives of three Black women in the author’s immediate family, this essay disrupts archival silences around the movements, mobilities, and resistance strategies of everyday Black women; rather, it reveals how Black grandmothers, mothers, and othermothers continue to sustain Black women’s viability and visibility through their work as memory-keepers and family historians. By centering the life herstories of her grandmother, mother, and aunt, the author engages in a process of Black feminist archival bricolage, weaving together fragmented pieces of distinct yet overlapping life narratives that—when put together—tell a more complete and complex story of Black women’s movements, resistances, and archival pedagogies. In doing so, archival fissures are collaboratively challenged in order to reclaim, recover, and recenter the invisible cartographies of everyday Black women.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2221948
Ali Tal-mason
Abstract Growing up in extreme poverty in Massachusetts, Nancy Gardner Prince (1799–1859) experienced migrancy and dislocation from an early age. In 1824, she emigrated to Russia for nearly a decade, and later emigrated to Jamaica for a brief period. As an African American author who journeyed widely in the United States and abroad, Prince’s writings reveal the racial discrimination and regulation that she endured while traveling in the US, as well as the impact that such restrictions on her freedom of movement had on her conceptions of racial kinship and national belonging. This essay approaches the regulation of Black mobility as a crucial site of racial dominance, subordination, and exclusion, and theorizes that Prince’s writings strategically remap the racially uneven conditions that she experienced on her journeys to articulate a counternarrative of Black citizenship and belonging in the US. Prince not only flips the script by publicly exposing racist conveyance operators, her autobiography also forms a counterarchive that records her ancestors’ oral histories of dispossession and US patriotism. Through close readings and attention to her revisions, we see that Prince’s engagements with territorial concepts such as “country” and “place” contemplate the tensions inherent in African American identity during the antebellum nineteenth century, as they disclose the complex negotiations that shaped her travels and texts.
{"title":"Nancy Prince: Strategic (Re)mappings through Travel and Text","authors":"Ali Tal-mason","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2023.2221948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2221948","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Growing up in extreme poverty in Massachusetts, Nancy Gardner Prince (1799–1859) experienced migrancy and dislocation from an early age. In 1824, she emigrated to Russia for nearly a decade, and later emigrated to Jamaica for a brief period. As an African American author who journeyed widely in the United States and abroad, Prince’s writings reveal the racial discrimination and regulation that she endured while traveling in the US, as well as the impact that such restrictions on her freedom of movement had on her conceptions of racial kinship and national belonging. This essay approaches the regulation of Black mobility as a crucial site of racial dominance, subordination, and exclusion, and theorizes that Prince’s writings strategically remap the racially uneven conditions that she experienced on her journeys to articulate a counternarrative of Black citizenship and belonging in the US. Prince not only flips the script by publicly exposing racist conveyance operators, her autobiography also forms a counterarchive that records her ancestors’ oral histories of dispossession and US patriotism. Through close readings and attention to her revisions, we see that Prince’s engagements with territorial concepts such as “country” and “place” contemplate the tensions inherent in African American identity during the antebellum nineteenth century, as they disclose the complex negotiations that shaped her travels and texts.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"31 1","pages":"507 - 523"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80366187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2221952
J. Williams
Abstract Most people know June Jordan the poet, the activist, the political essayist, and perhaps even the fiction writer. Fewer perhaps know her as an architect, urban planner, Black ecofeminist, and spatial theorist. This essay uses Jordan’s theories of place as a framework for her autobiographical writing, turning primarily to Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), a compilation of essays, letters, lectures, scenarios, diary entries, and reportage. An interdisciplinary approach that incorporates Black feminist autobiography scholarship, trauma and affect theory, and queer theory uncovers Civil Wars as both an autobiography of feeling and an archive of intellectual development. Jordan’s theory of place in Civil Wars functions as an architectural aesthetic that facilitates affective mapping—the movement of feeling between the self and the collective. Affective mapping allows Jordan to narrate a relational self by drawing on Black feelings that emerge within the intimacy of place and in the frequencies of Black sound.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2221941
P. Foreman
Abstract This essay takes up the archival turn—what the author is calling the “sankofa imperative”—in digital spaces, using the work of the Colored Conventions Project to ask broader questions about the recovery of Black women’s life stories and organizing efforts. Does a collective, distributed model of recuperative history in a digital, digitized, database age change both the equation and the ways in which scholars grapple with the argument that “the violence of Atlantic slavery was so great, and the limits of the archive so absolute, that no amount of historical recovery could properly describe it, let alone undo its damage,” as the editors of Social Text’s special issue “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom and the Archive” put it? Do historical calculations of slavery, Black unfreedom and its afterlives, and their accompanying archival violence function differently when recovery methods extend beyond the temporal limits that analog intellectual production demands? How does conventional (or pre-digital) scholarship in print formats differ from non-analog timelines that enable additional materials to be recovered, uploaded, and aggregated collectively and over time? This essay examines collective digital practices that can piece together scattered Black women’s archives and historical shards.
本文探讨了数字空间中的档案转向——作者称之为“sankofa势在必行”——利用有色人种公约项目的工作，就黑人女性生活故事的恢复和组织努力提出了更广泛的问题。在一个数字化、数字化、数据库化的时代，一个集体的、分布式的复原历史模型，是否会改变学者们应对“大西洋奴隶制的暴力是如此之大，档案的限制是如此之绝对，以至于再多的历史复原也无法恰当地描述它，更不用说消除它的损害”这一争论的方式?正如《社会文本》(Social Text)特刊《复原问题:奴隶制、自由和档案》(the Question of recovery: slavery, Freedom and the archive)的编辑们所说的那样。当恢复方法超出模拟智力生产所要求的时间限制时，对奴隶制、黑人不自由及其后遗症的历史计算，以及与之相关的档案暴力，是否会产生不同的作用?打印格式的传统(或前数字)学术与非模拟时间轴有何不同?非模拟时间轴使额外的材料能够随着时间的推移而被恢复、上传和汇总?这篇文章探讨了可以将分散的黑人妇女档案和历史碎片拼凑起来的集体数字实践。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2190221
Michael Lackey
There have been critical reflections about biofiction dating back to the 1930s, and while scholars like Ina Schabert, Alain Buisine, and Martin Middeke made compelling cases for taking the literary form seriously in the 1990s, it was, in my estimation, the 2012 publications of Lucia Boldrini (Autobiographies of Others) and Monica Latham (“‘Serv[ing] under two masters’: Virginia Woolf ’s Afterlives in Contemporary Biofictions”) that set the current boom in biofiction studies into motion. What makes the critical work of first-rate scholars of biofiction like Todd Avery, Riccardo Castellano, Alexandre Gefen, Katherine Scheil, and Virginia Rademacher so valuable is that they have provided us with conceptual models for seeing in texts and movements from the past significant shifts in thinking and aesthetics and new forms and ways of literary signifying. In my own work, I will always be indebted to Avery, whose insightful research about Lytton Strachey’s daring experiments with biography contributed to what would become the first major boom in biofiction, which occurred in the 1920s and 1930s.1 After reading Avery’s work, I was able to see Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with new eyes—I now believe that his text is when biofiction first came to fruition and is, in many ways, the work that provides a blueprint for the best biofictions over the last 140 years. As a scholar, I have been teaching, researching, and writing about Nietzsche since the 1990s, when I had the good fortune to study with Daniel Breazeale and Wolfgang Iser. But not once during those years did I entertain the idea of treating Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a biofiction—it was Avery (and Hans Renders) who inadvertently nudged me in a new scholarly direction that enabled me to see Nietzsche’s text as biofiction. But that shift made me realize something significant, specifically about German literature. Early twentieth-century German writers produced an enormous number of first-rate biofictions, even though they were rarely seen, categorized, or interpreted as such. Interpretation is crucial here, because the literary form invites but also simultaneously discourages https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2190221
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2023.2190220
Michael Lackey
Abstract As a literary form, biofiction started to dominate in the 1990s, and over the last ten years, biofiction studies has surged dramatically. While scholars acknowledge that there were some important biofictions in the nineteenth century, the form first started to catch fire in the early twentieth century, especially among German writers who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi era. Klaus Mann, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel, Bruno Frank, and Bertolt Brecht are only a few who published noteworthy biofictions, but it was Lion Feuchtwanger who had perhaps the biggest impact, with the 1925 publication of Jud Süß, a biographical novel about the famous court Jew. This novel was a best-seller, which, in part, contributed to the massive surge in the publication of biofictions during the 1930s. But there are some serious concerns revolving around the work, which became most obvious after the release of Veit Harlan’s 1940 film Jud Süß. By analyzing the novel and film in relation to the Nazis‘ anti-Semitic political agenda, I clarify why Feuchtwanger’s novel not only failed tragically to accomplish what it set out to do, but also contributed significantly to an agenda that it sought to resist and debunk. This essay focuses primarily on Feuchtwanger’s novel in order to clarify what biofiction is, how it uniquely functions and signifies, and some of the potential problems with the genre.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2138513
Arnaud Schmitt
Abstract This essay studies the role that captions play in the interaction between photographs and text in hybrid memoirs. Rarely studied, captions can nevertheless be seen as fundamental transitory spaces where visual information and textual information are first confronted with each other before further connections can possibly be established by the main text. But even if captions can sometimes be seen as “secondary text,” offering basic and factual information about the photographs they are attached to, they can also have their own original narrative function. In what W. J. T. Mitchell calls the “suturing of discourse and representation,” captions may challenge readers’ or viewers’ expectations, especially in an autobiographical context where their main purpose is normally to confirm and enhance the referential content of the photograph.
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