“Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name”

Novels such as Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, as well as the focus of “‘Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name’: Power, Privilege, and the Bodying Forth of Resistance,” provoke dialogue with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in important ways. Exploring Williams’s engagement with previous legacies of resistance, Chapter 4 draws attention to her disruption of a “neoliberal problematic” via her distinct problematization of the mind-body split and associated tropes of mediation such as the “as-told-to” dynamic. Like Wilson, Williams interrogates the indecipherability of black rage within both interracial and intra-racial liberal matrices of privilege and authority; like Keckly, she destabilizes the “Mammy” figure and undercuts liberal models of interracial friendship; and like Cooper, Williams cultivates an insurgent politics of sound. Becoming together with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in the aforementioned ways, Williams’s fiction exhibits a comparable attentiveness to situating blackness beyond conventional registers of containment, intervening into Enlightenment-era discourses of knowledge and self.

The Production of “Emancipation”

Elizabeth Keckly’s Behind the Scenes (1868) dislodges hegemonic models of individual sovereignty and progress, particularly as the memoir of the author’s years in the Abraham Lincoln White House underscores the harrowing conditions facing the previously enslaved at the onset of Emancipation and locates death/suicide as an expression of black political consciousness. In “The Production of ‘Emancipation’: Race, Ritual, and the Reconstitution of the Antebellum Order,” Keckly strikingly depicts epidemic black homelessness and poverty, thereby disrupting mythologies of the postbellum North as quintessential racial asylum. Keckly’s “anti-pastoral reach” as a force through which to contest teleological “up from slavery” narratives, and her politicized acts of witnessing and mediation further illuminate a reorganization, rather than an eradication, of the inhumane institution. Keckly’s selective self-commodification and her unmasking of the trope of interracial intimacy, moreover, foreground insidious if liberal modes of political control, problematizing conventional modes of fetishizing and Othering black women’s bodies.

“They Won’t Believe What I Say”

“‘They Won’t Believe What I Say’: Theorizing Freedom as an Economy of Violence” analyzes Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) in which Wilson exposes the coerciveness of imbricated discourses of sentimentality, Christianity, and economic determinism sustaining the liberal problematic. In particular, Wilson offers a dense engagement with questions of materiality, citing it as a critical register of political meaning and experience. As Wilson implicates abstract rationalism in hierarchizing socially constructed processes of investment and exchange, she similarly reimagines dominant ideologies of self-help and self-determination in the context of working class and underclass exploitation in the antebellum U.S. North, revising governing perceptions of interracial altruism and charity. Invoking blackness, fugitivity, and associated figurations of opacity in Our Nig in order to challenge Western liberal dictates toward ocularcentrism, order, and coherence, Wilson also provocatively manipulates liberal tropes of childhood, innocence, and joy.

Introduction

The introduction examines processes by which nineteenth-century black women writers have been disassociated from legitimate forms of black struggle and defiance. Extending a definition of the liberal problematic, and situating liberal ideology critique as a viable mode of resistance, the introductory chapter specifies methodology and content. It also addresses the ways in which Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper undermine fundamental liberal and Enlightenment precepts including reason, individualism, and the foregrounding of a transcendental subject. Each of these mix-raced, working, widowed women relies on distinct tropes of embodiment in their writing to contest reigning prescriptions toward objectivity, while making visible the constraints of practices of inclusion. Charting a “becoming together” of earlier thinkers with contemporary African-American art in the vein of Sherley Anne Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, the introduction to Resistance Reimagined offers rich insight into literary perspectives of liberalism.

“Wondering Under Which Head I Come”

Anna Julia Cooper condemns ideals of abstraction and universality within the traditions of U.S. Constitutionalism, Episcopalianism, and in the literature of leading establishment writers, including William Dean Howells. As articulated in Chapter 3, “‘Wondering under Which Head I Come’: Sounding Anna Julia Cooper’s Fin-de-Siècle Song,” an avowed embrace of difference, pluralism, and conflict characterizes Cooper’s prose, while her analyses of black male gender bias in the realm of higher education signal keen insights into the nuanced constraints of ostensibly liberal politics of the era. In A Voice From the South (1892), her reconceptualization of dominant tenets of civility and equality as “critical regard”; her invocation of musical metaphor; and her irruptions of sarcasm, compel a radical reevaluation of ways of recognizing social change. Cooper also extends an indictment of the provinciality and subtle maintenance of racial hierarchies within the (white) Women’s Movement which holds relevance today.

Conclusion

The conclusion explores the kinship between Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival and the #SayHerName Movement, as articulated by the African American Policy Forum. A more capacious roll call of instigators of black opposition encompasses sustained engagement with the philosophies and social achievements of intellectuals too frequently deemed incomprehensible as such. Accordingly, fully engaging with the liberal problematic entails grappling with fierce intricacies of black interiority and imagination, thereby upsetting time-honored biases regarding black resistance and power. Reading Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper’s literary endeavors differently likewise involves theorizing a counter-hegemony as concerned with vicious racial antagonism as subtle micro-aggression, with a theft of the black body as with a theft of black joy. In neglecting black knowledge production in its myriad forms, a history bereft of ambiguity and contradiction, and consequently, of humanity, emerges.