Climates of Re-Vision

2018 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Elizabeth Keckly’s memoir Behind the Scenes, and arguably, an important opportunity to consider precisely how African American writers have revised her initial literary... [ view full abstract ]

2018 marks the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Elizabeth Keckly’s memoir Behind the Scenes, and arguably, an important opportunity to consider precisely how African American writers have revised her initial literary analyses to confront modern particularities of racism, dehumanization, and violence. Here, I offer a becoming together of Sherley Anne Williams’ novel Dessa Rose and Elizabeth Keckly’s work within a larger framework of resistance to liberalism at the scene of black women's writing.  I argue that the two texts, though distinct in their own right, critique what I call the “liberal problematic” in comparable ways.  As I explore in my book Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival, the liberal problematic encompasses a fundamental disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession in the American nation-state, a naturalization of mainstream, procedural iterations of civility, autonomy, and reason. 

Behind the Scenes contains performances of “anti-pastoral reach” by which the author upsets seemingly intractable fantasies of Keckly-as-mammy.  Keckly’s quiet resistance clarifies the violence perpetuated by mythologies of superhuman black female strength, particularly their simulation of black volition and consent, without tangible variation in existing political and affective regimes.  As I will demonstrate, Keckly and Williams each carefully undo liberal fictions of consumable black motherhood.  Williams’ becoming together with Keckly in this way, moreover, speaks to the institutional hold of privilege; to how liberalism as a performative mode regulates black gesture and black being; and illumines productive effects of selective self-commodification, pinpointing ongoing value of climates of re-visioning within nineteenth-century literary inquiry.