Emancipatory Reading: Poetry of Slavery in the Post-Critical Climate

Recent challenges to the theorization of politics in literary studies have asked us to rethink the durable abstractions that shape the way we understand slavery’s archives, repertoires, and their afterlives. Though these... [ view full abstract ]

Recent challenges to the theorization of politics in literary studies have asked us to rethink the durable abstractions that shape the way we understand slavery’s archives, repertoires, and their afterlives. Though these interventions and provocations have energized productive conversations in our field, in this paper, I will argue that post-critical reading practices limit the emancipatory promise of abolitionist poetry by confining these writings solely to the political past. For instance, in “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Stephen Best points out how the slave archive is not always “a ready prism for apprehending the black political present,” in effect, asking us to make a hard-and-fast distinction between today’s political crises and the history of black cultural diaspora. Best’s argument stems from broader post-critical skepticism towards historical teleology, a stance which forecloses upon the possibility that emancipation remains in process and is vitally linked to cultural and political formations today. In response to these challenges in the post-critical climate, I will examine the writings of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper by adopting an emancipatory reading practice—a hermeneutics that aligns suffering and consolation along a temporal axis of liberated futurity—to explore how the political crises of past and the present might inter-illuminate. Through this reading practice, which draws upon Freudian conceptions of loss and consolation as well as recent work in critical race theory, I hope to understand how Harper’s poetry lends form and shape to an emancipatory project which is ongoing, in process, and, as we have seen in recent years, yet to be fully realized.