The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary

Synopsis

Haunted by representations of black women that resist the reality of the body's vulnerability, Kimberly Juanita Brown traces slavery's afterlife in black women's literary and visual cultural productions. Brown draws on black feminist theory, visual culture studies, literary criticism, and critical race theory to explore contemporary visual and literary representations of black women's bodies that embrace and foreground the body's vulnerability and slavery's inherent violence. She shows how writers such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Jamaica Kincaid, along with visual artists Carrie Mae Weems and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, highlight the scarred and broken bodies of black women by repeating, passing down, and making visible the residues of slavery's existence and cruelty. Their work not only provides a corrective to those who refuse to acknowledge that vulnerability, but empowers black women to create their own subjectivities. In The Repeating Body, Brown returns black women to the center of discourses of slavery, thereby providing the means with which to more fully understand slavery's history and its penetrating reach into modern American life.

Copyright:

2015

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780822375418

Related ISBNs:

9780822359098, 9780822359296

Publisher:

Duke University Press

Date of Addition:

06/01/16

Copyrighted By:

Duke University Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.