The Aftereffects of Slavery: A Black Feminist Genealogy

STAT E OF THE F IELD Jocelyn Fenton Stitt ......................................................................................... The Aftereffects of Slavery A Black Feminist Genealogy Abstract: The relationship of the enslaved past to the present has been an ongoing topic within African diaspora studies generally, and within Black feminist studies specifically. This essay traces a Black feminist genealogy rooted in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and her essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). These are arguably two of the most influential works of scholarship in African American feminist studies of the past decade. Hartman’s attempt to use the archive to rescue those lost within, particularly girls and women, is a project also taken up in the three texts discussed here: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (2017), and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). One of Hartman’s most important contributions is in juxtaposing the absences of the enslaved in the archive with the very real and present repercussions of what she calls the “aftereffects” of slavery on contemporary Black people, such as being subject to state violence. Hartman’s extraordinary work carries its own aftereffects in its influence on the writing of contemporary scholars of the Black diaspora. Campt, Commander, and Sharpe amplify her claim of the importance of the enslaved past to understanding contemporary Black lives. Recent work by Tina Campt, Michelle D. Commander, and Christina Sharpe engages with the ongoing question in Black feminist theory of how histories of enslavement impact the present. Their texts do so through a framework highlighting the “aftereffects of slavery” put forward in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and meridians  feminism, race, transnationalism 17:1 September 2018 doi: 10.1215/15366936-6955120 © 2018 Smith College Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt  Aftereffects of Slavery 151 her essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), arguably two of the most influential works of scholarship in African American feminist studies of the past decade. Hartman established her reputation as a historian with her work Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making (1997). In Lose Your Mother, Hartman turns to the autobiographical genre to place her experiences as a Fulbright scholar in Ghana within the context of other African American “returns.” She describes these varied returns, from Black Americans arriving to assist with the newly independent Ghana in the 1960s to contemporary heritage travel to forts where slaves were kept before the Middle Passage. In contrast to stories like Alex Haley’s in Roots, in which he returns to Africa and finds kin with a distinguished lineage, Hartman (2007, 7) travels to Ghana “in search of the expendable and the defeated.” Of course these are exactly the populations missing from colonial archives. Hartman knows this from the outset, arguing, “To read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear into the slave hold” (17). In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman takes a brief mention in a legal case of an enslaved girl who died on board the ship Recovery to deploy what she calls “historical fabulation.” Her practice serves to break out of standard historiographic writing in order to imagine “Venus’s” experience and subjectivity. Hartman’s attempt to use the archive to rescue those lost within, particularly girls and women, is a project also taken up in the three texts reviewed here. Indeed one of Hartman’s (2007, 129) most important contributions is in juxtaposing the absences of the enslaved in the archive with the very real and present repercussions of what she calls the “aftereffects” of slavery: “I could rattle off all the arguments about the devastating effects of having been property, denied the protection of citizenship, and stripped of rights of equality. The simple fact was that we still lived in a world in which racism sorts the have and have-nots and decides who lives and who dies.” Death, she writes, was not a byproduct of slavery but was built into the nature of a system that relied on the disposability of Black lives, which continues to the present, with racism determining who will be subject to police violence, incarceration, poor education and health care access, and shorter life expectancies. Hartman’s extraordinary work carries its own aftereffects in its influence on the writing of contemporary scholars of the Black diaspora. While Campt, Commander, and Sharpe reference Hartman’s work, they also amplify her claim of the importance of the enslaved past to contemporary Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 152 meridians 17:1  September 2018 Black subjectivity. From a feminist perspective it may seem uncontroversial that past social structures and ideologies influence the present. But just what exactly we can learn from the past and how much power it should have over the present is an ongoing debate. For example, Steven Best’s “On Failing to Make the Past Present” (2012) argues that following the publication of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved in 1987 the slave past has come to be seen as integral, accessible, and necessary to think the American present in much of African diaspora studies, including Hartman’s work. Best terms this strain of scholarship “the affective history project” and suggests that other intellectual genealogies not requiring a shared sense of unrecoverable loss might inspire more effective social movements (464, 466). More recently, Aida Levy-Hussen provides an excellent overview of the competing claims of the past on the present in How to Read African American Literature: Post–Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (2016). She argues that two modes of literary thought dominate contemporary African American studies, leaving little room for other interpretive practices. “Therapeutic reading” sees literary accounts of slavery in the form of the neo–slave novel as important both politically and psychologically, following in Hartman’s path, while “prohibitive reading” sees such accounts as potentially harmful returns to the past. Another reading strategy suggested by Levy-Hussein “works neither to discipline nor to cure but to contextualize and decode narrative patterns that emerge from world-shattering psychic experiences” (24). I see Campt, Commander, and Sharpe as largely taking this third path, interpreting the enslaved past in the Americas and European colonization of Africa as being intimately connected with the present, especially in their linking of the aftereffects of slavery to violence and death. It is fitting, if sobering, then, that the three books considered here open with personal accounts of family deaths as related to the continuing shock waves of enslavement on the African diaspora. Sharpe begins In the Wake: On Blackness and Being with an account of the deaths of family members from cancer, police violence, gun violence, and mesothelioma. She explains that her incorporation of personal history derives from Hartman’s model of using the autobiographical as an entry point to provide insight into how larger social forces work through the individual, what Sharpe calls living in the “wake” of slavery. She evokes Morrison’s formulation of re-memory in Beloved: that the past of slavery is not past. One of the gifts of this book is Sharpe’s dexterous handling of Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt  Aftereffects of Slavery 153 orthography; wake comes to have multiple meanings, including the trail of waves of a ship as a metaphor for ongoing traces of the violence of slavery as well as the period of sitting and tending to the dead. In the Wake is concerned with anti-Black racism and the ongoing political exclusion of Black Americans despite emancipation and civil rights, but it does not rely on sociological data. Sharpe views the impact of the enslaved past in the present through shared affective states across national boundaries, similarly to Paul Gilroy’s (2006) theories of melancholy or David Scott’s (2014) on tragedy as describing the postcolonial present. However, Sharpe suggests a less pessimistic outlook by detailing another dimension of the wake. The idea of a wake as an ethics of care informed by a practice of remembering the dead creates an interpretive practice that enables readers to make transnational and transhistorical connections not just to incidents of crisis and dispossession but also to places and times where the wake is challenged and survived. “Wake work,” as Sharpe terms it, presses us to recognize that slavery and its violence is ongoing in the present, while creating space for examining resistance as well as how our own reading and observational practices might be complicit with that violence. The poetry of Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Kamau Brathwaite anchors Sharpe’s exploration of contemporary events such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2013 capsizing of a boat filled with African refugees off the coast of Italy. In the Wake uses works of poetry that “do not seek to explain or resolve the question of . . . exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity” (Sharpe 2016, 14). Sharpe’s book is divided into four chapters exploring aspects of the paradox of dehumanization: “The Wake,” “The Ship,” “The Hold,” and “The Weather.” Each uses the terminology of the slave ship to tie the present to the past. Chapter 2, “The Ship,” shows how the lives of Black people are shaped by the technology of modernity, oceanic shipping, and travel from European colonial exploration, to the slave trade, to the work of global capitalism today. A gripping section concerns a photograph of a Haitian girl after the earthquake in a U.S. triage center with a slip of paper with the word ship taped to her forehead. In conversation with Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” Sharpe ponders what her and our ethical relationship should be to what she describes as the widespread documenting of Black suffering for public consumption. In chapter 3, “The Hold,” Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 154 meridians 17:1  September 2018 Sharpe looks at the slave hold as a metaphor for the gendered dehumanization that still grips the African diaspora. As Sharpe notes, following Hortense J. Spillers (2003), the de-gendering of the enslaved and the erasure of the childhood of Black children is tied to continuing state violence. Once motherhood and childhood are commodified in slavery, the meaning of mother and child cannot hold for Black subjects. Chapter 4, “The Weather,” turns weather as climate into climate as the inescapable conditions of racism. Jenny Sharpe (2002, xi, xiv, 24) writes of the balance between the influence of the past and limits on knowing it, “Slavery continues to haunt the present because its stories, particularly those of slave women, have been improperly buried,” even as her work demonstrates that agency is often conflated with opposition to slavery and that the archival record consists of what the state is interested in preserving rather than what existed with regard to enslaved women’s lives. Focusing on the commonalities of suffering and political dispossession, In the Wake goes beyond seeing the present haunted by slavery; it argues that the past of enslavement and colonization is the present. In the Wake shows the power of witnessing as intervention, but I wished for more on praxis. If we are all living in the wake of slavery, as the book convincingly argues, and if previous resistance to the aftereffects of slavery has failed, what forms of resistance are available now? Further, if the wake appears in the form of European refusal of refugees in the Mediterranean, as well as in the form of the injured child in Haiti, as well as in police violence toward Blacks in the United States, is it the same wake? At the end of In the Wake, Sharpe (2016, 113) offers respiration as a practice of care, of “keeping and putting breath into the Black body,” a mode of listening for each other’s continued breathing. Tina Campt’s Listening to Images begins with a description of her father’s breath, his hum the night after her mother’s funeral. His response to grief—a wordless humming to her mother’s favorite song—becomes a mode of inquiry for Campt. Just as her father’s hum expresses what words cannot, Campt’s methodology in Listening to Images involves how to interpret archives of Black presence that are also evidence of absence. Her work belongs to a group of innovative new works related to the African diaspora, archives, and visual culture, such as Krista Thompson’s Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (2014), which also owes a debt to Hartman’s work. Campt (2017, 4) listens for the frequency and reverberation of images across Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt  Aftereffects of Slavery 155 archives and across state practices that created those archives: “It is this exquisitely articulate modality of quiet—a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance—that moves me toward a deeper understanding of the sonic frequencies of the quotidian practices of black communities.” In pursuit of reverberations across archives, Campt looks at a found collection of passport photographs from Birmingham, England, of Black British men, photographs taken as part of missionary work in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in the later part of the nineteenth century, and images of convicts taken to record their physiognomy at the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town, South Africa. In each case Campt views these archives using what she calls a practice of counterintuition. She builds on Ariella Azoulay’s theories of photographic continuance that see the moment of the photographic image being created as not ending there but continuing through the traces of that creation within the photograph as well as through viewers’ ongoing acts of interpretation. Thinking of the photograph as in flux allows Campt (2017, 6) to imagine a listening practice that becomes “a conscious decision to challenge the equation of vision with knowledge by engaging photography through a sensory register that is critical to Black Atlantic cultural formations: sound.” Throughout Listening to Images, Campt reads across time periods, locations, and contexts in order to contrast archival materials with unexpected collections of photographs. She begins in chapter 1 with the exhibition Gulu Real Art Studio, which displayed Ugandan photographs, all of them images of Black bodies sitting in the same studio chair but with the subject’s face missing, since this part of the image was used for an official document or identity card. These striking photos of presence and absence of Black subjectivity as constructed through state practices of identification set the stage for the book’s intervention. Campt brings aspirational passport photos into conversation with photographs of a white sex worker and her family and neighbors, including Black men labeled as pimps and listens to the contrast. Her reason for doing so is that to only write about the “good” colonial subjects of the passport photos, sitting in suit coats for their official passports, would engage in a type of respectability politics that excludes the lives of other Black British subjects, no less under surveillance, who were not leading the lives of model citizens. Chapter 2 explores what Campt calls “black resistance” both as photographic subjects as well as an interpretive strategy. Stasis as a viewing practice Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 156 meridians 17:1  September 2018 highlights the multiple elements kept in tension, as embodied in an archive of images taken by a group of Trappist monks in the Eastern Cape in the late nineteenth century. The images of South African women show in Campt’s interpretation, a sense of confidence and dignity in the ways the women hold themselves. They do so even as the images were created to spur Europeans to fund the mission to convert the heathen and to correct the cultural and agricultural “backwardness” of the people of the Eastern Cape. The monks’ images, produced for European consumption, are contrasted with studio portraits commissioned by Black South African families of themselves dressed in their best clothes, such as Victorian-era suits and dresses. Such a contrast allows Campt to productively question how each set of photographs challenges categories such as exotification, selfobjectification, assimilation, and self-representation. Campt then turns to her experience of attending an exhibit of J. D. Okhai Ojeikere’s photographs of Black women’s hairstyles. In a stunning moment of seemingly past European representational practices colliding with the present, a Dutch woman asks Campt to stand in front of Ojeikere’s photographs, exclaiming, “It’s like having the real thing here!” Campt reports her discomfort with being photographed generally, and of feeling momentarily paralyzed by the woman’s request. Frozen with a tourist’s smile on her face, Campt reproduces this photograph of herself, caught within another’s gaze, as the last image of the chapter. Chapter 3, the final chapter, compares images of two groups of incarcerated people: those imprisoned in Breakwater Prison in South Africa in 1893 and the Mississippi Freedom Riders taken into custody in 1961. This chapter centers what can be gained from coming into direct contact with archival photographs—what Campt calls the “haptic touch.” The prison photographs are housed in a homey photograph album, something most of us would use to store family photos. The presentation of the images of men in albums more commonly associated with showing kinship highlights these men’s classification as types of criminals through pseudo-scientific measurements of their heads and hands. Moving from the ledgers listing the criminals (described as an excess of data and statistics) to the images themselves allows Campt (2017, 91) to interpret the photographs as having the ability to “move their subjects from mute to quiet subjects who refuse the silence imposed on them in the effort to reduce them to a concatenation of criminal statistics.” Listening to Images closes with an examination of the affects produced by the “#If They Gunned Me Down, Which Picture Would Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt  Aftereffects of Slavery 157 They Use?” social media phenomenon, which critiqued the stereotypical ways in which U.S. victims of police violence were represented in the media. These photographs of young Black people were images of their everyday selves as students, workers, and members of families spliced together with themselves dressed casually or in poses that might seem threatening. Such a photography project, Campt theorizes, represents how the sitters “actively anticipate their premature deaths through these photos” (109). These self-representations enact a kind of fugitivity, a future the young people imagine even as it anticipates their own deaths. Campt’s exploration of the ethics and methodological issues of re-representing those who did not give consent for their photographs to be taken might be read and/or taught productively with Sharpe’s work, particularly in chapter 4, “The Weather,” on the circulation of representations of Black crisis. Listening to Images skates along the surface of images, listening to their resonances and feeling through their materiality in relationship with other collections of photographs. This method allows Campt to create unexpected juxtapositions that jar the reader out of an intuitive reading of, for example, ethnographic photographs created by missionaries as necessarily dehumanizing their subjects. While I recognize that Campt’s method of constructing the book is to create surprising and unexpected juxtapositions of images and archives discursively, much in the same way as she might curate a gallery exhibition, the movement from England in the 1950s to German missions in South Africa in the late nineteenth century, from photographs of family albums in the Eastern Cape to albums of prisoners is dizzying—dizzying in both the skill of Campt’s multiple interpretive methods from counterintuition to stasis, to “haptic touch,” but also in its historical and cultural jumps. Many of the archives Campt discusses do not contain Black cultural productions but were mandated by the mission or the state, or are penitentiary images. Listening to Images might have pushed harder on the claim that sound as a modality of Black cultural production can be applied to images produced either under duress, as in the ethnographic and prison photographs, or out of compliance with state mandates, as in the passport photographs. Campt clearly sees strategies of resistance within the photographic subjects, following Azoulay’s premise that a photograph’s meaning does not end when the shutter closes. It is a testament to the book’s many points of connection between archives and time periods that I was left wanting more context for how the archives were Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 158 meridians 17:1  September 2018 chosen, what archives were excluded, and what those inclusions and exclusions mean for projects such as Campt’s. If In the Wake is concerned with the aftermath of the shipboard movements of African peoples to the Americas, and Listening to Images with the circulation and interpretation of images of Blackness, Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic asks readers to reconsider one of the central tropes in African American cultural productions: the desire to travel “back” to Africa. The book begins by recounting the death of Commander’s grandfather, a man whose life was marked by flights to the North and returns to the South. His death allows Commander (2017, x) an imaginative springboard to consider how journeys such as these, based on hope, might create “radical possibilities for disrupting Black social alienation and dispossession by using them as embarkation points from which to take flight.” A central premise of the book hinges on Commander’s argument that these “returns,” imaginative or real, are often considered with suspicion. Real and imagined returns have been characterized by critics as holding regressive notions of Africa as a romanticized and timeless place waiting to welcome home the diaspora. Although the text does not reference Yogita Goyal’s Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic (2010, 9), it is one example, along with the critics mentioned earlier, that labels writing of return as “diasporic romance” with the improbable ability to “collapse distances of time and space to imagine a simultaneity of experience.” Commander (2017, 7) suggests that such imaginings are not necessarily removed from larger Black political movements, arguing that flight to an idealized location should not be placed into the category of romance: “Black Americans have been perpetual travelers enraptured by the promises of flight since the Middle Passage. Flight is transcendence over one’s reality—an escape predicated on imagination and the incessant longing to be free.” Thus Commander writes that these cultural forms and individual returns are speculative, a category that involves epistemological projects related to Black futurity. Flight takes many forms in this book: the flight of slaves from the plantation; the flight of the great migration of African Americans from the South to the North; flights of return to western African nations in the 1960s with the promise of pan-African transnational liberation; and more recent flights of heritage tourism to places seen as granting access to authentic African cultures such as Ghana, Senegal, and Bahia in Brazil. Other flights home come from the imagination, what Commander terms “speculative Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt  Aftereffects of Slavery 159 returns.” These returns begin in oral histories of enslavement with tales of Africans who flew back to Africa as a metaphor for suicide during the Middle Passage. Afro-Atlantic Flight sets out to refute the notion that returns by African Americans are undertaken by privileged first world travelers acting out neocolonialist fantasies with individualist hopes of personal healing that have no larger impact on racial inequalities in the United States. Further, fictional, poetic, and filmic representations of return may be fantasies with some degree of romanticization of their healing potential, but Commander sees these as modes that allow African Americans to express deep desires for freedom and full citizenship. Afro-Atlantic Flight has an ambitious premise and methodology, combining cultural studies, participant observation, and semistructured interviews. Chapters 1 and 4 focus on textual and filmic cultural productions, read thematically through tropes of flight and return. Some of these are nonfiction, as with memoirs of return to Africa, such as Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes (1986), while others are novels featuring speculative accounts of returns to Africa, as in Reginald McKnight’s I Get on the Bus (1992), set in Senegal, or time travel to the past of slavery, as in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). Chapter 4 discusses novels that contain locations deemed to have authentic cultures that can speak to the diaspora, such as Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), set on a mythical Gullah island. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 contain participant observation of events and rituals related to return in Ghana and Brazil. An innovative aspect of the work is how it thinks beyond Africa as the sole site of cultural authenticity desired by African Americans, to consider locations in the southern United States and South America. Chapter 2 uses participant observation to demonstrate how Ghanaian public policies shape heritage tourism by tailoring historical sites for Black diasporic visitors. Commander (2017, 89) alerts us to the complicated relationship between Ghanaians who view all Americans as wealthy, and African Americans who are often crushed when they are hailed as white, obroni (foreigners), or as overly sentimental about a past that seems inconsequential in light of inequalities in contemporary West Africa. Afro-Atlantic Flight’s discussion of the failure of “blackness” to unite those of different nations and class statuses serves as an important counterpoint to studies like In the Wake that analyze Black experience through a comparative but unifying lens. Chapter 3 discusses Bahia in Brazil as a diasporic site of return that is considered an authentic conduit to a shared Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 160 meridians 17:1  September 2018 African past of enslavement. This chapter is particularly effective in combining cultural studies readings of the documentary É Minha Cara / That’s My Face, participant observation of various tours offered to Black tourists interested in the history of slavery, and interviews with people who have relocated to Brazil. Commander produces a nuanced account of the history of African American interdiasporic travel to Brazil undertaken for spiritual and cultural reasons, dating to the early twentieth century. The chapter informs readers of the ambivalence of those “returnees,” as their euphoria about Bahia turns to starker realization of the racism and classism still present in Brazil. Chapter 4 employs a similar methodology beginning with a reading of the documentary Moving Midway, concerning the relocation of a white family’s plantation home, the sale of the land it sits on, and how the relationship to the land is understood differently by their Black relatives who are descendants of the formerly enslaved on the plantation. Reading the documentary through the lens of speculative return, Commander shows how the African American branch of the family tree imagines the past differently and does not have the attachment to the land that their white family expects. Indeed much of what Commander reveals about the meaning of the past created in the African American imaginary, particularly as explored in chapter 4, contains insights into how memory and historiography for white Americans are also speculative when they imagine the past with “loyal” slaves and states’ rights rather than slavery as the cause of the Civil War. In this otherwise important intervention in the debate about the relationship of the past of slavery and the meanings of Africa to the diaspora in the present, Afro-Atlantic Flight could have more completely fleshed out what Commander considers the overarching tropes in these imagined returns to Africa. While the introduction promises to “perform the important tasks of mapping and examining the myths that Afro-Atlantic communities perpetuate about slavery and their purported retentions from the original Africa” (Commander 2017, 5) it might be more accurate to say that AfroAtlantic Flight documents diasporic affective responses to real and imagined returns home rather than cataloguing what remains of African cultures in their New World descendants. These affective responses can be understood as Hartman’s aftereffects of slavery, as well as evidence of what Sharpe calls living in the wake. Cataloguing the commonalities of these cultural productions might have allowed Commander a richer reflection on the meaning of what is absent. For example, some of the most common Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt  Aftereffects of Slavery 161 desires Commander writes about, derived either from cultural productions or interviews, include reliving the experiences of ancestors by visiting sites of enslavement, such as slave forts in Ghana and plantations in the United States; establishing an origin for their African heritage through quests for ancestors; imagining spaces where Blackness is normative; and finding a connection to an imagined African spirituality. Interestingly objects of exilic desire, such as for authentic food, landscapes, and fluency in the languages of their forebears, are largely absent in the subjects of AfroAtlantic Flight. Such a comparison highlights that much of what constitutes “Africa” in the minds of those creating speculative returns is actually a social space in which ruptures of history are mended, origins are discovered, and anti-Black racism is absent. All three accounts are structured by the importance of affective states in interpreting the past, but their works also clearly point to the future. By imagining a place and a time where anti-Black racism is no longer a force constraining life outcomes, the texts considered here, in common with Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, create the possibility of feminist fugitive futures. In a final example, Campt (2017, 17) suggests a “grammar of black feminist futurity” that consists of the future real conditional, which describes an event that has yet to take place but must do so: “The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must. . . . It is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be.” By clearly delineating the ongoing impact of the wake, Sharpe allows us to think a future without the dehumanization of Black subjects. Listening for the connections between disparate images of Blackness globally, Campt invites us to imagine a future archive of images created with consent and outside of the shadow of the penitentiary or the colonial mission. In thinking through flight as a metaphor for moving from dystopia to a space of wholeness or healing, Commander provides a compelling analysis of how this trope remains highly relevant to African American cultural productions that imagine times and places where a new relationship to the past can be constructed. ......................................................................................... Jocelyn Fenton Stitt is the program director of faculty research development at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Previously she was an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Minnesota State University. Stitt is at work on “Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing.” Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018 162 meridians 17:1  September 2018 Works Cited Best, Stephen. 2012. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3: 453–74. Campt, Tina M. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. Commander, Michelle D. 2017. Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. Durham: Duke University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2006. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Goyal, Yogita. 2010. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. 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Spillers, Hortense J. 2003. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, edited by Hortense J. Spillers, 203–29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, Krista A. 2015. Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/17/1/150/542941/150stitt.pdf by SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARIES user on 17 October 2018