MAN AND WOMAN, SLAVERY AND EMPIRE: "RECONSTRUCTING (GENDER)" IN "PLANTATION AMERICA"

Beyond “sexuality,” per se, what is the relationship between “sex” and “slavery” historically? Whether it goes by the name of “chattel slavery,” “racial slavery” or “neo-slavery,” rhetorically, what is the relationship between gender categorization and African enslavement? Why has this relationship been not been clarified, despite over five hundred years of white racist imperialism? How can full comprehension of this relationship not be crucial for contemporary Pan-African struggles, particularly in North America? What resources might be mobilized toward this end, practically and theoretically, to make this a moment of clarity as opposed to continued confusion?

Oyèrónké Oyêwùmi’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) is a recent study which begins to write what could legitimately be called a “history of sex,” or “gender.” Contrary to the “history of sexuality” written by Michel Foucault, however, Oyêwùmi unearths a politics of “race” behind the “sex” and “sexuality” manufactured by Europe. She argues that “woman” is a culturally specific category of the West which finds no existence in Yorubaland, for example, before the onslaught of empire (ix). The same would be true, by necessary extension, for the category of “man.” Critically, “woman” is seen as the “social construction” of the “anatomical female,” or a “universal” subject “constructed,” outside of time and space, to be always and everywhere subordinate to her equally monolithic counterpart, “man” (8-11). This doctrine has led to the misleading conception that “native females” are “doubly colonized,” a notion which Oyêwùmi rejects because it represses the colonial context of gender formation itself; and it suggests “colonized women” benefit from the process of colonization, that is, the patriarchal project of Europeanization (122, 127). On the whole, The Invention of Women shows how masculist and feminist naturalizations of “sex” or “gender” bind Africa and Africans to the past and present West.

Importantly, these ideas are not entirely without precedent. Oyêwùmi’s decidedly Yoruba-focused work, whose concept of colonization does not in principle exclude the “Atlantic slave trade” (xi), it calls to mind a polemic penned by Toni Cade Bambara in Africa’s Diaspora: “On the Issue of Roles” (1970) confronts the very same matter long before the rhetoric of “social construction” becomes prominent in Western academia. A militant rejection of “the madness of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’” (102), Bambara’s main contribution to her The Black Woman: An Anthology would mock the sexual dogma of Western anthropology, biology and psychiatry, observing that “human nature” (or, the notion of “what a girl’s supposed to be like and what a boy’s supposed to be like”) is an extremely “malleable quality” (103, 107). The prescriptive dichotomies of gender are scorned as “a hindrance to full development,” and “an obstacle to political consciousness” in the movement for Black liberation (101): “Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and womanhood,” Bambara expounds, “and concentrate on Blackhood” (103).

Every practice of erotic identity should be defined in terms of egalitarian struggle. Status-quo conventions of sex differentiation are exposed as cultural and historical artifacts of empire. They can never, ever be taken for granted. While Bambara maintains we would do well to reclaim “the old relationships” (105), of Africa before colonialism, she also insists we make a study of “the destructive and corruptive white presence” (104). Invoking Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism (1959), his writing on sexual transformation in revolutionary Algeria, Bambara concludes: “We make many false starts because we have been programmed to depend on white models or white interpretations of non-white models, so we don’t even ask the correct questions, much less begin to move in a correct direction. Perhaps we need to face the overwhelming and terrifying possibility that there are no models, that we shall have to create from scratch” (Bambara 1970, 109). “On the Issue of Roles” closes with a call to forge, for Black people’s sake, “revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships” (110), beyond the categorical confines of sex or gender. The white-supremacist “madness of ‘masculinity and femininity,’” “manhood” and “womanhood,” this is all roundly renounced as a part of Pan-African revolt.

Bambara’s anthology was designed in part “to piece together an ‘overview’ of ourselves too long lost among the bills of sale and letters of transit” (10). The “trade in flesh” reference is anything but coincidental. Not surprisingly, she was bold enough to interrogate the terminology of The Black Woman’s title, even as editor of this undeniably pioneering effort. Bambara understood that the social logic of a “slaveocracy” precludes the possibility of there actually being such a “thing” as a “Black man” or a “Black woman.” She understood the necessity of interrogating rather than assimilating these basic sexual concepts, regarding social formations then and now. We might ask, accordingly, what cultural context could “de-naturalize” the concept of gender in the West more fully than the history of Africans in “Plantation America”?[1] Academic discourse on the subject of “sex” and “slavery” ignores this question, unfortunately. I will therefore consider several foundational texts on “gender” and “slavery” with colonialist categorization clearly in mind. For, whatever their professed strengths, the writings of Angela Y. Davis, Deborah Gray White and Hazel V. Carby all function to reinscribe the sexual conceits of empire, rhetorically, where they might have been de-mystified with ease. The Invention of Women notwithstanding, the critical-political perspective laid down by Bambara has no parallel, I argue, in the literature on African enslavement in the British settler colony that becomes the super-imperialist power of the “United States.”

Angela Y. Davis: “Reflections . . .” (1971) and “The Legacy of Slavery” (1981)

Deciding where to begin in this context seems like a less than difficult task. Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987) states that the “institution of slavery is now widely regarded as the source of stereotypes about the black woman,” and that this “observation was first made by Angela Davis” in the “seminal” essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (Carby 1987, 20; 39). Davis wrote this text as a political prisoner in 1971. It was published twice overall in The Black Scholar; and it was even reworked a decade later to become the opening chapter of Women, Race & Class, “The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood” (1981). Well before White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), Davis’s statements were prominent enough to be the point of departure for standard debates on the subject in North America for years.

Like Bambara’s “On the Issue of Roles,” Davis’s writings appeared in the aftermath of the infamous “Moynihan Report.” “Senator” Daniel Patrick Moynihan had declared in The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) that what ensures the abject status of Black people in his “United States” was, not a colonial imperialist system of “white-supremacy,” but a “tangle of pathology” which was, for him, synonymous with Black culture itself. The “Negro family” of this propaganda is marred by its “perverse” “matriarchal” structure which produces “anti-social” subjects marked by sexual “confusion” and “chaos.”[2] This white racist equation of matriarchy with “cultural deprivation” (“pathology” or “primitivism”) is, in actual fact, a very basic element of Western social thought, as the work of Cheikh Anta Diop (1974; 1987; 1989; 1996) and Ifi Amadiume (1987a; 1987b; 1989; 1997) has consistently shown.

While unaware of its global historical depth, Davis had to confront this lore at the time of “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” She would ultimately conclude: “The image of black women enchaining their men, cultivating relationships with the oppressor is a cruel fabrication which must be called by its name. It is a dastardly ideological weapon designed to impair our capacity for resistance today by foisting upon us the ideal of male supremacy” (Davis 1971, 14). In “The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood,” she would reiterate: “Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men’s social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men’s” (Davis 1981, 23). The matriarchy pathologized by the West is not the problem, in other words; and, in the struggle for Black liberation, patriarchy is plainly not a solution, Moynihan’s state sociology aside.

“Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (1971)

Yet and still, the profound implications of the “sex/gender” discussion in Davis have gone almost completely unnoticed. We read in “Reflections” that “the [enslaved] black woman had to be released from the chains of the myth of femininity,” and: “in order to function as slave, the black woman had to be annulled as woman” (Davis 1971, 7). When the status of the majority of “female slaves” as “field workers” is examined in “Legacy,” Davis sustains: “they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned.” “Black women,” therefore, “were practically anomalies” (Davis 1981, 5). No biologism of sex precludes a violent extraction of their labor by the plantation regime. “Black female” oppression is consequently construed as “identical” to that of “male slaves.” Moreover, and perhaps in pointed refutation of Moynihan’s denial of this whole reality, Davis’s account of the qualitative sameness of Black “male” and “female” oppression is expanded with a quantitative measure of Black “female” specificity: “But women suffered in different ways as well, for they were victims of sexual abuse and other barbarous treatment that could only be inflicted on women” (6).

This is common heterosexualist assumption that was articulated in “Reflections” with a notable difference. Given the amplified significance of “domestic” life for the enslaved, the “custodian of the house of resistance” was said to be targeted by “the most elemental form of terrorism distinctively suited for the female: rape.” That is, sexual assault was recognized as an attempt to annihilate her resistance and define her status as a “female animal” (Davis 1971, 13), not as a “woman” (an identity which requires the status of “human being”). Nevertheless, both “Legacy” and “Reflections” recognize that such violence represents a collective assault as well. The institutionalized rape of the “female slave” aims to reinforce the powerlessness of the “male slave” (even if sexual violence against “male slaves,” which would represent an assault against all of the enslaved as well, cannot be imagined). By no means, however, was this practice sure to succeed. The “negative equality” among the “slaves” is solidified by a “positive equality” found in “Legacy.” For, after “Reflections,” Davis confirms a non-hierarchical and relatively unrigorous division of labor in the culture of the oppressed (Davis 1981, 17-18). Thus, when a three-fold equality of culture, oppression, and resistance exists in this anti-slavery realm, the explanation for sexual violence is simple: “they were trying to break this chain of equality through the especially brutal repression they reserved for the women” (23). There is no conventional Western construction of sex here in the shorter history of what Bambara had called “the old relationships.”

In any event, Davis ultimately assimilates the cultural life of her “slaves” to the social conceits of colonial slaveocracy. This is how she and Bambara obviously part ways: “Legacy” closes with the curious declaration that “Black women were women indeed,” not to mention the claim that “certain personality traits” developed under white domination yield “standards for a new womanhood” (29). These traits do not interrogate the concept of “womanhood” itself, for her. The attachment to this specific rhetoric of gender is never questioned. Nor is the necessity of rigid sex differentiation of any kind in any way disputed. Canonical histories by Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman are chided for their own provincial gender presumptions (4, 19). But a fundamentally European sexual framework remains in Davis’s “Legacy,” even more so than “Reflections.” The “madness of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’” (or “manhood” and “womanhood”) is, finally, categorically ensconced via the bodies of enslaved Africans in Plantation America.

“Reflections” did not or could not easily, always and completely assume hegemonic concepts of gender. It did intend to rescue them in some fashion for the “community of slaves.” Of course, the slaveocratic order of settler colonialism construes its own as “human” and its “slaves” as “non-human” (or “sub-human,” if not “anti-human,” at best). One cannot qualify as “human” if one is not typically identified as “man” or “woman,” and vice versa, since “manhood,” “womanhood” and “humanity” are not “apolitical” notions (as if there were such a thing), but very political notions of empire. History, and Sylvia Wynter (Scott 2000), have shown as much, repeatedly. When Western categorizations are taken for granted, however, resistance to domination is defined as gaining access to such things as opposed to rejecting them out of hand for an old, new or another way of life. Hence, Davis would write of a “release” from femininity, and an “annulment” of womanhood, as if there were some “natural” and “universal” sex or gender experienced by Africans (or Europeans) before colonization and enslavement.

After Frederick Douglass is quoted as protesting a “manhood...lost in chattelhood” (Davis 1971, 5), she herself states: “the community gravitating around the domestic quarters might possibly permit a retrieval of the man and the woman in their fundamental humanity” (6). This is not just expressed as their “retrieval” of a “native” sense of self-worth. It is an argument for the likelihood, if not the actuality, of a “slave man” and “slave woman” fashioned in the “quarters of resistance,” or the counter-hegemonic, oppositional “community they pulled together through sheer force of strength” (6). The “human being” of “womanhood” would be accessed, theoretically, even where it is at odds with what is referred to as the “historically evolved female role” (8). This is how our “foremothers” would foil the oppressor’s attempt to define her to a “female animal” in “Reflections.” Uncritical presumptions of “manhood” and “womanhood” notwithstanding, they could do so through a distinctly Black cultural formation that does bitter battle with the white racist artifact of “human” “gender” and “sexuality,” although Davis presupposes “manhood” and womanhood” as absolute monoliths, to some extent, from the outset.

“The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood” (1981)

This striking symbolic warfare fades almost entirely out of view in “Legacy.” Davis had relied in part on a general distinction between “sex” and “gender” as she struggled to project a humanism of gender into her “community of slaves,” a Black community which could never be reduced to “beasts of burden” in African Diaspora. While the rhetoric of “sex” often denotes an anatomical biology that can refer to “human beings” and “non-human animals” alike, the rhetoric of gender refers to what has come to be called the “social construction” of “sex” as “gender” among “human beings” alone--as if its anatomical biological base is not also itself “socially constructed” or instituted.

The paradigmatic space between “sex” and “gender” is importantly the place where, even according to this account, “gender” could be “constructed” differently by different cultures and different histories at different times and in different places. Yet the fact that “gender” appears to always, inevitably get collapsed with “sex” in Western accounts proves that “sex” and “gender” have been conceived in culturally specific and historically static, Western terms. While “Reflections” went back and forth on this issue, “Legacy” makes little or no differentiation between sex and gender at all, naturalizing both as one in effect, despite the life-threatening stakes laid out in “Reflections.” Tense negotiation of white conceptions of “bestiality” and “humanity” through white conceptions of “masculinity” and “femininity” is no longer a major part of the analysis, as white conceptions of “manhood” and “womanhood” are now taken for granted, without question, if in modified fashion. This time, “women” and “female slaves” are simply rendered synonymous from beginning to end, like “female” and “woman,” overall.

The Black cultural formation of Davis’s “slave community” is no longer what matters most, moreover, when it comes to collective self-definition and sex or gender. Women, Race & Class proceeds if there is, at bottom, some “trans-cultural,” anatomical biological distinction underwriting its sexual universalism, guaranteeing its socio-historical relevance for enslaved Africans, when the whole world-view of Western anatomy or biology is grounded in racial distinctions and “scientific racism.” Now, Black “female slaves,” “hardly women in the accepted sense” (Davis 1981, 6), can be pronounced “women indeed” regardless of allusions to sexual “anomalies,” “genderlessness” (5) and “breeding” (7). Now, the regulatory practice of rape is one that “could only be inflicted upon women” (6), instead of one “distinctively suited for the female,” designed to promote her mythical “animality.” Indeed, “Legacy” contends: “If Black women had achieved a sense of their own strength and strong urge to resist, then violent sexual assaults--so the slaveholders might have reasoned--would remind the women of their essential and inalterable femaleness” (24). Not only is the ideology of “womanhood” assumed, unilaterally, it is assumed to be coextensive with “femaleness” as the specter of “female animality” somehow disappears. The supposed guarantees of biology enable this assumption, again, even though such biologism continues to guard its “manhood” and “womanhood,” its “humanity,” for white Western bodies alone.

Why, then, should the “legacy of slavery” be “standards for a new womanhood,” one unavoidably grounded in the original, racist standards of gender, for Africa’s Diaspora in particular? Why shouldn’t slavery’s legacy be a critical rejection of all European discourses of sex or gender and the alien tongues in which they have been so violently imposed, and are re-imposed? Why not repudiate “manhood” and “womanhood” as “natural,” “universal” or “necessary” features of social existence? Regarding terms like “femininity,” “housewife,” “mother,” and “woman” Davis acknowledged that “among Black female slaves, this vocabulary was nowhere to be found” (Davis 1981, 12). Given this and other facts, historically, why reproduce that same rhetoric, and in such generic terms, under the guise of “freedom” or “emancipation” no less? Why evade the truth of slaveocratic imperialism, in short?

The colonial vocabulary of sex is furthermore part and parcel of the “modern” production of “heterosexuality” as a defining feature of Occidentalism. The strict division of society into “heterosexual” and “homosexual” subjects for a “hetero-normative” agenda shapes the discourse on matriarchal households countered by Davis. She did not counter matriarchy’s demonization by patriarchal Europe as has Diop and as Amadiume would, as Pan-Africanist social historians. Davis rejects it out of hand, making use of Gutman to uphold certain “marriage taboos, naming practices, and sexual mores” as evidence of “a thriving and developing [Black] family during slavery” (Davis 1981, 14). Where these relations are cited to distinguish them from those of white settler society, they are still made to conform to traditional forms of the West. Davis highlights the participation of “male slaves” in the “domestic” sphere of the Black community, but there is the need to emphasize that they were not “the mere helpmates of their women,” or victims of “matriarchate” dominance (17); and we are told that their “boys needed strong male models to the very same extent that their girls needed strong female models” (19). The examination of “sex,” “gender” and “slavery” has almost always been an examination of “conjugal” or quasi-conjugal dynamics to the exclusion of all other Black family and community dynamics or relations. The point in Davis is always to persuade à la Gutman, against Moynihan: “the slaves were not ‘not-men’ and ‘not-women’” (13). The patriarchal West’s “manhood” and “womanhood” are posed as such “natural” “facts of life” (along with its kin concepts of “family” and “sexuality”) that their social desirability cannot ever be queried. The so-called “sexual savagery” of African matriarchy is summoned merely to be dismissed by the heterosexualism of empire.

Deborah Gray White: “Female Slaves” (1983) & Ar’n’t I a Woman? (1985/1998)

Women, Race, & Class actually began by marking the “conspicuous” and “disappointing” absence of a book-length study of “slave women,” or Black women “during slavery,” even by the close of the 1970s (Davis 1981, 3). But would any book do here at the center of U.S. imperialism? Coming to fill the void for many is Deborah Gray White, author of Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South which was published in 1985 and republished with a new introduction, “Revisiting Ar’n’t I a Woman?” in 1998. White’s “Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South” (1983) was a short essay that not only precedes her more prominent book, but also paves the way for the ideas that she would eventually elaborate. As is so often the case, the anti-matriarchalism of the West determines the starting point for White. Yet, unlike Davis, White will embrace the substance of “matriarchy” in the language of ‘matrifocality.” Even so, and very much like Davis, White couches this socio-cultural experience in traditionally colonial terms. The sex she assigns to matrifocality remains an assimilationist counterpoint to the Occidentalism of “The Moynihan Report.” The gender of Western heterosexualism is naturalized and universalized on the whole, many years after the different militancies of Jones and Davis are far out of vogue in North America.

“Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South” (1983)

“Female Slaves” seeks to counter a certain tendency of histories written in response to Moynihan. The fiery “Reflections” of Davis (not to mention the polemic of Jones) seem too “political” or radical to merit much mention in White. She takes issue with the “slave historiography” of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Genovese, Gutman, and John Blassingame for simply inverting “The Moynihan Report.” It had perversely exploited E. Franklin Frazier to proclaim that the “problem” with contemporary Black life was the Black family, and that the “problem” with the Black family was the “often reversed roles of husbands and wife.” This “trans-gendered” “pathology” was traced back to “slavery.” After Moynihan, “modern historiographers” came to save the day by declaring the patriarchal character of Black families on plantations. For them, the “sex” of “slaves” is and should be “male dominant,” and “heterosexually” discrete.

White interrupts this symbolic compensation, maintaining that the “pendulum” has swung too far from “female-dominated families” to “male-dominated” units: “slave women did not play the traditional female role as it was defined in nineteenth century America, and regardless of how hard we try to cast her in a subordinate or submissive role in relation to slave men, we will have difficulty reconciling that role with plantation realities” (White 1983, 30). White’s own conclusions actually mesh well with those of Davis whom she fails to engage: “The high degree of female cooperation, the ability of slave women to rank and order themselves, the independence women derived from the absence of property considerations in the conjugal relationship, ‘abroad marriages,’ and the female slave’s ability to provide supplementary foodstuffs are factors which should not be ignored in consideration of the slave family ” (28). Unfortunately, these findings are made to assert Black familial “normalcy” on white-supremacist terms. The cultural and historical specificity of the “genders” said to be “reversed” by “slaves” and “ex-slaves” goes entirely unrecognized. The “sex roles” reinscribed by White end up as “matrifocal” variations on a Western metaphysical scheme.

This defense of matrifocality is the culmination of a labor history founded, paradoxically, on “the traditional female role” of European “femininity,” thanks to a host of unreasoned and undocumented “probabilities.” At the outset, White claims that depictions of “female slaves” as full-time field-hands virtually identical to “male slaves” are more misleading than not. She is compelled to acknowledge the existence of some “full female hands,” who are forced to “slave” like “males,” before suggesting: “It is difficult, however, to say how often they did the same work, and it would be a mistake to say that there was no differentiation of field labor on Southern farms and plantations. The most common form of differentiation was that women hoed while men plowed” (24). White can fathom labor division as always and only gendered, never according to physical capacity, for instance, beyond sexual dictates. She must immediately concede that “exceptions” to this inferred “distinction” between “hoeing” and “plowing” were “so numerous as to make a mockery of it” (24).

So how or why should this mock-distinction retain its status as a hard and fast rule? Despite the fact that such a sexual division would be not simply rare but ridiculed, this dubious distinction is assumed throughout the rest of White’s work. By the close of “Female Slaves,” she will go so far as to classify the “slave community” as one of many societies where “strict sex role differentiation” is the norm (30). A ponderous emphasis is placed on “a lot of traditional ‘female work’” (24) such as cooking, sewing, and doctoring (25) which will contradict her awkward disclosure that “sex role differentiation in field labor was not absolute but...there was differentiation in other kinds of work” (26); and the buried confession that “field work occupied the time of most women” (25) confutes the startling yet central presumption that it “is likely that...women were more often called to do the heavy labor usually assigned to men after their childbearing years” (24). Likewise, White’s categorization of “pregnant and nursing slaves” as “half and three quarter hands” (in line with her feminizing incapacitation of all “female slaves”) is always presented as a strict difference in kind, not quantity, of production: “at least until thirty-five, slave women probably spent a considerable amount of time doing tasks which men did not do” (24). It is plain to see these “probabilities” in White are founded more on the fallacies of “femininity” than documentation, historical reality or cogency of argument.

Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)

This problematic approach is duplicated in Ar’n’t I a Woman?, the first extended study of the subject anticipated by Davis. In its third chapter, “The Life Cycle of the Female Cycle,” White speculates in a fashion which is still at odds with all that slips through her previous undertaking: “Although some women of childbearing age plowed and ditched when they were pregnant, in view of the slave owner’s concerns about natural increase it is more likely that women who did the same work as men were past their childbearing years. If this was the case, the middle-aged years were the most labor-intensive years of a woman’s life” (114). Manifestly, “female slaves” do plow now, and ditch as well, even when pregnant. The point is to downplay the experience of “working like a [slave] man” in favor of more “womanly” pursuits, without interrogating “manhood” or “womanhood,” ever. The second chapter, entitled “The Nature of Female Slavery,” troubles White’s generalization. Until the formal abolition of “the overseas slave trade,” she sustains, a clear priority was given to labor production over labor-force reproduction in “the lower and newer regions of the South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas)” in particular. This deduction has as its premise the existence of “lower fertility rates” (69) and the idea that the “slaveholders” were slow to realize the profitability of “natural increase” (67). Regardless, the rational solicitude White grants to “slaveholders” regarding “childbearing slaves” would be logically confined to the period after 1807 alone. This is according to her very own narrative, of course. All in all, the conditions of possibility for the “female slave laborer” White wants to imagine as a prototype continue to shrink considerably with each passing statement. Her prolonged attempt to project femininity into this history of super-exploitation is subverted over and over again.

What gets stigmatized in White as a “masculinization” of sorts was very often vaunted as power and strength by those she pretends to represent. Many a narrative and interview substantiates what Davis had surmised: “Their awareness of their endless capacity for hard work may have imparted to them a confidence in their ability to struggle for themselves, their families and their people” (Davis 1981, 11). Conversely, White’s mission is to discover an absolute, inviolate sexual division of “slaves” into “men” and “women” as a “natural” and hierarchical matter of course. In Ar’n’t I a Woman?, “The Life Cycle of the Female Slave” imagines a gender-socializing function for the so-called “trash gang,” a “low-scale” labor group comprised of “pregnant women, women with nursing infants, young teenagers, and old slaves.” She describes this “trash gang” as “predominantly female,” in one sentence, and “overwhelmingly” so in the next. Only paragraphs before eruption into this purified “female world,” we were told that differentiation among “slave children” ages ten to twelve was, in all likelihood, nil: “If their activities of work and play are any indication of the degree of sex role differentiation...then young girls probably grew up minimizing the differences between the sexes while learning far more about the differences between the races” (94). This state of affairs is said to change quite drastically in the “three-generational ‘trash-gang’” (95), but how exactly? Shouldn’t we now ask how the “trash-gang” would socialize, or sexualize, the teenage “boy slaves” and the elder “slave men,” outside their projected prime? They are listed and then quickly forgotten. Why should this query be repressed? In her fourth chapter, “The Female Slave Network,” White visibly struggles in a manner that leaves her ultimate agenda exposed: “it is hardly likely that slave women, especially those on large plantations with sizable female populations, lost their female identity” (20-21). A fear of “masculinization” prevails even though, properly speaking, “female slaves” have as little to do with colonial conventions of “masculinity” as do “male slaves” do in the white racist society of slaveocratic imperialism. Their history throws into radical question the dichotomy of “male” and “female” identity propagandized, variously, from the plantation to the present day.

“Revisiting Ar’n’t I a Woman?” (1998)

Such colonialist, slaveocratic conceptions are further endorsed by “Revisiting Ar’n’t I a Woman?,” the author’s introduction to a new edition of her book published almost a decade and a half after its initial appearance in 1998. She now begins by noting that the movement for “Black Power” was responsible for the rise of “African-American Studies” (not Black Studies) in U.S. academia. The point of this “renaissance,” in her opinion, was the “restoration” of “masculinity” in “black men” (White 1998, 3). For White, the related “restoration” of “femininity” in “black women” had yet to be achieved before the original publication of Ar’n’t I a Woman? The essential “task” of her text is explicitly and repeatedly equated with “proving” the “womanhood” of her subjects in historical, if not contemporary, terms. She still cannot imagine a Black Studies which questions or subverts white Western categories of sex and gender, “male” and “female,” “man” and “woman.” In retrospect, White remarks: “[s]ome critics allege that I muted slavery’s brutality--and the consequent dogged resistance” (9). But this fact is not connected to her sexual political agenda. Conceding that she could not adequately conceptualize the “difference” between “black and white women,” and that she would not currently insist so much on their “commonalities,” she will anxiously reassert: “Black and white women had so little in common because the sexism they both experienced kept them apart (6). She presumes some prelapsarian commonality of gender, apparently at an anatomical or biological level, while it is a white-supremacist “sexism” which always disallows the unity desired by White in advance, socially and “biologically,” requiring that brutalization and resistance be muted as “unfeminine.” The historian cannot afford to recognize the brutality of oppression and resistance if her professional intellectual commitment is to affirm a gender convention fundamentally at odds with both.

So how is White’s reassessment to be itself assessed, finally? The book-length study desired by Davis has yet to be written. “Were I to write Ar’n’t I a Woman? today,” White muses, “I would use the verb ‘enslaved’ rather than the noun ‘slave’ to implicate the inhumane actions of white people. The noun ‘slave’ suggests a state of mind and being that is absolutely unmediated by an enslaver. . . . Enslaved forces us to remember that black men and women were Africans and African-Americans before they were forced into slavery” (8). What “African-Americans” does White find before the enslavement of Africans by Europeans in the Americas? In reality, “enslaved Africans” never quite emerge from this account at all. White would shift from “slave men and women” to “enslaved men and women” with no real cultural point of reference beyond the plantation, or the racist nation-building project of a white settler super-colony (8-9). The rhetorical switch from “slave” to “enslaved” is said to be focused on resistance and only recently possible now that there is more “history” than “myth” available on the topic (5).

This rosy historiographical tale recalls the closing lines of “Female Slaves,” where White concluded: “Sambo and Sapphire may continue to find refuge in American folklore but they will never again be legitimized by social scientists” (White 1983, 30). Such a statement is more than “naïve.” James Turner and W. Eric Perkins penned “Towards a Critique of Social Science” in 1976, and they were clear: “The social sciences were integral to the maintenance of bourgeois rule not only in the United States, but over America’s expanding colonial empire in the South Pacific, the Caribbean and Latin America” (Turner and Perkins 1976, 4). The discourse and discipline were, in short, built for bourgeois domination, colonial and imperialist, “domestic” and global. Sterling Stuckey displayed these links, too, between history and sociology and domination, in “Twilight of Our Past: Reflections on the Origins of Black History” (1971, 281). Author of the landmark Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987), Stuckey could explain why, “white historians as a group are about as popular among black people as white policeman” (Stuckey 1971, 291). L.D. Reddick concurs with his criticism of hegemonic historians such as Fogel and Engerman, Genovese, and Ira Berlin in a foreboding speech entitled “Black History as a Corporate Colony” (1975).

Like the whole counter-historical tradition associated with Carter G. Woodson and his Journal of Negro History, these anti-imperialist perspectives were available to White and others, as her brief “Black Power” reference opening “Revisiting Ar’n’t I a Woman?” should illustrate. For whom, therefore, is a focus on resistance not possible until the 1990s? Who focuses more diligently on resistance and revolution than Claudia Jones in 1949? What about Angela Davis, in 1971 and 1981? Her “Reflections” is listed in a mere footnote to Ar’n’t I a Woman’s introduction. In the end, the title of White’s text represents a simple search for affirmation that is far less probing than Sojourner Truth’s fiery, boastful, even bicep-flexing oratory--as a militant sexual political analysis is cast, convolutedly, as an “impossible” “thing of the past.”

Hazel V. Carby: “Slave and Mistress,” Reconstructing Womanhood (1987)

Certain sexual ideological confines are challenged, to some extent, by Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood and its own exploration of the nineteenth century “cult of true womanhood.” Her second chapter, “Slave and Mistress: Ideologies of Womanhood under Slavery” includes a critique of white “women’s historians” who fail to consider “the generative power” of this cultish paradigm when they dismiss it as out of line with the lives of “elite planter class women” (Carby 1987, 24). As is custom, “feminist historiography” defines the plantation system as essentially “patriarchal,” narrating its control over “all women’s bodies,” evading the racial and racist foundation of “patriarchy” itself in the process. Carby would chart the disparate effects of this system on “white and black women” (20) with her literary historical analysis which, unlike the Marxian and quasi-Marxist readings dominating the terrain, examines “labor” less than “sexuality.” This ordinary, artificial split between “sex” and “work” has serious consequences, as it turns out, specifically for “differences” and conflicts in “class” status and identification in Carby’s enormously influential work on “The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist.”

Critically misleading from the outset is the subtitle of “Slave and Mistress,” “Ideologies of Womanhood under Slavery.” Since, as she remarks, “woman meant white” in the logic of the cult (34), there could be only one reigning idea of “woman,” and it was embodied by the “mistress.” The “slave” could certainly have ideas about this “womanhood,” constructed as inherently white, but she was herself constructed as “woman’s” antithesis. Carby recalls how “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (21) were the four main factors framing Victorian femininity; and how they were, without question, inaccessible to “the black woman as slave” (21). She goes so far as to recognize that “Black women were not represented as being of the same order of being as their mistresses; they lacked the physical, external evidence of the presence of a pure soul” (26). Needlessly minimizing the economic contours of this embodiment, Carby stresses: “Existing outside the definition of true womanhood, black female sexuality was nevertheless used to define what those boundaries were” (30). Apart from her status as a super-exploited worker in the field, the “slave woman” is associated with “taboo sexual practices” and “overt sexuality” in the mind of the slaveocracy (32).

According to this scheme, she is a “lascivious animal” that “breeds,” while it is the glorified white woman who “mothers.” The polar opposition so inscribed is illustrated in the danger she’s said to pose to the “master’s” patriarchal home: “the white male, in fact, was represented as being merely prey to the rampant sexuality of his female slaves...it was the female slave who was held responsible for being a potential, and direct, threat to the conjugal sanctity of the white mistress” (27). Her healthy resistance to the sexual exploitation and abuse disguised by this alibi is met with a reinforcement of her systematic demonization: “Measured against the sentimental heroines of domestic novels, the black woman repeatedly failed the test of true womanhood because she survived her institutionalized rape, whereas true heroine would rather die than be sexually abused” (34). Hence, Carby states the obvious when she says “the social relations of slavery” dictate that “the interests of the mistress lay with the slave master,” not the “female slave.” The “pedestal on which” the former “stood” was “supported by the institution of slavery” (31), to say the least. There was surely no gender to be “shared” by “white and black women” in Plantation America.

There is, “naturally,” no “universal man” socialized in opposition to a “universal woman,” or vice versa; there is a white “man” and a white “woman” specified over and against Black, African “slaves,” “male” and “female,” in a greater, racist sexual opposition which Carby actually denies. Her objection to the white cult of gender is made as if it were illogically white. Recalling the antithetical identities of “slave” and “mistress,” she asserts that the “ideology of true womanhood attempted to bring coherence and order to the contradictory material circumstances of the lives of women” (24). Yet the material realities of “white and black women” cannot be “contradictory,” anymore than those of “slave mistress” and “male slaves,” as slavery’s concept of sex reserves “womanhood” for “white female” bodies alone. There is “antagonism,” in other words, not “contradiction.”

Carby presumes an identarian unity of “white and black women” that is strictly anatomical in nature. “Woman” is taken for granted as biological entity even though such biologism never grants womanhood to Black “female slaves,” and biology is itself “constructed” to construct gender in white racist fashion. Imagining the “position of black and white women in the sexual dynamics of the slave system” as “contradictory” (32), rather than “conflictual” or “antagonistic,” Carby seeks to perform a “womanization” or “feminization” of the “female slave” which is plainly not permitted by the system under study.[3] She translates a physical capacity for “reproduction” into a sameness of subjectivity which is, crucially, belied by the social opposition between “glorified motherhood” and “motherless breeding” (30). So although the Victorian European “cult of true womanhood” may be criticized in part by Carby, for “excluding black women,” the more comprehensive culture of sex or gender that constructs “women” as a “natural” and “universal” category is not.

This last task requires, to be sure, a thorough interrogation of the heterosexualism undergirding white conceptions of “manhood” as well as “womanhood.” Carby’s use of the term “contradiction” seems to come from Blassingame’s reading of the “dialectical relationship between the simultaneous existence of two male slave stereotypes, a rebellious and potentially murderous ‘Nat’ and a passive, contented ‘Sambo’” (Blassingame in Carby 1987, 21). This dialectic would reflect a “complex and contradictory” unity internal to one subject position, the social identity of the Black “male slave.” There is no biologically based “unity” to be “contradicted” across the divide between “slave” and “master.” The “true manhood” of the white West cannot be the property of purported “beasts of burden.” A “black man as slave” would be a contradiction in terms, not the marker of a contradiction within some gender “shared” by “owner” and “chattel.” This was no less the case for “slave” and “mistress.” Together, “manhood” and “womanhood” are manufactured for a heterosexuality of “white-supremacy” which academic historians and critics have yet to explode. Carby writes that slaveocratic ideology believed that “women” should “‘civilize’ the baser instincts of man” and, further, that “in the face of what was constructed as the overt sexuality of the black female...these baser male instincts were entirely uncontrolled” (Carby 1987, 27). But it is “white womanhood,” not “black femaleness,” which is thought to enable and elevate this “manhood” as the racial prerogative of white society or Western “civilization.” The converse is also said to be true. This other half of the equation is missed by Carby, who notes that the “slave woman, as victim, became defined in terms of a physical exploitation resulting from the lack of assets of white womanhood: no masculine protector or home and family, the locus of the flowering of white womanhood” (35). Without a doubt, it is “white manhood,” not “black maleness,” which is thought to enable and elevate “womanhood,” again, as the racial prerogative of white society or Western “civilization.” Nevertheless, none of these racist concepts can be rejected as such if they are not recognized as the racist concepts of a heterosexualist empire.

That Carby’s basic interests lie elsewhere is exposed by her neglect of the labor identity of “the black woman as slave,” not to mention the very title of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. The material identity of the “black female field hand” (25) need not compete with an investigation of “Black female sexuality.” Another name for the “cult of true womanhood” was the “cult of domesticity.” For a “real, respectable woman” had to be a domesticated one who could never function as a super-exploited “field worker,” or even an otherwise exploited “house Negro.” The persona privileged by Carby’s project is, significantly, “the writer” or “novelist” who may or may not depict this matter of labor in narrative. The “Black female workers” center stage in the texts of Claudia Jones, Davis, and even White are virtually nowhere to be found here. This is to say that its attention to cultural anxiety surrounding “sexual stereotypes” of “Black women” reflect the specific concerns of an elite as opposed to the masses.

The writers in Carby may very well react to their “exclusion” from the “cult of true womanhood” and “domesticity” by seeking “inclusion,” via the invention of a derivative “discourse of black womanhood” (32). They may not be “paradigmatic,” racially speaking, except as a select social class. Carby complains that “[t]hinking, articulate, reasoning black women were represented only as those who looked white: mulattoes, quadroons, or octoroons” (33). She will not scrutinize this politics of assimilation from the perspective of those still represented as “unthinking,” “inarticulate,” and “irrational,” unilaterally, that is, most of those “Negresses” or Africans who looked Black. The wish for a “reconstructed womanhood” is read in the literary corpus of the “free” and “manumitted” as if it “naturally” extends to the “lower” and “lowest” strata of the enslaved. The concrete examples include Lucy Delany, who speaks to the “virtues” of “honest women,” and Mary Prince, who evangelizes “womanly” values in a similar vein. Inasmuch as these writings do posit a “black womanhood in its essential difference from white womanhood, a “difference” which does not preclude “sympathetic” ties between “slave and mistress” (37), they testify no less to an ‘essential difference” between these writers and the vast majority of “female slaves.”

In Carby’s fifth chapter, “‘In the Quiet, Undisputed Dignity of My Womanhood’: Black Feminist Thought after Emancipation,” she will allow: “As an elite, black women intellectuals could only maintain a representative black female voice if they weighed the advantages of forming an alliance against the knowledge that for the mass of black women white women were not potential allies but formidable antagonists” (118). Momentary concession aside, simply ignored is the formation of racist class positions, here by the National Association of Colored Women, as they “adopt and adapt” (61) various white-supremacist conventions for themselves. The elitist “need” to “forge a [moralist] culture of [true] Black womanhood” (118), akin to Carby’s own aim of forging a “sisterhood of white and black women” for “[f]eminist historiography and literary criticism” (53), this is not itself interrogated as class-interested “need.” An actual “representativeness” is arrogated in the age-old mission to “uplift” or “civilize” the Black majority with gender. The elite desire for “womanhood,” both before and after “emancipation,” can be couched in generic terms because Carby’s exclusive focus on “sexuality” shields divisions of “labor” almost completely from view.

In short, given its investment in “reconstructing” a “reconstruction” of “womanhood,” Reconstructing Womanhood fails to realize that the gender it wants to reiterate is a “social construction” in the first place. Had it been able to do so, the rhetoric of “reconstruction” could have been put to more “deconstructive” or de-mystifying uses. When “white-supremacy” reconstructs “slavery” as “emancipation,” it will also reconstruct, as in reconsolidate, “manhood” and “womanhood” as racist social categories. This is why Carby could cite Davis in conclusion on how the “links between black women and illicit sexuality consolidated during the antebellum years had powerful ideological consequences for the next hundred and fifty years” (39). This racism of sex and gender is not some static carry-over from a distant period. It is a constantly reiterated process in ruling-class machinations of empire.

It is no an accident that the “working class” analysis of Barbara Omolade in “The Unbroken Circle: A Historical Study of Black Single Mothers and Their Families” (1994) describes the relation between the “past” and “present” of “racism and bondage” in a more persuasive way: “The only ‘women’ are those whose men who have ultimate control over people of color. Thus, it becomes understood and axiomatic--to be white and female is to be ‘woman’ and to be white and male is to be ‘man.’ Black men and women are neither man nor woman; they are non-beings, e.g. chattel, niggers, underclass” (Omolade 1994, 25). The nineteenth century “cult of true womanhood” was just one instance of a greater cult of gender under white Western hegemony. Whether the antithesis of “man” and “woman” is rendered as “chattel” or “underclass,” the naturalization of “manhood” and “womanhood” serves a viciously political function; and this “reconstruction” of plantation power in subsequent colonial and neo-colonial contexts can be destroyed only when the white heterosexualist madness of “masculinity” and “femininity” is renounced in a vigilant revolutionary praxis.

Conclusion

Uprooting white imperialist politics of gender and sexuality from within the space colonized as the “U.S.A” presents a unique set of problems, intellectually. While certain of its norms or ideals may be criticized as “racist,” they are more rarely criticized as Western or European in origin or outlook. Elsewhere, Barbara Bush’s “‘The Family Tree Is Not Cut’: Women and Cultural Resistance in Slave Family Life in the British Caribbean” (1986), casually affirms: “It was in the interest of the planters to promote myths of the instability of the slave family, for this justified the exploitation and separation of slaves...Contrary to these views slaves in fact viable family forms based on African rather than European values” (126-27). Though Bush is preoccupied with proving a lack of “promiscuity” and “immorality” in her “slaves,” as if these evaluations were not culturally specific themselves, racism and “white-supremacy” are directly identified with Occidentalism. Merle Hodge’s “The Shadow of the Whip: A Comment on Male-Female Relations in the Caribbean” (1974) similarly confirms West African culturalism and socio-sexual arrangements in “the Caribbean and indeed Black America on the whole” (116). The hegemony of the West is not forgotten when Hodge inveighs against “the accepted ideal of white womanhood,” contending: “the revaluation of black womanhood inevitably also implies a restoration of black manhood, when the black man no longer forcibly evaluates his women by the standards of a man who once held the whip over him. It is one stage of his liberation from the whip hand” (118). If the essential vocabulary of gender is retained, the denunciation of racism does not eclipse the fact of cultural conflict from Hodge’s vision. “Blacks” are never reduced to a social effect of some monolithic “nation-state” complex in the “New World.” It is not that this kind of analysis has not come forth under U.S. colonization, as Bambara’s brilliant “On the Issue of Roles” no doubt demonstrates. It simply does not come forth with commercial sanction from a white nationalist academy of empire.

Of course, the standardization of Western sexual categories knows no geopolitical boundaries. A rhetorical aside found in a Hilary Beckles’s “Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery” (1995) is interesting in this respect. Its engagement with well-known texts by Bush, Kamau Brathwaite, Arlette Gautier, Barry Higman, Lucille Mair, Verena Martinez-Alier, Bernard Moitt, and Marietta Morrissey leads Beckles to comment: “the post-structuralist assertion that the term woman is but a social construct that has no basis in nature has struck no central nerve, an insensitivity which says a great deal about the theoretical state of this recent historiography” (126). This statement is curious for several reasons. Its author includes his own name on the list of figures who ignore this naturalization of sex in the study of gender. This individual and collective evasion, a brash endorsement of “madness” in Bambara’s view, is apparently not meant to be corrected in present or future work. The brief and strange reference to “post-structuralism” seems designed instead to scold the colonies for something like “theoretical underdevelopment.”

But why should de-naturalization be classified as “post-structuralist,” always and automatically? On what elusive definition would “post-structuralism” be responsible for “On the Issue of Roles” or The Invention of Women, for example? The “Derrida” and “Foucault” invoked by Beckles have produced no such analysis of white racist gender or imperialist sexuality. Nor, as a matter of fact, have any of their disciples. Furthermore, saying something is a “social construct” is scarcely the same thing as saying it is a culturally specific, Western bourgeois “construct.” What is clearly at stake here cannot be confined by the dictates of any genealogy of European intellectualism (i.e., “structuralism” versus “post-structuralism”). It is a matter of colonialism and anti-colonialism, slavery and anti-slavery, imperialism and anti-imperialism.

Even still, between British settler colonies in the northern Americas and U.S. empire, the white racist madness of “manhood” and “womanhood” is ritually reinforced in the “past” by academic literature composed in the “present,” even as Black radical traditions continue to erode this distinction between “then” and “now.” This is how the old world order of settler colonialism reconfigures itself, intellectually, in the new world order of neo-colonization. Hence, supplementing Bambara and Oyêwùmi is Sylvia Wynter’s statement on the “global expansion” of humanism in graphically gendered terms:

These ultimately bourgeois conceptions and the “heterosexuality” they combine to create, for Wynter, are all uncritically consolidated by conventional writing on enslaved Africans. When the form or content of these binaries cannot be found, historically, their necessity is not then challenged; instead, their form and content are rigidly imposed in any given fashion and by any possible means. The contemporary U.S. domination of anti-Black, white-supremacist Occidentalism is thus naturalized, “universally,” through the culturally specific categories of “manhood” and “womanhood” as well as “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality.” And “enslavement” may be accepted as “emancipation,” once again.

Deborah Gray White wrote against the weight of “The Moynihan Report” in an age of patriarchal revisionism. She helps eclipse the pioneering, politically-charged essays of Angela Davis who also wrote in the wake of Moynihan, but as a prisoner and high-profile activist in Black liberation struggle. Other, more conservative academics, Black and white, can now write as if “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” were never militantly written. Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson’s patriotic A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (1998) is a perfect case in point.[4] Davis had echoed the anti-fascist analysis of oppression and resistance written by Claudia Jones (1974 [1949]) in a profoundly revolutionary post-war praxis.

Yet as Carole Boyce Davies demonstrates (in a forthcoming work) and, thankfully, begins to correct, Jones is disappeared by citational protocols of the intellectual establishment. This erasure is extremely significant for the study of sexual politics and African enslavement since, unlike more institutionalized figures, she does not sever North America’s social context from the global context of capitalist imperialism. Indeed, her framework was mirrored in Malcolm X’s description of the “U.S.A.,” at “The Harvard Law School Forum of December 16, 1964,” as “the racist and neo-colonial power par excellence” (1991, 167). From this standpoint, it is not nearly as easy to embrace the “manhood” and “womanhood” of empire. Writing to contest a Victorian cult of gender, while confined to an “antebellum,” southern region of one state in a “world system,” Hazel Carby reinstated this system of gender in a literary history showcasing an “Afro-American” elite.

Nevertheless, it is just such resistance that remains urgent toward revolutionary Pan-African liberation, actual “emancipation” in other words. The various insights of Toni Cade Bambara and Oyèrónké Oyêwùmi should inform any angle on anti-slavery and slaveocracy. This is not to mention Sylvia Wynter’s extended “ethnography” of Western “Man” and “Woman,” at the level of ideas. Oyêwùmi ably criticizes a feminist rhetoric of “gender,” if not anatomical “sex,” noting that scholarship on gender always animates a politics of gender itself (Oyêwùmi 1997, xv). This critique therefore demands an interrogation of the privileged intellectual, whether neo-colonialist or neo-colonized, or both. Bambara dissects and rejects the sexual conceits of empire as a mythology that it would be deranged for all Africa and its Diaspora to endorse. Her sight is deep, scoping the Black world as a whole, and it is no less sharp because of it. This grassroots praxis goes well with Wynter’s anti-heterosexualist tracking of the bourgeois character of “modern” modes of domination in general.[5] For where, to date, no canonical histories of enslavement diagnose the “madness of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’” they fail to do so in large part because they uphold assimilation as a middle-class social ideal: Black history is academically packaged as the “pre-history” of the “Black bourgeoisie,” explicitly and implicitly, not the Black majority experience of Africans enslaved, and resisting “slavery” along with elite domination, somewhere in Plantation America, or the whole “New World” of European imperialism.

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Notes

1. As a conceptual tool, “Plantation America” is Pan-African and hemispheric in orientation. Here, its reference to plantation societies throughout the Americas enables a way out of U.S. isolationism, exceptionalism and imperialism. I use, even resurrect it to encompass North America as but one instance of a larger unit of historical study and experience, beyond the nationalizing (and/or regionalizing) interests of any specific state regime, whether that regime represents a past or present organization of geopolitical power and containment.

2. See Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey’s The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (1967), for more information and the aftermath.

4. Tellingly, there are three listings for Davis in Hine and Thompson’s index. She appears twice as an “countercultural icon” (Hine and Thompson 1998, 296; 298), not an author or agent of praxis; and once she is quoted on Billie Holiday (269), even though Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998) would reincribe many an insight from her unacknowledged work in “Reflections” (and “Legacy”): “Women’s blues are such an important source of insights about African-American historical consciousness precisely because they do not attempt to eradicate the memory of an era of relatively egalitarian gender relations” (Davis 1998, 121). It may be instructive as well to contrast the “interracial sisterhood” of Hine and Thompson’s text with the radical sisterhood of Angela and Fania Davis’s “The Black Family and the Crisis of Capitalism” (1986), a more recent publication of The Black Scholar.

5. Characteristically, Wynter’s “1492: A New World View” (1995) insists that from “this ultimate mode of otherness based on ‘race,’ other subtypes of otherness are then generated—the lower classes as the lack of the normal class, that is, the middle class; all other cultures as the lack of the normal culture, that is, Western culture; the nonheterosexual as the lack of heterosexuality, represented as a biologically selected mode of erotic preference; women as the lack of the normal sex, the male. . . ” (42). Wynter’s writings systematically undermine the naturalization of “heterosexuality” by Western humanism.