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“Forever Perverse, Queer, Askew”: Notes on Slavery and Resistance in African American Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2015
Extract
At a recent meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), a host of plenaries and concurrent sessions theorized the politics of Emancipation as nonevent and the practice of historiography in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. Held in October 2013 in Jacksonville, Florida, the 98th Annual Meeting of ASALH attracted a record number of attendees, despite obstacles associated with the shutdown of the federal government, closures at a local airport, and increased mobilization in opposition to the state's controversial “Stand Your Ground” statutes. Indeed, rushing into one conference room a few minutes late, having just presented earlier that day myself, I was struck by the sheer number of scholars in the room, the palpable enthusiasm to get things under way. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't have been too surprised. Taking as its subject Shonda Rhimes's hit television show Scandal – the Season 3 premiere of which had aired only the night before – the panel stoked a range of interests: race and popular culture, matters of sexuality and desire, even the impeccable style of protagonist and professional “fixer” Olivia Pope (played by actress Kerry Washington). Titled “Crashing the Ol’ Boys Club: Interrogating Power and Representation in ABC's Scandal,” the discussion sutured fans and critics alike into a collective accounting for the effects of a nation's apparent seduction by the labyrinthine exploits of Pope, head of the foremost crisis-management firm in Washington, DC, and her paramour, white, married, Republican US President Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III (played by Tony Goldwyn).
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References
1 The shutdown of the Jacksonville International Airport in October 2013 – due to the discovery of two suspicious packages – was unrelated to the federal government shutdown.
2 In attendance at the panel presentation, I am paraphrasing audience remarks; any errors in transcription are my own. As the remarks of Brittney Cooper (assistant professor of women's and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University; cofounder of the Crunk Feminist Collective) echoed an 11 February 2013 blog post (co-authored with Treva Lindsey, assistant professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Missouri–Columbia) called “Love in a Time of Scandal” on thefeministwire.com, I've reproduced those comments here.
3 Warren, Kenneth W., So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 29, 34–35Google Scholar, emphasis added.
4 Hartman, Saidiya, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008), 6, 100Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., 6.
6 Best, Stephen, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Modern Language Quarterly, 73, 3 (Sept. 2012), 453–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 457, 456, 459.
7 Ibid., 454, 455.
8 Holland, Sharon Patricia, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis in original.
9 Ibid., 3.
10 Ibid., 62, original emphasis.
11 This, too, is derived from the blog post “Love in a Time of Scandal.”
12 Quashie, Kevin, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 129Google Scholar, 3.
13 Ibid., 8.
14 Ibid., 93.
15 Evie Shockley's “Colorblind(ed): Visuality, Discursivity, and Slavery in Rita Dove's and George Elliott Clarke's Verse Plays” was presented by Shockley at a one-day forum, “Racial Representations: African American Literature since 1975,” at the University of Oregon on 26 April 2013.