Overview

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

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9780822359296

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Reviews

In this moving study of slavery and its afterlife, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines literature, photography, and contemporary art to retrieve black women from the margins of slavery's representation. The Repeating Body is an invaluable contribution to the study of feminism, diaspora, and visual culture. --Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

In this moving study of slavery and its afterlife, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines literature, photography, and contemporary art to retrieve black women from the margins of slavery's representation. The Repeating Body is an invaluable contribution to the study of feminism, diaspora, and visual culture. --Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route

Author Information

Kimberly Juanita Brown is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth University. 

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