Introduction

The introduction examines processes by which nineteenth-century black women writers have been disassociated from legitimate forms of black struggle and defiance. Extending a definition of the liberal problematic, and situating liberal ideology critique as a viable mode of resistance, the introductory chapter specifies methodology and content. It also addresses the ways in which Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper undermine fundamental liberal and Enlightenment precepts including reason, individualism, and the foregrounding of a transcendental subject. Each of these mix-raced, working, widowed women relies on distinct tropes of embodiment in their writing to contest reigning prescriptions toward objectivity, while making visible the constraints of practices of inclusion. Charting a “becoming together” of earlier thinkers with contemporary African-American art in the vein of Sherley Anne Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, the introduction to Resistance Reimagined offers rich insight into literary perspectives of liberalism.

Resistance Reimagined

A reimagining of liberal ideologies of selfhood, privilege, and consent is a significant legacy of nineteenth-century black feminist knowledge production. Yet, analyses of black women’s critical engagement with theliberal problematic—the disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession, between freedom and subjection in the American nation-state—remain incomplete. Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival repositions a spectrum of discourses, from canonical nineteenth-century American literary studies to black women’s history, to interrogate black women’s disruptions of the liberal problematic as a medium of resistance. It deploys African-Americanist and feminist literary criticism by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Lindon Barrett, post-1960s histories of enslavement and black political consciousness by Stephanie M. H. Camp, and rhetorical theories developed by Shirley Wilson Logan and Vorris Nunley, to expand the bounds of contemporary critical inquiry in two key ways. First, Resistance Reimagined spotlights nineteenth-century black women’s intervention into the effects of liberalism as juridical, economic, and affective performance. This unsettles sedimented perspectives of black resistance as inherently militant, male, and vernacular, while problematizing how scholars have read nineteenth-century African-American women’s activism—against Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for instance—as inauthentic or accommodationist. Second, the text juxtaposes early writers and thinkers, including Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper, with authors of modern neo-slave narrative, including Sherley Anne Williams, to grapple more effectively with the neoliberal present.

Conclusion

The conclusion explores the kinship between Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival and the #SayHerName Movement, as articulated by the African American Policy Forum. A more capacious roll call of instigators of black opposition encompasses sustained engagement with the philosophies and social achievements of intellectuals too frequently deemed incomprehensible as such. Accordingly, fully engaging with the liberal problematic entails grappling with fierce intricacies of black interiority and imagination, thereby upsetting time-honored biases regarding black resistance and power. Reading Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper’s literary endeavors differently likewise involves theorizing a counter-hegemony as concerned with vicious racial antagonism as subtle micro-aggression, with a theft of the black body as with a theft of black joy. In neglecting black knowledge production in its myriad forms, a history bereft of ambiguity and contradiction, and consequently, of humanity, emerges.

Harriet Wilson and the White Reader: Authority and Audience inOur Nig

From the time of its reissue in 1983, Harriet Wilson's 1859 text,Our Nig, has inspired critical discussion, much of which has concerned the matter of genre and related questions of the author's purpose and audience. When Henry Louis Gates first introduced it to contemporary readers, he called it both a “novel” and a “third–person autobiography,” further suggesting that it might be read in the context of sentimental novels, as he analyzed the book's interesting departures from Nina Baym's overplot inWoman's Fiction(“Introduction,” xi, xli–lv). Since then a number of critics have expanded upon and argued with Gates's preliminary assessment of Wilson's work and audience. Hazel Carby argues that Wilson writes to black readers, assuming that many of them would have shared her experience, whereas most other critics, including Claudia Tate and Margaret Lindgren, assume that Wilson is writing to a white audience, and negotiating the sense of difference between reader and writer. Barbara White and Eric Gardner, establishing that the actual “Bellmont” family, the Haywards, had strong abolitionist connections, suggest the complications of audience for Wilson. And Gardner, like Carby, suggests that Wilson would have assumed that her story would have been marketable only to a small group of Northern black readers, many of whom would have had similar experiences. Drawing on William Andrews's work with black autobiography, Beth Maclay Doriani describes how Wilson (and Harriet Jacobs) subvert the traditional genre of black autobiography, at the same time as they adhere to 19th–century conventions for publication and sale to white audiences. John Ernest argues that Wilson would have understood the ways in which her story would have been read and misread by proslavery forces. Drawing on William Andrews's discussion of Henry Bibb's narrative, Ernest argues persuasively for Wilson's extraordinarily complex understanding of her audience, to whom she appeals for an exchange based on a recognition of the essential mistrust of social groups.