Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-nlwjb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-08T11:18:22.241Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Calling Forth History's Mocking Doubles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Haley Konitshek
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Hortense Spillers ends “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” with a provocative suggestion: “Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’) … ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment.” In this article, I knead the material, representational, and performative powers operating through conceptually separate and yet deeply entangled contested terrains: (1) the “real,” or the scene of “actual mutilation,” whose high crimes against the flesh coincide with (2) the construction of the “symbolic.” Through Baradian performativity, I read Spillers's theorization on the name as an event wherein proprietary relationships, which necessarily oscillate between material/signification binaries, are called forth in historical terrain in the moment of racial address. Paying close attention to her grammar, the first half of this article tracks Spillers's movement through an undercurrent of American historical mythology that, as she demonstrates, misnames the black mother. The rest of this article then takes up to what extent certain “mocking doubles”—minstrel and/or monstrous tropes resuscitated but not redeemed or even necessarily renamed—might agitate their way toward new texts for female empowerment and the cultivation of the black mother's power to “name.”

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28 (3): 801–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Cheryl. 2012. “A” is for abject: The Red Letter Plays of Suzan‐Lori Parks. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26 (2): 31–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. Skepticism and the problem of others. In The claim of reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Equiano, Olaudah. 1789/2004. The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, written by himself. Introduction by Robert Reid‐Pharr. New York: The Modern Library.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1952/2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Roderick. 2004. Aberrations in black. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Verna. 2007. Nurturing and murderous mothers in Suzan‐Lori Parks's In the Blood and Fucking A. American Drama 16 (1): 75–89.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Paul. 2001. The genuine article: Race, mass culture, and American literary manhood. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. 2016. Spill: Scenes of black feminist fugitivity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of subjection. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1996. Reel to real: Race, sex, and class at the movies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 2009. Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Isoke, Zenzele. 2013. Urban black women and the politics of resistance. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Douglass. 2013. Black politics but not black people: Rethinking the social and “racial” history of early minstrelsy. The Drama Review 57 (2): 21–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class. Oxford: University of Oxford Press.Google Scholar
Lott, Eric. 1996. Blackface and blackness: The minstrel show in American culture. In Inside the minstrel mask, ed. Bean, Annemarie, Hatch, James V., and McNamara, Brooks. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine, ed. 2014. Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1965. The negro family: The case for national action. Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor.Google Scholar
Nagar, Richa. 2014. Muddying the waters: Coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nowatzki, Robert. 2006. “Our only truly national poets”: Blackface minstrelsy and cultural nationalism. American Transcendental Quarterly 20 (1): 361–78.Google Scholar
Nowatzki, Robert. 2010. Representing African Americans in transatlantic abolitionism and blackface minstrelsy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Onishi, Yuichiro, and Gardner, Tia‐Simone. 2015. Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi's art‐making as spiritual labor. In Traveling texts and the work of Afro‐Japanese cultural production: Two haiku and a microphone, ed. Bridges, William H. IV and Cornyetz, Nina. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Parks, Suzan‐Lori. 2001. In the Blood. In The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theater Communications Group.Google Scholar
Reinhardt, Mark. 2003. The art of racial profiling. In Kara Walker: Narratives of a negress, ed. Berry, Ian, English, Darby, Patterson, Vivian, and Reinhardt, Mark. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sell, Mike. 2013. Blackface and the Black Arts Movement. The Drama Review 57 (2): 143–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharpe, Christina. 2010. Monstrous intimacies: Making post‐slavery subjects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sotiropoulos, Karen. 2008. Staging race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama's baby, papa's maybe”: An American grammar book. Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar