“Introduction” (co-authored) and
“Passing and its Prepositions” for Racial Identity, Indeterminacy
and Identification in the Nineteenth Century, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 24.2.
“Reading/Photography: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’s Four Girls at
Cottage City, Victoria Earle Matthews and the Woman’s Era,” Special
Issue by Legacy, 24.2, 2007.
"Recovered Autobiographies and the Marketplace:
Our Nig's Generic Genealogies and Harriet Wilson's
Entrepreneurial Enterprise." Harriet Wilson's New England: Race, Writing, and Region. JerriAnne Boggis, Eva Raimon and Barbara White, eds.,
University Press of New England, 2007.
"The
Christian Recorder, Broken Families and Educated Nations: Julia
Collins' Civil War Novel the Curse of Caste," African American Review,
40.4, Winter, 2006.
“Who’s
Your Mama?: ‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography and
Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom.” American Literary
History. Vol. 14, no. 3, Fall, 2002. The women I examine in this
essay, Louisa Picquet and Ellen Craft, use their own bodies to challenge
their enslavement by expressing a desire, not for whiteness, but for
familial and juridical relations in which partus sequitur ventrem
(the child follows the condition of the mother) produces freedom rather
than enslavement for African Americans, light and dark. Included are
examinations of the Craft narrative, Running 1000 Miles For Freedom and
Louisa Picquet's The Octoroon.
“Sentimental Abolition in Douglass’s Decade: Revision, Erotic
Conversion, and
Politics of Witnessing in Frederick Douglass's "Heroic Slave" and
My Bondage and My Freedom.” Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics
of Affect in American Culture. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds. U.C.
Press, 1999. Reprinted from Criticism and the Color Line: Race and
Revisionism in American Literary Studies. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1996.
“‘Race, Gender and Justice’: New Technologies and Student Empowerment.”
Works and Days: Intentional Media, Conversations on Teaching and
Learning in the American Cultures and History Classroom, special issue,
volume 16, number 1-2 (1998). Co-authored.
“‘Reading Aright’: White
Slavery, Black Referents and the Strategy of Histotextuality in
Frances Harper's Iola
Leroy.” Yale Journal of Criticism, volume 10, number 2 (1997),
327-354.
“Manifest in Signs: Reading the Undertell in Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl.” New Essays on Harriet Jacobs. Deborah Garfield and Rafia Zafar eds. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
“Past-on Stories: History, Ontology, and the Magically Real -- Morrison
and Allende, On Call." Magical Realism: Foundations, Theory, History,
Community. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Farris, eds. Duke
University Press, 1995. Reprinted from Feminist Studies, vol.18, no.2
(Summer, 1992). The relation between ontology and naming is
explicitly figured in both Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits and
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Morrison locates the defining power in
speech and listening, survival skills quite distinct from talking and
passive hearing. Allende subverts the Adamic power of literal naming and
so posits a new genesis. In both novels, women become the site of a
history that survives and so nurtures the present.
"'This Promiscuous Housekeeping': Death, Transgression, and
Homoeroticism in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Representations, vol.43 (Summer,
1993).
"The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
and Our Nig."
Callaloo, vol.13, no.2 (Spring, 1990).
"Looking Back from Zora: or Talking Out Both Sides my Mouth for Those
Who Have
Two Ears." Black American Literature Forum, vol.23, no.4 (Winter, 1990).
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