Monstrous Intimacies

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, and often sexual violence of slavery has shaped black and white subjectivities from the earliest days of transatlantic slavery to the present, Christina Sharpe interprets Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address the "monstrous intimacies" imposed by slaveholders on the enslaved. She juxtaposes works of fiction, film, and visual art with nonfictional texts, reflecting on Frederick Douglass's account of witnessing the brutal beating of his aunt, alongside Essie Mae Washington-Williams's Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond; on Gayl Jones's novel Corregidora, about master-slave sexual relations and their repercussions, alongside a firsthand account of such monstrous intimacies written by a South Carolina politician, slave-holder, and vocal critic of miscegenation; and on the South African-born writer Bessie Head's fictionalized critique of the racial classifications of Africans by Europeans, alongside the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in European museums as the Hottentot Venus. She discusses issues of the black body, institutional representation, and sado-maschism in relation to the black British artist Isaac Julien's film The Attendant, which is set in a slavery museum. Culminating in her dynamic readings of the black and white silhouettes created by the artist Kara Walker, and the charges levelled against Walker by her critics, Monstrous Intimacies is a powerful meditation on subjection and subjectivity.