Notes
179 NOTES Introduction 1. The use of the terms “America” and “American” throughout the book refer exclusively to the United States of America rather than to the Americas. I use the terms purposely to evoke particular social, cultural, political, and historical contexts.And these contexts are connected to specific frameworks, terms, events, and hegemonies that remain central to the critical discussions,discourses,and traditions of African American literature. 2. See Golden’s Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, which documents the 1994 exhibit on black masculinity at the Whitney Museum. Golden developed and served as primary curator for the exhibit. 3. See Leak’s brief discussion of AliceWalker and Charles Johnson (2) andAnna Douglass’s illiteracy (24). 4. Ikard isn’t the only black male scholar who acknowledges this. Others include Michael Awkward, Calvin Hernton, and Manning Marable; see Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, edited by Guy-Sheftall and Byrd. Chapter 1 1. See also Jackson 141–42, in which he declares: “Perhaps only Douglass’s Narrative exceeds Bibb’s as a work of art, although Bibb lacks much of Douglass’s apparently inborn abundance of what Keats called negative capability—the ability, that is, of not saying what might be well left unsaid while saying very appropriately what is said” (141). Jackson’s Eurocentric evaluation of Bibb’s text is a little puzzling; however, the question becomes, What is it that Bibb should not have mentioned or that he doesn’t say “appropriately ”? Jackson doesn’t make this clear; however, Jackson’s comments may refer to the romantic, domestic relations that are a central focus of Bibb’s narrative and are the same elements that Olney and Stepto disparage. 2. My use of the term “gendered racism” comes from the work of Athena Mutua in “Theorizing Progressive Black Masculinities,” in her edited volume, Progressive Black Masculinities, 5–6. 3. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, letter of January 1855 to his publisher William Ticknor (Hawthorne). 4. Here I am using the term“masculinist”to mean a tendency to see masculine experiences , frameworks, and representations as normative; see James’s use of the term (141–60). 5. See Leak (xii), where he also questions Stepto’s elision of gender. 180 nOTes 6. William and Ellen Craft provide a passage that lines up well with the sentiments and arguments made by Douglass in the Grandmother passage, supporting the contention that even though it didn’t happen to Douglass’s own grandmother, it was indeed a familiar scenario (8). 7. See Fredrickson’s discussion of the progression from racialist thought to its consolidation within racist ideologies in both the South and the North among the abolitionists, particularly colonization, “romantic racialism,” and reliance on paternalistic relationships to African Americans. 8. Later we find that money is collected to help recover his family:“‘We think that a strong obligation rests on the friends in this state to sustain Mr. Bibb, and restore to him his wife and child. Under the expectation that Michigan will . . . re-unite the long severed ties of husband and wife, parent and child, Mr. Bibb will lecture through the whole State. . . . Let friends in each vicinity appoint a collector—pay to him all contributions for the freedom of Mrs.Bibb and child; then transmit them to us’”(Bibb,preface).Bibb’s authenticated account generates pathos and gains the emotional sympathies and support of his audience, which in this case directly translates into financial remuneration. 9. For more on the“burden of the body,”refer to Frederickson:“The biological school saw the Negro as a pathetically inept creature who was a slave to his emotions, incapable of progressive development and self-government because he lacked the white man’s enterprise and intellect,” a philosophy in vogue during the 1840s and ’50s (101). 10. Heglar argues that Bibb also fixes Malinda in the South by constructing his reunions with his wife and child as movements further South and into slavery, rather than as movements toward freedom in the North: “Thematically, Bibb presents his desire for his slave family as such a contradiction and impossibility that he can find adequate terms only by reversing the slave narrative’s conventional vertical trope of movement from South to North, from slavery to freedom” (95). Bibb’s use of this trope further readies the reader to accept the conclusion that for Bibb to gain his freedom, even though he tries heroically and repeatedly to rescue his family, he must ultimately leave them to...
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