The Politics of the Body: Gender, Race, and Coalition after Twenty Years

In the end I come to the allegory of my own authorship. I began this project out of the desire to articulate connections between social action and literary expression and therefore to define my own critical work as, at least potentially, politically productive. I hoped that the structure of political alliance that linked feminists and abolitionists would provide an appropriate and empowering model for an alliance between poetry and politics. I had intended, that is, to tell a happier story about the insight and strength to be found in strategies of coalition, both political and rhetorical. Instead, as I worked, the relation between feminism and abolition increasingly seemed to be characterized by patterns of exploitation, appropriation, and displacement; similarly the potential for aesthetic erasures and absorptions marred any simply positive reading of the links between poetry and politics. This does not mean, however, that the chapters that follow merely trace a bleak story of disillusionment. Neither narratives of inevitable failure nor stories of easy cohesion or success, they are useful cautionary tales, important precisely because they articulate some of the obstacles to embracing and heeding difference.

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Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty

When I received Jennifer Tuttle's generous invitation, noting that it was now twenty years since the 1993 publication of Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body and asking me to provide a coda for this cluster of essays in Legacy, I felt honored and shocked. I hadn't noticed; it didn't seem so long ago that I had written these words. I should have known. My daughter, born as I finished Touching Liberty, is about to start her senior year of college; twenty years certainly leave their marks on the body. But as so often with anniversaries, the reckoning of the passing of time confronts us less with change than with the "ever-changing-same dynamic" that Gabrielle Foreman exposes (313). At any rate it is clear to me that I, for one, haven't gotten far beyond the balanced doubleness of voice and intention that rings through the introduction to Touching Liberty: the self-conscious insistence on critical awareness of complicity, my own and those of the writers I studied, but also a tenacious faith and hope that such literary attention might matter. Cautionary tales are tales after all, and I find that I do still believe in the power of story to produce something, maybe connections, possibly change, certainly alertness.

The rich mesh of essays that make up this issue of Legacy, with its cluster of reflections about different practices and difficulties of raced and gendered coalition, offers a timely opportunity to think about what these decades have entailed for black and white, feminist, and equal rights coalitions in the academy and beyond. In a talk at a women's music festival that Barbara Smith published in Home Girls the year I began graduate school, Bernice Johnson Reagon described "what it feels like if you're really doing coalition work. Most of the time," she said, "you feel threatened to the core and if you don't, you're not really doing no coalescing" (356). What I admire most about this issue of Legacy are those rough places where the sense of threat and discomfort breaks forth, where coalition doesn't pretend to be easy. Jen McDaneld describes "the contradictory inheritance of white suffragists[:] . . . the conflicting nexus of the racialized, classed, and gendered political identity of the white, middle-class woman," and that is also of course, with varied local particulars, the dissonant positionality from which she writes, and from which I write (259). "Well aware," Sarah Robbins and Ann Pullen admit, "that our interpretive abilities would be limited by our identities as white women who had never been to Angola, we repeatedly sought guidance" (292). The relation between feminism and abolition, between the woman suffrage and black suffrage movements, are in many ways quite literally our legacy as white and black feminist scholars of US literature. We can use this history as mirror and metaphor, but it is also necessary...