Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, and: "The Regulations of Robbers": Legal Fictions of Slavery and Resistance (review)

The juxtaposition of two new books on African American women by literary scholars reveals why interdisciplinarity has soared as a methodology in recent academic scholarship. Both Trudier Harris and Christina Accomando examine representations of black women from the slave era to the present and the harmful legacy of these images in black women's sociopolitical situations. The sophisticated analyses of diverse texts in Accomando's "The Regulations of Robbers" would be felicitous but for the gravity of the subject—chattel slavery—whereas the single-minded focus of Harris's Saints, Sinners, Saviors leaves its provocative premise unfulfilled. Harris meditates on African American writers' depictions of the figure of the strong black woman, demonstrating that from Lorraine Hansberry forward, twentieth-century canonical African American literature's commitment to transforming the Chloes and Dilseys depicted by whites has ironically and devastatingly reinscribed the myth of black matriarchy. Accomando, in contrast, attends to figures of enslaved black womanhood in her broader study of multivalence and intertextuality in narratives of U.S. slavery and resistance. Harris focuses exclusively on African American literature and, after a compelling foreword, limits her methodology to close reading—and is too often limited by it. In contrast, Accomando examines a variety of texts, including literary works by both black and white authors, employing an interdisciplinary methodology that permits the investigation of poetry, novels, popular films, speeches, legislation and laws (bona fide and faux), slave narratives and other autobiographies, and personal essays from four centuries of American public discourses. Examining single events from multiple perspectives, Accomando argues successfully that master narratives neglect or obfuscate countertexts to enable their own dominance.

Harris's thesis is bold: by overcompensating for nineteenth-century representations of black women as physically oversized yet fundamentally deficient, African Americans unwittingly collaborate with racist distortions of black womanhood. Harris occasionally references popular-culture icons from film and television, devoting chapters to Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler, Pearl Cleage, J. California Cooper, Ernest Gaines, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Dorothy West. Thus, she unflinchingly risks alienating black readers who admire these mid-to-late-twentieth-century writers and are invested in conventional images of black women's strength. While black men are envied for mythical size, Harris dares to assert, a similar adulation of strong black women in popular media perpetuates the harmful stereotype of the Mammy, and worse, leads African American women to risk poor health in the pursuit or maintenance of obesity. Furthermore, Harris explains how racism reduces representations of mature black womanhood to a false choice between a mythic asexual, or masculinized, servility and an immoral or feeble pathology. Saints, Sinners, Saviors exposes a paradoxical legacy of slavery akin to the paradox embodied by the figure Harris examines. As the strong black woman at once exhibits venerable fortitude in the face of racism's grossest violations but badgers and staggers under the weight she throws around, so contemporary black authors risk an overburdened exaltation of strong black women characters that renders them not admirable but both debilitating and debilitated.

Accomando, too, launches an intrepid thesis: we must explore a variety of texts and genres if we are to comprehend fully African Americans' rebellion against slavery. Drawing on critical race, feminist, and literary theories to examine documents of slavery and slaves' resistance, Accomando uncovers the fallacies that buttress and sustain master narratives. Without full awareness of the multiple utterances that, once heeded, can destabilize the apparent univocality of dominant and domineering voices, readers place faith in the capacity of facts to express inexorable truths. Accomando exposes many illusions about slavery, revealing facts for what they often are: rhetorical constructions of the arbitrary...