Resistance Reimagined: Black Women's Critical Thought as Survival by Regis M. Fox (review)

Regis M. Fox begins her prologue to this work by sharing an "instructional encounter" that exemplifies the myopic view of Black women writers within the context of resistance—an encounter that demonstrates the cultural "reticence to engage Black knowledge production in its myriad forms" (xiii, xviii). This rigorously researched intellectual history posits nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black women's critiques of liberalism as a "vital reservoir of African-American resistance" (8). For Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckley, Anna Julia Cooper, Sherley Anne Williams, and their twenty-first-century #SayHerName-sakes, Fox's reimagining of resistance represents a "becoming together" of Black feminist knowledge, producing power that is long overdue (9). If, indeed, all the women are white, all the men are Black, and some of us are still brave, Resistance Reimagined reminds us that Black women have always been "woke." Fox recovers nineteenth-century Black women as "subtle, savvy, [and] theoretically oriented" rather than "immediately and empirically evident" (11). She methodologically engages in an African Americanist literary tradition that extends through her readings of women's words as imaginative links to progressive resistance rather than as a passive recitation of regressive heteronormative narratives. She reads her subjects as providing pathways to Black resistance by redefining civility, rhetorically manipulating good manners (105), reconstructing white feminism (100), engaging in Enlightenment discourses, and disrupting political order (136, 142).

Arguing that nineteenth-century Black women are all too readily "viewed as immediately and empirically evident, rather than as subtle, savvy, or theoretically oriented" (11), Fox's book seems methodologically aligned with Kristin Waters's work on Black women's intellectual traditions, because it engages with scholarship that focuses on the theoretical rather than the biological or sociological. Fox recovers Black women's fiction and nonfiction prose to conceptualize the intellectual as political; indeed, the very title of this book signifies on a cerebral comprehension of resistance. Her analysis articulates the difference between "belonging together," which indicates "a finite literary canon or stable tradition," and "becoming together," which refers to "a transitory association that produces cognizance of the intersectional and circumscribing effects of the liberal mandate" (9). For example, Fox's reading of Wilson's Our Nig provides a profound and unapologetic framing of nineteenth-century Black feminist knowledge production: Wilson's disruption of the "disorderly girl" figure (23), Fox argues, "undermine[s] narratives of liberalism as fundamentally emancipatory" (22). This disruption exposes "postures of abettal" (29), challenges the "violent affects of liberal compassion" (26), "engag[es] black anger on its own terms" as change agent then and now (46), and "reinforces contrariness" as a disruption of hegemonic discourse through the "politicized picaninny figure of Frado" (47).

Fox's precise readings of Keckley's formerly "undertheorized" challenges to "liberal ideologies of selfhood" are similarly demonstrative of the power of "becoming together" (55). But the chapter on Cooper most fully demonstrates the power and originality of this book. Fox's exegetical dissection of "Woman versus the Indian" and "Has America a Race Problem: If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?" challenges Cooper's reputed elitism and support of heteronormative patriarchal values. Not only does Fox unpack how "Cooper confronts the limits of a Lockean constitutional legacy"; she also provides a critique of domestic terrorism in the "state-sanctioned dissimulation of the turn of the century" (92). Consequently, Fox directly connects Cooperian thought to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, thereby affirming the prominence of Black women's contributions along the continuum of intellectual activism. The "theory of harmony" and "contradiction of the liberal prescription and productive dissonance as central to the democratic project" (94) are, to be sure, important interventions that Fox provides as evidence of the "ongoing relevance of Cooper's interventions" (94).

What signals Fox's work as innovative is her attention to Cooper's use of music in the chapter "Coming to Voice," which offers a close reading of Cooper's musical...