The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary by Kimberly Juanita Brown (review)

CLA JOURNAL 523 Book Reviews Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 264 pp. ISBN: 9780822359296. Cloth: $89.95. In The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary, Kimberly Juanita Brown offers a compelling critical analysis of black women who dare to resist bodily restrictions. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s concept of “The Afterlife” encapsulated in her titular poem, Brown, in tracing slavery’s afterlife in black women’s literary and visual representations, argues that black women require “a totality of vision—the image and the afterimage—in order to grapple with all of the ways in which [they] fail to be seen with any clarity or insight” (3). According to Brown, this totality of vision provides a panoramic view of black women’s lives and experiences, rendering visible their inescapable hypervisibility even while according them subjectivity. Thus, in combating this pervasive body dismissal, the black female body functions as archive, as text that both registers and recovers from the body’s vulnerability. Employing the photographic trace to unearth black women from oblivion, Brown draws from black feminist theory, critical race theory, cultural studies, visual studies, and literary criticism to identify the interconnectedness between black women’s portrayals and slavery’s indelible memory. Operating within this duality, The Repeating Body not only examines selective works by multiple writers: Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Michelle Cliff, Honor Ford-Smith, Fred D’Aguiar and John Edgar Wideman, but also incorporates the work of visual artists Carrie Mae Weems, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Faith Ringgold, Renee Cox, Betye Saar, and Romare Bearden. Arguing that the studies of the Black Atlantic have always been invested in studies of visual culture, Brown in relocating black women from the periphery of slavery’s representation to the center of the (cinematic and discursive) frame engenders their subjectivities. Divided into four chapters, the book adds a comparative perspective to existing discourse on visual culture. In exploring the enormity of the weight of slavery, Brown skillfully captures the title of the book, The Repeating Body in her exploration of corporeal repetitions (two Denvers, three Pauls (Brothers Paul A, D, and F), and three Beloveds) in Toni Morrison’s classic novel, Beloved (1987). The chapters themselves are woven or threaded together by repetitions that offer “insight into the visual, material, and gendered iterations of slavery’s indelible memory” (13). Further, Brown establishes that photography affords repetitions and duplications that engender the reliving of memory, even as it brings needed visibility to women once rendered insignificant and accorded limited or no exposure. In recognizing the importance of gender to the process of enslavement, Chapter 1, “Black Rapture: Corporeal 524 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Afterimage and Transnational Desire,” examines slave women’s sexual agency and their roles as mothers in the slave economy. Analyzing artistic representations of Sally Hemings, Margaret Garner, and Brazil’s Chica da Silva, this chapter shows how as mothers of the children of slave masters the women are racially coded; not only is whiteness coursing through their veins/bodies but also their flesh is marked by this sexual violation that renders indecipherable the extreme violence of the system. In articulating the need for a modern reinterpretation of the past, Brown is quick to point out that these women, specifically the Corregidora women of Gayl Jones’s eponymous novel, Corregidora (1975), do not remain sexually anonymous. As Brown eloquently puts it:“Violation becomes volition and slave women emerge as the most powerful corporeal space on any plantation” (19). Furthermore, the chapter bears witness to Sally Hemings assuming agency as she positions her body “at a sexual crossroads between power and possibility” (27). Contributing to this discourse, Faith Ringgold’s Slave Rape Series authenticated slave women unsilencing the past as they reclaim their reproductive rights and sexual agency. Chapter 2,“Fragmented Figurations of the Maternal,”chronicles the rupturing of the maternal process as it brings to the forefront black maternity and the accompanying violence. Focusing on how black female citizenship is untenable, the chapter explores how black mothers are denied their maternal rights even as they are...