Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives by Amy K. King (review)

Amy K. King's Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives is a deeply researched, historically contextualized, and effectively argued work that takes seriously women's violence in a range of texts—fictional, visual, and audiovisual. King's interdisciplinary effort extends the work of several scholars to provide a rich, intersectional analysis of creative texts from the Caribbean and the United States that span the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. For her, the grotesque "focus[es] on bodily performances of violence and how these performances mirror a corrupt sense of self formation in the legacies of slavery" (p. 12). In using the grotesque as a mode, King hopes "to uncover what was frequently present, yet somehow ignored . . . what we frequently take for granted in terms of identity and representation" (p. 12). She contends that the grotesque is made legible primarily through touch, and she interrogates how the absence and presence of physical touch creates and undermines the forced intimacies that are entrenched in plantation logics. This strategy allows King to study issues of power, violence, and complicity among women. By exploring the legacies of plantation slavery in this way, King scrutinizes active participation and investment in the patriarchal order, particularly by white women who use a system of grotesque violence in reality and fiction. Additionally, she indicates how the uncritical repetition of such grotesque violence impacts contemporary perceptions particularly as it relates to the limitations of interracial "sisterhood."

King's work uses a variety of tropes that I could not always keep track of, including jealousy, social prestige, rivalries that threaten social stability, and talking back to probe what patterns of women's violence reveal in wide-ranging and fruitful contexts in work by United States and Caribbean cultural creators. Each chapter explores multiple historical periods, genres, and geographies to interrogate these patterns of complicity. For instance, using the trope of jealousy, she discusses the iconography of plantation logics and desires in nineteenth century woodcuts and book covers of plantation pulp fiction. Chapter two analyzes how scripts of sadism are rendered by enslaved and enslaver alike in texts as diverse as Gayl Jones's poem "The Machete Woman" (1983), Madison Smartt Bell's All Souls' Rising (1995), and the Dutch film Hoe Duur Was de Suiker (2013; The Price of Sugar) by Jean Van de Velde. In chapter five, King uses the horror genre to interrogate rivalries that threaten social stability using Barbara Creed's conception of "the monstrous-feminine" (p. 143). King extends Creed's ideas to discuss how monstrous women destabilize society but are disciplined, reaffirming the social order (p. 143). To do this, she examines texts such as the anthology television show American Horror Story (2011) and the novels Unburnable (2006) by Marie-Elena John and Memory Mambo (1996) by Achy Obejas.

One of the most interesting explorations is King's argument, in chapter three, about the continuum of sexual violence in the 2016 version of Roots, Valerie Martin's novel Property (2003), and several short stories from Ann Allen Shockley's The Black and White of It (1980) (p. 76). In this chapter, King considers coercion, desire, power, and the ways in which false notions of intimacy impact women's sexual experiences—particularly forced and violent ones. The chapter forecasts her analysis of sexual violence in lesbian relationships that appears in the chapter on horror, specifically her reading of Obejas's story. King's work may also have benefitted from engagment with recent novels, including John R. Gordon's Drapetomania: Or, the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, Lovers (2018), Robert Jones Jr.'s The Prophets (2021), and Nathan Harris's The Sweetness of Water (2021), and short stories like Kei Miller's "The Business of Tea" (2014), as they also explore same gender desire in plantation settings. Nonetheless, the aforementioned chapters confront these intimate and challenging topics to...