Emancipation’s Daughters

Reviewed by: Emancipation’s Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body by Riché Richardson Carol E. Henderson Riché Richardson. Emancipation’s Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body. Durham: Duke UP, 2021. 329 pp. $27.95. At a time when the United States continues to wrestle with matters of race and identity, human and social justice, belonging and inclusion, citizenship and privilege, Emancipation’s Daughters enters the conversation to interrogate these very ideals. At the heart of author Riché Richardson’s examination of country, state, and nation is the question of citizenship and the role that “black women have played historically in shaping notions of national selfhood within a diverse citizenry.” To join this discussion, we must acknowledge that we are indeed a diverse citizenry. This recognition portends what truths are self-evident—that all of us are created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among these being life, freedom, and the right to pursue a life that is of our design. That this diversity is illegible for some and misrepresented for others in the founding documents, traditions, narratives, and histories of our nation provides fertile ground on which Richardson commences this critical journey of national womanhood and race. Richardson rightfully underscores the marginalization of “founding mothers” within the nation’s storied history, as this history is traditionally scripted white and male. Additionally, when there is a “founding mother” thread woven into a story, those legendary exploits cast white women, such as American upholsterer Betsy Ross and former first lady Dolley Todd Madison as historical leads. Richardson’s work extends this critical lens, creating counternarratives that build on the scholarly efforts of Lauren Berlant, Nicole Fleetwood, E. Patrick Johnson, and others who craft an Other nationhood and a more inclusive body [End Page 130] politic. Recurrent scripts of womanhood, specifically Black womanhood, foreground a more nuanced conversation about Black female subjectivity and iconicity beyond slavery and urban scarcity, beyond the static formations of the mammy figure, the welfare queen, and the angry Black woman. In mediating these images, the Black maternal figure makes legible alternative and reimagined texts that trouble these conventions as it simultaneously lays bare the precarious hypervisibility of the Black feminine body within the strictures of these public spaces. Highlighting Fleetwood’s work, Richardson stresses the importance of public images to our understanding of race in the United States, particularly the ways Black bodies “narrate nation” visually, powerfully, acutely. She is also careful to note that the ideal of national citizenry excluded all women from its definition, as white elite males were “positioned as the superior and legitimate subjects.” This fashioning is acutely and starkly evident in the system of chattel bondage where Black bodies were racially positioned as commerce—bought, sold, bartered, and violently dehumanized in public spaces. In fashioning the mores of a nation along the contours of the Black body, a racialized currency is normalized in the national imaginary that prefigures the Black female body as abject and scripts their progeny as illegitimate. When one considers how laws and de jure societal norms moved the boundaries of the Southern plantation from the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Delaware, and other states to Northern and Midwestern regions through legal provisions like the Fugitive Slave Act, conventional approaches to Southern studies must be critically reimagined. For Richardson, this means revisiting Philip Curtin’s critical work on the “plantation complex,” envisaging his term as denoting both a fixed location and a methodological framework which moves beyond the borders of the South and serves as a “primary site within modernity for containing, disciplining, reproducing, abusing, and annihilating the black body.” Richardson further extends these critical analyses of the South to incorporate the interdisciplinary sweep of the Southern Hemisphere, including Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia, to circumscribe the larger historical influence these territories have exerted in fashioning the legible cultures, traditions, and perspectives of an “Africana South” (Richardson’s term) that recognizes and affirms the “diasporic cultural flows that constitute black southern identities.” That is why Richardson’s book title is so telling. Emancipation’s Daughters points to this legacy, deploying interventions within cultural, political, literary, and social studies that ask

Citizenship · Emancipation · Femininity · National identity · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · White supremacy · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law