Sites of Slavery

Reviewed by: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet Jesse A. Goldberg (bio) Tillet, Salamishah. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. In Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, Salamishah Tillet explores the way in which post-civil rights African Americans return to “sites of slavery”—”the objects, texts, figures, places and narratives from the American past that provide tangible links between present-day Americans and American chattel slavery”—in order to produce a “democratic aesthetic” which responds to the “civic estrangement” of contemporary African American citizenship in the United States (5). Tillet defines “civic estrangement” as “the paradox post-civil rights African Americans experience as simultaneous citizens and ‘non-citizens’” (3). Her notion of a “democratic aesthetic” both emerges and departs from Michael Bennett’s Democratic Discourses in drawing on the Du Boisian “twoness” of “the pessimism of civic estrangement and the privilege of American legal citizenship” (4). Ultimately, Tillet’s argument is that “the recognition of slavery in the civic sphere [achieved by returning, as the figures in Tillet’s book do, to sites of slavery,] will expand the parameters of African American citizenship” (166). Tillet weaves through a rich archive of cultural productions from literary fiction and legal cases to photography and film. As such, the book’s interdisciplinary approach draws on scholarship in literary and cultural studies, performance studies, history, and law, and will appeal to readers from a variety of disciplines. [End Page 228] Following a teachable introduction, chapter 1, “Freedom in a Bondsmaid’s Arms,” combs the historical canon’s account of the sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Tillet begins with Barbara Chase-Riboud’s 1979 novel Sally Hemings, which imagines a romantic relationship that “does not entertain the possibility that Jefferson sexually exploited Hemings” (29). While it isn’t fully clear how the novel considers what Saidiya Hartman describes as slavery’s “condition of unredressed injury” (101)—despite Tillet’s gloss of the “ambiguity” of the relationship—it is clear that it repositions black female subjectivity as central to American founding narratives. Chapter 1 then moves to historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s books Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) as well as playwright Robbie McCauley’s 1992 drama Sally’s Rape. Tillet reads Gordon-Reed’s books both as illustrating African American civic estrangement’s roots in American slavery and as “democratizing the historical record” (38). In contrast to Chase-Riboud and Gordon-Reed, who both imagine a romantic relationship between Hemings and Jefferson, McCauley’s play directly confronts the violence of interracial sexual relationships during slavery and posits them as “the historical foundation for racial inequalities, such as civic estrangement, in the present” (42). Also unlike the previous two authors, McCauley highlights a multiplicity of African American women’s voices as opposed to privileging one particular subject. Such a multiplicity “reconstructs a lineage of critical patriotism that centers black women’s dissent” (50). The author’s second chapter, “The Milder and More Amusing Phases of Slavery,” looks at how post-civil rights African American writers and artists return to Uncle Tom’s Cabin not to reject its most problematic characters, Uncle Tom and Topsy, but to reclaim them “as post-civil rights symbols of racial resistance or reconciliation” (52). Tillet pairs Ishmael Reed’s novel Flight to Canada (1976) and Robert Alexander’s play I Ain’t Your Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1991) to examine the promise and limits of satire as they each displace Harriet Beecher Stowe’s narrative authority and “recast Tom as a figure who embodies the racial self-awareness and political pessimism of the post-civil rights era” (60). Her reading of Flight to Canada demonstrates the multi-directional reach of satire, as Reed critiques not only Stowe’s racism but also the Black Power Movement, while her reading of I Ain’t Your Uncle highlights the importance of returning to sites of slavery because this reveals an

Aesthetics · Art · Citizenship · Democracy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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