Ghostwriting Transnational Histories in Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4052015 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erica L Johnson (0000-0001-7290-1885, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 114-139 |
| Publication date | 2009-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Meridians (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1536-6936 • E-ISSN: 1547-8424 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/mer.2008.9.1.114 |
| OpenAlex | W2018615833 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
In this article I argue that Cliff's portrait of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist, entrepreneur, and civil rights activist Mary Ellen Pleasant participates in a genre of subaltern historiography that I term "ghostwriting." Cliff was inspired to write about Pleasant, who provided major funding and leadership in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859-and indeed the stone that marks her grave reads simply: "M. E. P. She was a friend of John Brown"-because her role in the raid and in U.S. abolition is absent from nearly all historical documentation. I open the essay with the fact of Pleasant's erasure by documenting her historiographical absence and then go on to explain how Cliff ghostwrites Pleasant's story through a narrative of strategic adjacencies. Cliff enmeshes Pleasant's story with those of others engaged in contrapuntal history-telling from all over the world. This transnational network of resistance extends in Cliffs novel from the Caribbean to the Pacific to Sephardic passageways; her character bears witness to events from the Spanish Inquisition to the Civil Rights era in the U.S., a temporal span that Cliff achieves through the dynamic of haunting. Through her emphasis on the power of mutual witnessing and her use of a Decameronian plot structure, Cliff acts as a ghostwriter by first telling another person's story and, more importantly, by recounting stories of largely absent and hence ghostly subjects
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Cliff · Historiography · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Silence · Sociology · Subaltern · Witness · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2018 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |