Rudrani Sarma - Unveiling Mary Seacole: Beyond “Mother Seacole” and the “Black Nightingale”
Black women are, as Hortense J. Spillers writes, configured as “a locus of confounded identities” in the dominant racial discourse. This is evident in the story of the nineteenth-century Jamaican healer Mary Seacole, which consists of two competing narratives: the publicly circulated representations of Seacole constructed by white soldiers and journalists during the Crimean War, and her own experiences aiding troops as documented in her understudied 1857 memoir, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Sarma argues that Seacole anticipates her own future erasure from the dominant historical record, offering her narrative as a corrective testimony in an attempt to dismantle the “system of secrecy” that keeps stories like her own “veiled” from public memory. By tracing the ways in which Seacole negotiates and remakes the racial, social, and professional terms of her figuration, asking: how did Black women in the nineteenth century recover—and rearticulate—their selfhood in the face of positions they were made to inhabit?
Kay Barrett focuses on The Bondwoman’s Narrative—the first novel written by a Black American woman and the only one by a fugitive slave as far as we know. The Bondwoman’s Narrative is understudied in the context of contemporary Black literary and cultural studies, especially with regard to Crafts’ use of Gothic horror. She makes the case for reading The Bondwoman’s Narrative as a prototypical Afro-Gothic novel and reframing Black American literary history with this genre-centered understanding of the novel in mind, asking: how might our understanding of contemporary Black cultural production change if we locate its Afro-Gothic roots in The Bondwoman’s Narrative?
Brandy Underwood names California Cooper’s Family (1991) as a lesser-known novel that is occasionally mentioned within larger conversations about contemporary narratives of enslavement. Nevertheless, Cooper’s novel should receive more attention because it fits well within current dialogues about eco-narratives in Black-authored literature. She places Cooper’s Family in conversation with other narratives about Black women and their interaction with the natural world, arguing that these works are eco-narratives about Black women’s desires to create order within inherited spaces through advocating for animals and planting gardens while empowering Black women to become cultivators of new Black futures.
Arselyne Chery - Postcolonial Intimacies: Haunting the Haitian Female Body in Roxane Gay’s “Sweet on the Tongue” and “In a Manner of Water or Light”
While Haitian-American writer Roxane Gay has been widely acclaimed for her cultural criticism and contemporary feminist thought, not enough attention and study has been paid to her creative work, most especially her 2018 short story collection, Ayiti. Underwood argues that the text centers the experiences of Haitian women, exploring, for instance, their sexual entanglements with American soldiers, which symbolizes the violent state of U.S.-Haiti relations; their strivings toward a better life in the U.S; and their desires to love freely, regardless of societal consequences. Ultimately she states that Gay utilizes sugar and blood, respectively, to illustrate the hauntings of Haiti’s colonial past on the postslavery Haitian female body.
Each speaker will have 12-15 minutes to present diverse perspectives across identities and time, with 15 minutes left for discussion.