Papers by Teresa Zackodnik
American Studies, Jun 1, 2005
... As Suren Lalvani argues, we are mistaken to see photography as straightforwardly democratizin... more ... As Suren Lalvani argues, we are mistaken to see photography as straightforwardly democratizing portraiture by extending it beyond the purview of the aristocracy. Rather, photography "ushered" the previously excluded "into a representational system [that] . . . ...
Victorian Review, 2001
We may exhibit and look at artefacts, read lists of cargo, ship tonnages, the entries in punishme... more We may exhibit and look at artefacts, read lists of cargo, ship tonnages, the entries in punishment books, display caricatures, or paintings or models of slave ships, or the memorabilia of slave torture. There is abolition propaganda focused on anonymous slave sufferers, or on white personalities who spearheaded the abolition movements. There are grand narratives on large academic canvases, and there are heroic sculptures and friezes.
University Press of Mississippi eBooks, Mar 9, 2010
Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 13, 2021
MELUS;, 1997
In her (auto)biographical narrative China Men,(1) Maxine Hong Kingston searches for and reconstru... more In her (auto)biographical narrative China Men,(1) Maxine Hong Kingston searches for and reconstructs the history of her (fore)fathers through a complex narrative that accesses memory, "talk-story," imagination, historical "facts" and documents, photographs, Chinese legends and folklore, and newspaper articles. Hong Kingston's narrative arrives at a knowledge of her (fore)fathers' identities and histories, as well as her own, via these sources, and in so doing equalizes the truth value of memory, "factual" accounts, imagination, and documented "proof." Her treatment of photographs in China Men is not confined to a reconstruction of her male ancestors' past and history, but also plays a prominent role in the narrative of her immediate family's more recent past. Moreover, Hong Kingston's own apparent view of the photograph is a diverse and often seemingly contradictory one: as a child she tells of innocently believing that a photograph may lie; yet, as an adult she seems to hold the equally naive belief that the photograph is capable of telling the truth.(2) Hong Kingston also interrogates the multiple functions of the photograph in both American culture, and within her own family. In her narrative, photographs are documents of self-evident proof and silent communications from the past which speak only when she names them. In addition, Hong Kingston examines the status of the photograph as document, a document that can attest to a personal and communal history of Chinese American presence, as well as contribute to an erasure of that presence in America. Finally, photographs in China Men are both failed attempts to capture an event or person(s) as unchanged and present ("as they are"), and tools for fabricating a successful "American" to send home to loved ones in China. Far from undermining the history she discovers and creates, Hong Kingston's plural and contradictory treatment of the photograph parallels the multiple and self-contradicting versions of the histories she presents, exposing and challenging dominant American history as a monologue that has silenced and erased the histories of Chinese Americans. Traditionally, the photograph has been seen in Western culture as a re-presentation of nature, an unmediated transcription of reality onto film.(3) This notion of photography as veracity endows the photograph with the capacity to prove, to either present factual evidence or stand as a fact itself. And this belief in the photograph as proof extends beyond Roland Barthes' assertion in Camera Lucida that "in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there" (76), to an unquestioned acceptance that the photograph presents us with a faithful reproduction of what "has been there." The very act of photography as interpretive (the photographer chooses what to photograph, the camera is controlled), and necessarily selective (the photograph is limited by the camera's field of vision--the frame), is denied in favor of the photograph's construction as presence, truth, fact, and proof. The photograph has gained the status of document in our culture, both as a verifiable document of "reality," and also as the product of a medium ostensibly able to document the monologic narrative of conventional Western history. However, the "innocence" of the photograph as a simple metonymy has not gone unquestioned, and all philosophies or reflections on photography argue that the photograph is a means of communication, rather than a piece of factual evidence. Moreover, what the photograph communicates arises only from the meaning we ascribe to it; meaning does not inhere in the photograph itself. The photograph, then, can only verify the meaning we simultaneously invest in, and extract from, it. Rather than presenting an evidential and singular Truth, the photograph's silence invites the speculation of multiple meanings, characterizing it, Susan Sontag states, as "a polylogue" (173).(4) Because its silence can be invested with more than one possible meaning, the photograph may also be enlisted by the dominant culture in the service of obtaining and maintaining power. …
University of British Columbia Press eBooks, 2011
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2021
What in contemporary parlance we would call African American feminisms has been a politics and ac... more What in contemporary parlance we would call African American feminisms has been a politics and activism communal in its orientation, addressing the rights and material conditions of women, men, and children since the first Dutch slaver brought captive Africans to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Although Black women would not have used the terms “feminist” or “feminism,” which did not enter into use until what is recognized now as the first wave of feminism, scholars have been using those terms for the past two decades to refer to Black women’s activism in the United States stretching at least as far back as the 1830s with the oratory and publications of Maria Stewart and the work of African American women in abolition and church reform. Alongside and in many ways enabled by crucial forms of resistance to slavery, Black women developed forms of feminist activism and a political culture that advanced claims for freedom and rights in a number of arenas. Yet our historical knowledge of 19t...
Ariel a Review of International English Literature, Jul 1, 1999
Nineteenth Century Prose, Mar 22, 2002
Focusing on the lecture tours of African American abolitionists Ellen Craft (1851) and Sarah Park... more Focusing on the lecture tours of African American abolitionists Ellen Craft (1851) and Sarah Parker Remond (1859), this paper argues their appearances and appeals on the platform capitalized on their English audiences' fascination with the "tragic mulatta" figure and familiarity with the "woman as slave" trope. Craft's "whiteness" clearly affected her audiences, who saw her as a living exhibit of the lowest to which American slavery would sink. Remond's lectures, in turn, invoked the figure of the "whitened" slave Ellen Craft embodied in order to stress slavery's horrors and facilitate an empathic appeal. Remond carefully managed that empathy by moving between embodied and rational appeals, and by standing as a figure her audiences could imagine would be enslaved in America despite being free-born. ********** Before Ellen Craft arrived in Liverpool in early December of 1850, she had been circulating in American anti-slavery publications as what we might call slavery's zero limit and a "living proof" of its horrors and extremes. Indeed, Samuel May, Jr. brought her to the attention of Bristol Garrisonian John Estlin in just such a fashion, stressing her "whitened" features in a letter dated 2 February 1849: E.C. [...] has no trace of African blood discernible in her features [...] but the whole is that of a southern-born white woman. To think of such a woman being held as a piece of property [...] (while it is in reality no worse or wickeder than when done to the blackest woman that ever was) does yet stir a community brought up in prejudice vs. color a thousand times more deeply than could be effected in different circumstances. She was a living proof that Slavery [...] is as ready to enslave the whitest and the fairest as any other provided only the pretext be afforded. (1) Ellen and her husband William effected a "daring escape" from Macon, Georgia in December 1848. Ellen, the daughter of her master Major James Smith and his house-slave Maria, was light-skinned enough to pass for white. With William posing as her slave, Ellen disguised herself as a rheumatic Southern gentleman en route to Philadelphia for treatment; travelling by rail car and steamer, the Crafts arrived in Philadelphia four days later. The Crafts lived in Boston until the Fugitive Slave Law passed in September 1850 forced them to leave the United States in early November for England, where they lived for nineteen years. Not only were the Crafts well known in the United States where their escape was recounted in both abolitionist and pro-slavery papers, but their "daring escape ... [was] widely reported in British newspapers." (2) Soon after their arrival in Liverpool, the Crafts accompanied William Wells Brown on a lecture tour of the north and west of England as well as Scotland from January through May of 1851, appearing at a score of anti-slavery meetings. (3) By 1854, the Crafts would be hailed as having made a "profound and abiding impression" (4) on their audiences who were drawn by the promise of seeing Ellen Craft, "the 'White Slave." (5) Ellen's "whiteness" and her status as living proof of the depths to which American slavery would sink created both the attention she labored under and the complex circuit of empathy and identification that her fellow African-American abolitionist, Sarah Parker Remond, would need to carefully negotiate. On 12 January 1859, free-born Remond arrived in Liverpool to begin a lecture tour of Britain that came to be described as grueling and highly influential. (6) She appeared in cities and towns through England, Scotland, and Ireland between January 1859 and January 1861. (7) During this period, Remond delivered several speeches in which she invoked the figures of the female slave and the tragic mulatta, figures that Ellen Craft effectively embodied for her audiences. The 1850s were active years for British women in the antislavery cause and years in which women's rights agitation developed. …
Feminist Studies, Mar 1, 2004
At the 1867 American Equal Rights Association (AERA) convention Sojourner Truth drew her audience... more At the 1867 American Equal Rights Association (AERA) convention Sojourner Truth drew her audience's attention to a subject they had begun to ignore-the rights and material conditions of former slaves, including "colored women." During a career that spanned three decades, Truth spoke at woman's rights and antislavery meetings, boldly supporting abolition, universal suffrage, and the rights of freed people, workingclass African Americans, and black women. Truth, although singular in style, was like other early black feminists who maintained multiple political associations and negotiated the conflicting demands of competing and intersecting publics. They often produced double-voiced addresses that demanded consideration of their location and the ways in which they were represented.' Such considerations, however, cannot be limited to how early black feminists circulated in their own moment, but also must take into account how they have circulated in the histories of woman's rights and feminism we have inherited and continue to perpetuate. The African American women who have acquired representative status, "embodying" early black feminism in our historical memory, require particular attention. Many recognize a single name, Sojourner Truth, as the black feminist of the nineteenth century. Remaining in our memories and imaginations for longer than any of her contemporaries, Truth has become a highly transportable symbol of black feminist "difference" and of the intersection of race and gender.
American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 2015
Recent assessments of periodical studies after the digital turn have called for attention to meth... more Recent assessments of periodical studies after the digital turn have called for attention to methodology in ways that imply the field is itself in need of remediation through the "conceptual language of information technology," such as "thinking of periodicals as systems or networks," 1 in order to arrive at an "elusive" common methodology. 2 I would suggest that these calls risk moving past the field's incomplete grappling with the media's historical past, a past I will argue is necessarily carried with it in remediations that articulate the "new." I am interested in the mutually dependent relation between slavery and the periodical and its consequences, not only for how we understand the emergence of American and African American periodicals, particularly, but also for futureoriented thinking in the field of periodical studies, generally. Robert Desrochers has argued that the advent of "print capitalism" or the "commercial press" and slavery in the Atlantic world were inextricable, 3 yet as David Waldstreicher observes, "slave advertisements" are not studied "themselves as a print genre . . . [and] an essential part of the newspaper they . . . subsidize [d]," but rather for their content as historical record. 4 Human unfreedom was fundamental to this media form, yet this goes unacknowledged in periodical studies, even as many of us think carefully about the ways in which the periodical can be used to articulate, shape, and mobilize liberatory politics in varied locations and time periods. This article will first trace the slave ad's 5 textual and visual logics financially underwriting the American periodical, before turning to an African American remediation of those racializing commodity logics. Such a "media ecology" is useful for considering illustration in black periodicals, where the complexities of representing black subjectivities continued to be bound up with those of representing the black body well after slavery ended. 6 Pauline Hopkins's work at the Colored American Magazine provides us with a case study
Modernism/modernity, 2012
American Studies, 2005
... As Suren Lalvani argues, we are mistaken to see photography as straightforwardly democratizin... more ... As Suren Lalvani argues, we are mistaken to see photography as straightforwardly democratizing portraiture by extending it beyond the purview of the aristocracy. Rather, photography "ushered" the previously excluded "into a representational system [that] . . . ...
Uploads
Papers by Teresa Zackodnik
The first three chapters trace the varied speaking styles and appeals of black women in the church, abolition, and women’s rights, highlighting audience and location as mediating factors in the public address and politics of figures such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Amanda Berry Smith, Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker Remond and Sojourner Truth. The next chapter focuses on Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching tours as working within “New Abolition” and influenced by black feminists before her. The final chapter examines feminist black nationalism as it developed in the periodical press by considering Maria Stewart’s social and feminist gospel; Mary Shadd Cary’s linking of abolition, emigration, and woman suffrage; and late-nineteenth-century black feminist journalism addressing black women’s migration and labor. Early black feminists working in reforms such as abolition and women’s rights opened new public arenas, such as the press, to the voices of black women. The book concludes by focusing on the 1891 National Council of Women, Frances Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper, which together mark a generational shift in black feminism, and by exploring the possibilities of taking black feminism public through forging coalitions among women of color.
Press, Platform, Pulpit goes far in deepening our understanding of early black feminism, its position in reform, and the varied publics it created for its politics. It not only moves historically from black feminist work in the church early in the nineteenth century to black feminism in the press at its close, but also explores the connections between black feminist politics across the century and specific reforms.
African American Feminisms brings together writings that document distinctly African American feminist organizing from as early as the late 1820s through female benevolent and literary societies, as well as writings that document African American feminist participation in black political concerns such as emigration and colonization, discrimination in public transportation, and anti-lynching. African American women also negotiated competing demands within interracial reform movements like abolition, woman's rights, temperance and suffrage, as well as within organizations like the black church, making documents that offer insight into those unique demands key to understanding black feminist arguments and rhetoric. Pursuing a varied feminist rhetoric that ranged from advocating domestic and maternal feminism to defending black womanhood, African American feminists focused on larger social reforms as well as agitating for material changes in the lives of African American women and girls. African American feminists were also keenly attuned to opening useful venues to black feminist voices, from the pulpit to the press, and urged the women that followed them to continue this work.
This collection, which includes a variety of genres from the spiritual autobiography to the platform speech and the pamphlet, goes beyond the more common focus on the "greats" of black feminism to include lesser known black feminists and some unidentified women who contributed to black feminist debate on a variety of topics. African American Feminisms, edited and with an introduction by Teresa Zackodnik, is destined to be welcomed by those interested in women's studies, feminism, and African American history as an invaluable reference resource.