Sunday, October 4, 2015

Racial Mimicry and Chandler's Mental Metempsychosis

            Brown’s chapter on the (mis)appropriated representation of the black body into various forms of performative entertainment strikes me as effectively poignant throughout. In her analysis, the author highlights the undercurrent of power exerted in the form of racial mimicry, and the position white women held within the hegemonic hierarchy contingent on skin color. She even examines how the subtle perpetuation of the black body as commodity permeated the anti-slavery cause among white female abolitionists, notably Elizabeth Chandler.
            I found Chandler’s appeal to women to participate in her conception of “Mental Metempsychosis” to be quite disturbing. Brown defines this process, in which “a woman was to invite the suffering soul of the (dead) slave woman, and her painful physical memory, to pass into her own body.” I believe that Brown rightfully criticizes the intent of this practice as remarkably self-serving, even “pornographic in its urge.” She emphasizes that “the use of the idea of black suffering, an icon for all types of suffering, does not imply active alliance with black people or their continued struggles for space and resources.”
            I would place additional emphasis on her use of the word “icon” from this quote, for its allusion to the normalized Christian tradition in which the religiously devout would self-prostrate while envisioning the humiliation, torture, and crucifixion of Christ. According to Brown, the practice of “mental metempsychosis” was “meant to activate and intensify her Christian sensitivities, to make her feel as she felt in her faith the ecstasy of Christ’s suffering, a shiver through her body as she ate his flesh and drank his blood.” In this context, the black body is exploited similarly to that of a medieval relic, preferred dead to alive, in order to enhance the white woman’s spiritual connection with her god seems extremely reprehensible. (71-3)

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