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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