Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

Perverse Modernities

by Christina Sharpe

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond , as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru —about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant , Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Theory, Race, Philosophy, Sociology, Art History

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Christina Sharpe is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke 2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke 2016) and Ordinary Notes (Knopf/FSG/Daunt 2023).

Reviews

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christina Sharpe is so so so brilliant.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The root of Sharpe’s theories in In the Wake can be found in this book. While In The Wake is stylistically superior, the ideas Sharpe relays regarding what she calls “monstrous intimacies” provides an intriguing insight into the ramifications of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Post-Slavery narratives and art.

[Zach Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christina Sharpe defines monstrous intimacies as ‘a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated and transmitted, that are breathed in the air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous’. Using fiction (Corregidora, Maru), non-fiction (Frederick Douglass and Essie-Mae Washington), film (The Attendant), and art (Kara Walker), she masterfully lays out her thesis of the construction of post-slavery subjectivities across the African diaspora. It was at times difficult to follow the thrust of her arguments, but the analysis was so detailed and the imagery so clear - I now have a much better understanding of the legacy of slavery and the condition of what she calls "relative freedom within unfreedom."

I plan to read "In the Wake" soon, which I imagine will clarify and expand on these theories and make even more clear my understanding of her work.