Sorting Shadows: sound, silence, and gender in the aftermath of Jamaican Slavery Público
Russell, Channelle (Spring 2022)
Abstract
“Sorting Shadows” is an aural exploration into the realities of survival, resistance, and violence within textual representations of Afro-Jamaican women from the Pre-Emancipation to the Pre-Independence periods. Considering sensory constructions of Jamaica, “Sorting Shadows” explores Black women’s voices, the Jamaican landscape, and gender to construct an argument surrounding affect, fugitivity, and survival. Through a cross-temporal exploration of Afro-Jamaican women’s soundings and silences, this project considers documents such as abolitionist pamphlets and a coming-of-age novel by Michelle Cliff towards a complex exploration of Afro-Jamaican womanhood and survival. Exploring sound and silence, this project is guided by generative questions, such as: how do scholars write about terror and sound? What are the spatial, bodily facets of the history of slavery? What, of womanhood, can be gleaned by exploring sound and silence? This project expands on the conjecture that “sound from enslaved bodies might be another way of marking enslaved historicity through the violence they endured,” arguing that focusing on the body and its acts reveals a new, embodied, and fleshed arena in Atlantic slavery studies. In a discipline that places so much burden onto the voiceless, reading for aurality lends a voice—but seldom words—to the enslaved in the face of brutal violence. This voice is very rarely their own, filtered through the perspective that confines her to the page. Considering an “enslaved women’s “dreadful cries” as another genre of humanity” and genesis for deeper understanding unlocks a sensory experience that deepens slavery and gender studies (8). “How does one write a history of the impossible?” Trouillot probes in his book Silencing the Past (73). This project attempts to answer, probing instances of pain, fugitivity, and silence: how is sonic resistance present or represented in scenes of subjected motherhood?
Table of Contents
Introduction: Seeking the Self………….………………………………………………….…….1
Chapter One: Crying Out……………………………………………………..…………..…….11
Chapter Two: “This Woman’s Work”…………………………………………………..………31
Conclusion: Make-Believe……………………………….……………………………………..51
Bibliography.………………………………………………….……...................................53
About this Honors Thesis
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