Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis

Author:Kristen Lillvis
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

AFROFUTURIST TEMPO-RALITY IN GAYL JONES’S CORREGIDORA

In her 1975 novel, Corregidora, a text that spans from the late 1940s to the late 1960s but is peppered with stark descriptions of the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse a family of women suffered during slavery, Jones presents music as a tool through which her protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, initially reproduces but eventually alters her family’s moribund history. Ursa sings the blues, a genre that, like Afrofuturist and jazz music, engages simultaneously with historical and futurist tropes. The blues allows Ursa to bring the histories of her enslaved ancestors into being through song and also create a new vision for the future that shapes her understanding of her past and present experiences. This two-part project results in inconclusive readings about Ursa’s power at the conclusion of the novel: we do not know if Ursa repeats the past and reunites with her abusive ex-husband, though we are made aware that she refuses to reproduce one history and become, like her great-grandmother before her, a perpetrator of violence against the man who wronged her. However, the place of possibility in which Jones leaves her characters and readers emphasizes the power that can be drawn—potentially, at least—from a liminal subjectivity. Recognizing Ursa’s subjectivity as oriented toward the past, present, and future means that we cannot situate her—or her foremothers in the novel or black women and men from other works of historical fiction—as a fixture in or bearer of an unchanging history. Instead, we must acknowledge that posthuman liminality offers a constantly renewing source of agency for Ursa, her family, and her community.

Liminality becomes important early in the novel Corregidora. Ursa finds herself both estranged from and consumed by her family history in the present. While her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother occupy her thoughts, Ursa struggles with her lack of a physical (specifically, uterine) connection to the women in her family. Following a domestic dispute with her first husband, Mutt, Ursa suffers a miscarriage and undergoes an emergency hysterectomy (Corregidora 15). Because of her inability to biologically continue her family line following the procedure, Ursa feels alienated from her foremothers, who stress the importance of keeping their history alive by producing children who will carry the stories of their ancestors’ suffering into the future.

While Ursa possesses a liminal subjectivity, given her position both inside and outside the family line, her foremothers’ narrative, passed on through the maternal body, reflects an engagement with a single, static history. Specifically, the family narrative relies on history to authenticate those experiences that have received no legal and insufficient cultural validation. Since the age of five, Ursa has heard stories from her foremothers about the necessity of communicating through the female body the horrors endured at the hands of the “Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger” Simon Corregidora (Corregidora 8–9). Corregidora raped and impregnated Ursa’s great-grandmother and grandmother (his own child), whom he owned as slaves. Because no written evidence of this abuse exists, Ursa’s fore-mothers ask each female member of the family to

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