JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction"[On the slaveships, some Igbos] wished to die on the idea that they should then get back to their own country. The captain in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient viz. to cut off the heads of those who died intimating to them that if determined to go, they must return without heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness the operation. One of them by violent exertion got loose and flying to the place where the nettings had been unloosed in order to empty the tubs, he darted overboard. The ship brought to, a man was placed in the main chains to catch him which he perceiving, made signs which words cannot express expressive of his happiness in escaping. He then went down and was seen no more." (qtd. in Cowley and Mannix 108) n this recollection of a 1788 slaveship, Dr. Ecroide Claxton admits the inadequacy of language to convey the escaping man's happiness: He "made signs which words cannot express." Suicide often provokes the rhetorical impasse here encountered; the sign is clear but incommunicable. Claxton cannot translate the joy of the man who, "flying to the place" of escape, found the way out of the horror and defied the captain's command that the Africans remain onboard. During the Middle Passage, some people fought back physically; others survived in more covert ways; still others jumped overboard. On several ships, "there was an epidemic of suicide at the last minute" (Cowley and Mannix 111).1 Although this leap to freedom, and death, haunts African American literature (Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, James Baldwin's Another Country, Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Dawn Turner Trice's Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven, Shay Youngblood's Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery), the act of suicide often goes unnamed. And the flying potential of Africans and African Americans as an imagistic and thematic trope has generated far more critical discussion than its metonymic twin, suicide.2 Despite the number of self-inflicted deaths in Toni Morrison's novels and the fact that she wrote her master's thesis on alienation and suicide in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, there has been little critical attention given to the repetition of selfdestruction in her own work.3 In Beloved (1988), a woman jumps overboard during the Middle Passage; in Jazz (1992), Violet's mother, Rose Dear, climbs into a well, drowning herself in me disappear' " [59]). These bodies do not tell a history of capitulation to dominant powers bu...
Langston Hughes’s verse play Scottsboro, Limited first appeared in the November 1931 issue of New Masses. Hughes takes advantage of agit-prop’s licence to move away from the strictly factual to present a vision of social transformation. Drawing from Antonio Negri’s writing, I discuss the unclear temporal location of the first scene relative to the rest of the action, especially the final act of liberation. Critics have assumed a causal connection between the emergence of communist workers in the audience and the freedom of the Scottsboro figures, but it is the defiance of the imprisoned that strengthens the resolve of the Red Voices and dispatches the Mob. Hughes transforms a scene of private execution into a public platform of black-led revolt, remakes prison into a site of physical and spiritual resistance, and provides a kairological perspective on the U.S. carceral state.
Ryan's essay analyzes the coordination of the innocence argument and sentimentality in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's TheExonerated (2003), a documentary play based on interviews with people sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. The play's composition, performance, and reception reveal the challenges of creating art that is aimed at social reform and confirm the difficulty in assessing the political function or, in Fredric Jameson's sense, the political unconscious of American literature. As a celebrated example of political theater, The Exonerated also provides a forum for thinking through the contemporary terms and framework of conversations about state killing. Ryan argues that the play stimulates reform and elicits sympathy by substituting a false rhetoric of universal vulnerability for a more accurate assessment of imprisonment and judicial murder. The attempt to make the play accessible, emotional, and persuasive also sets real limits on how audience members are asked think about personal and social responsibility. Some of these efforts include a focus on the wrongly convicted instead of the guilty, a balance of white and black interviewees in the face of a racially unbalanced justice system, a rendering of pain as uplifting for audiences, and an encouragement of personal and financial solutions rather than structural and political ones.
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