Sensational Violence

Abstract

This chapter looks beyond the recurrent trope of jealousy to examine the dynamics and limits of power and intimacy in scenes when white women act violently against enslaved women. The chapter begins with salacious representations of women in pulp novels, which helped popularize depictions of plantation violence in the second half of the twentieth century. Surveying a variety of novel covers in the Falconhurst series and Dragonard series, the chapter argues that mediated violence inflicted by white women with instruments of torture in pulp novel cover artwork maintains violence as a tool of social separation. As such, a scene of violence on a paperback cover of Edgar Mittelhölzer’s novel Children of Kaywana distances audiences from social critique. The chapter then continues to examine stereotypical depictions of women in Richard Fleischer’s exploitation film Mandingo (1975). Though Mandingo is not revolutionary, it provides a sense of how characters perform power, thereby exposing some of the fault lines of sadistic violence. Finally, the chapter provides a counterpoint to exploitative stereotypes via Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013). Here, the woman who enslaves increases her power on the plantation by manipulating the system’s corrupted intimacies through briefly employing violent skin-to-skin touch.