Futures of Enlightenment Poetry by Dustin Stewart (review)

Abstract

As an interdisciplinary historian of gender and the Black Atlantic, Johnson frames her extensive archival research with original theoretical insights that will be of interest to scholars of the eighteenth century across disciplines. For example, the concept of “null value” (134) focuses a fresh perspective from the digital humanities on the enduring problem of archival silences so meaningfully elaborated by scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Saidiya Hartman, and Marisa Fuentes. Incessant, yet incomplete, efforts at colonial quantification too often leave black women’s humanity frustratingly obscured in the documentary record. Rather than “pausing at empirical silence or accepting it at face value” (134), Johnson formulates a different approach that affirms black life even in the moment of its erasure: “Identifying archival silences as null values surfaces slaveowners and officials as responsible for missing and unacknowledged black life in the archive, but it resists equating the missing or inapplicable information with black death” (135). A lifeaffirming method also becomes central to the way Johnson draws on black queer and sexuality studies to develop a notion of black femme freedom. For Johnson, black femme freedom names a space of freedom that exceeds the terms of legal manumission and encapsulates the ways that black women continually refused commodification “by stepping into the fray on each other’s behalf” (173). It is a concept that honors “the promiscuous and polymorphic arrangements of femininity and feminine desire” that black women created (173).