“Hemispheric Postcolonialism: Black Female Sexuality and Slavery in the Americas”

Abstract

Building on what Günter H. Lenz describes as the "always two-directional processes of transculturation," this piece brings together two classic works, Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Carlos Diegues's Brazilian film, Xica da Silva (1975), specifically addressing the hemispheric connections in cross-cultural literary and cinematic representations of black female sexuality, colonialism and slavery in the Americas. The essay presents a critical comparison of the legacy of slave concubinage and black female resistance, noting how Jones's Corregidora helps to undermine the Brazilian myth of racial democracy, while Xica da Silva deepens Gayl Jones's Pan-African vision of the quilombos, or maroon societies, and problematizes sexuality by magnifying the complex mix of abjection and desire, which deeply engages Jones's novel. By furthering an already existing discussion yet promoting a new critical paradigm for a hemispheric postcolonialism, this work seeks to fortify the nexus of Africana Studies, Comparative American Studies and Hemispheric Studies, but with a distinct postcolonial focus on the historic and cultural intersections of U.S. and Latin America, working within the purview of postcolonial studies in particular.The stories of Brazil's legendary figure, Xica da Silva, and the Kentucky blues woman, Ursa in Gayl Jones's Corregidora, form an unlikely pairing that might stand in for the far extremities of black women's oppression in the Americas. Despite the fact that the Portuguese slave trade produced the largest imported slave-holding colony in the Black Atlantic world (Coser 123), Xica da Silva rose from the status of slave concubine to become the "Empress of Brazil" in the diamond region of Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. By contrast, Ursa Corregidora, a "Queen of the Blues," endured mental and spiritual deterioration as the abused ex-wife of a jealous and crazed husband, whose traumatic experiences of mutilation, hysteria and blighted sexuality return her to Brazil's brutal slave past. Taken together, Ursa Corregidora and Xica da Silva share intimate and unspoken histories of slave concubinage and reveal the common bond of Portuguese assaults on black women, uniting them across many generations and continents and forming the basis of what Ashraf H. A. Rushdy calls an "intersubjective communion" of the Americas (273). 1 These women live and perform intimate expressions of black female sexuality that represent gradual accumulations of colonial abjection and desire. 2 Their stories imagine women's bodies of the African diaspora as the space of "home" that is violated and severed from a muchanticipated redemptive return, where rape signifies not one but multiple bloody colonial encounters in the conquest of Africa and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas. 3 These two works relate, on the one hand, a true story transformed into myth and legend and dramatized by Carlos Diegues's film, Xica da Silva (1976), leading to comedic and carnivalesque inversions of colonial dominati...