Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Slavery, Silence, and the Politics of Ventriloquism

Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's “Damnation of Women”

“…Any reading of “Damnation” must, therefore, be alert to the meanings of Du Bois's ventriloquism and to a “propensity to ventriloquize” (Reinhardt 2002, 84) on the part of the reader who would appropriate his essay for her own purposes. There is the very real danger that engaging with Du Bois's arguments—in lieu of those of Cooper, or Wells‐Barnett, or any of his female contemporaries—simply reinforces their silence in a canon composed of male elites 10 .…”

“…On the other hand, to assume that only black women can tell their history is to deny the interpreted character of all “experience” (Scott 1992) and to risk reproducing demeaning assumptions that this history is not worthy of analysis by all scholars. There is the further concern that in offering an account of these women's experiences, the theorist presumes a kind of proprietary intimacy with those experiences (Spivak 1988, Reinhardt 2002). 11 In this regard, simply turning to the texts of black women is no inoculation.…”