Abstract
In light of the millions of lives absented by the archive’s “manufactured certainties,” this dissertation takes a long view of historical recovery, defining it as a narrative intervention whereby Black Americans across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have negotiated conditions of social and political exclusion by counteracting the erasure of Black histories. Studies of this tradition of Black archival politics rarely recognize the contributions of fiction writers, instead prioritizing historians, librarians, and activists. However, speculative and close narrative practices, employed by scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Lisa Lowe, reveal the influences of fiction on methods, modes, and theories of recovery. I argue that this “new” turn in historical recovery within recent scholarship builds upon a much longer African American literary tradition. As a case study for this tradition, “Silence and Noise” reads the biographical archive of Sally Hemings—who left behind no record of her life in her own words—alongside a wide range of fictional representations of her spanning two centuries. This project’s genealogy of recovery, then, underscores the centrality of imaginative restoration to a Black archival politics that has long mediated the tension between race and American identity.
Chapter One draws on rhetorical analysis to highlight how depictions (and conspicuous elisions) of Hemings across different historical archives—including Thomas Jefferson’s personal correspondence and administrative records, the extended Jefferson family papers, and nineteenth-century newspaper reports—reveal anxieties about the mutable matrices of race, gender, class, and power in the early republic. The opposing depictions of Hemings by Ellen Coolidge and Madison Hemings, Jefferson’s white granddaughter and Black son, underscore and foreshadow the persistent political implications of her erasure and recovery.
In Chapter Two, I read William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), the first African American novel, as an early version of historical speculation that adopts and revises the conventions of the slave narrative, the sentimental novel, and the historical novel in its recovery of Hemings. Brown’s deep disregard for chronology and authenticity reflects what I refer to as “fugitive fictional practices,” which enable him to tell a different story about the history (and future) of Black life in the United States. Clotel highlights the dynamic relationships between text, culture, aesthetics, and politics, especially as it recuperates Hemings’s story in order to respond to, rethink, and rewrite the nation in the midst of the American sectional crisis. Hemings’s centrality to Clotel, and to an expanding African American literary tradition, is telling of her continued cultural relevance for Black American writers.
Finally, Chapter Three troubles recovery as a productive response to historical erasure by analyzing how Hemings’s establishment in the American cultural imagination of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries relied upon her figuration as Jefferson’s romantic counterpart. In the movement from textual to visual recovery mediums, Hemings becomes a depoliticized figure who absolves Jefferson’s participation in slavery even as she represents the sexual violence endemic to the institution. This chapter examines and deconstructs the impulse within recovery to accommodate hegemonic narratives, even in the recuperation of subjects and practices that threaten those narratives’ coherence. My discussion of Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2024 play Sally & Tom highlights the metacognition of its play-within-a-play format as a corrective to recovery’s tendency towards the supplemental rather than the critical.
In analyzing these many representations, this dissertation expands our understanding of fiction as a dynamic site of Black archival politics and reveals the ways an American identity-in-crisis—whether in the first decades of the nation’s existence, on the eve of the Civil War, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, or in the dawn of a new millennia—returns again and again to the “primary narrative” of this enslaved woman’s unfree flesh.
