RabachK VtP Annotation: DemonicGrounds

“... stress that if practices of subjugation are also spatial acts, then the ways in which black women think, write, and negotiate their surroundings are intermingled with placebased critiques, or, respatializations.” (xix) …”naming place is also an act of naming the self and self-histories…. Landscape does not simply function as a decorative background, opens up the possibility for thinking about the production of space as unfinished, a poetics of questioning” (xxiii) …”to use Doreen Massey’s metaphor, different layers of life and social landscape are sedimented into each other. Deep space is the production of space intensified a writ large, ideological and political shifts that impact upon and organize the everyday in multiple contexts and scales … Deep space and its production… are crushingly real” (15) FIGURE 1. On page 39 - a reconstruction of Harriet Jacobs hiding place - then used to explore different and contradictory forms of captivity, concealment, and resistance. Thinking about concealment.. Confined spaces..  But also about seeing and hearing.. “For seven years Brent holds her body captive while observing activities not always meant for her eyes and ears. There is both a separation from and connection to the world outside the attic; she is both inside and outside, captive and free” (42) “If scale is socially produced, but implicitly profitable and materially hierarchical, then an analysis of body-scale on and in relation to the auction block demonstrates how social processes organize the world into intelligible and different “clusters” and locations. That is, the auction block differentiates the black body by visually demarcting it and attaching it to discourses of dispossession and captivity to the flesh. The sacel of the body, then, necessarily identifies the ways in which the historical and geographic particularities of the plantation are socially produced through powerful material technologies … This is not to suggest the scale of the body is bound, cut off from its surroundings, but rather that social processes create the idea that balck flesh is distinct, radically different, captive, and not white” (75)   “If the plantation represented the scale of a town, the auction block figuratively and materially displays a smaller scale--the body or bodies--within the town. … social differences, instigated through scaled different bodies therefore materially and ideologically contribute to the meaning of the plantation town. To put it another way, the auction block, like the main house or the fields, is a geographic economic site, which is also required within the plantation town to convey power, hierarchy, and social roles.” (75)