Aisha Matthews | University of Maryland, College Park (original) (raw)
Book Chapters by Aisha Matthews
Critical Insights, 2020
This chapter examines the conspiratorial actions that control the movement of female bodies throu... more This chapter examines the conspiratorial actions that control the movement of female bodies throughout The Handmaid’s Tale and will contend that the ultimate conspiracy of the novel is one through which men’s cultural insecurities about virility and control are projected onto the flesh of the novel’s women. More specifically, by disarticulating and objectifying women’s bodies, dividing them by function, and alienating them from individual subjectivity, the paternalistic fathers of Gilead conspire to obscure the truth about male infertility, reviving the myth of woman’s bodily excess to erase failures in traditional masculinity.
Papers by Aisha Matthews
Third Stone, 2021
While literacy may have signified the humanity of male slaves in the antebellum South (at least i... more While literacy may have signified the humanity of male slaves in the antebellum South (at least in their own view), the English language and American print culture did not similarly empower female slaves towards positive subject-formation through discourse. This article will examine the tension between oral culture and print culture in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Ultimately, an analysis of Jacobs’s work through the lens of book history and its power to shape cultural formation will suggest a critical imperative for the contemporary neo-slave narrative genre.
Accordingly, the agency of contemporary neo-slave writers serves as a foil to the problematized authority granted to our literary foremothers, and in many ways redeems the emancipatory potential of the written word. This essay argues that neo-slave narratives, as part of the continuum of slave narratives, attempt to resolve or deconstruct the dualistic myths of Western epistemology and through interaction with speculative tropes, offer a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and healing for the postmodern African American subject. The manipulation of language serves different ends in the neo-slave narrative than it does in its precursor, but by exploring the breakdown of mind/body dualism, challenging the hierarchy of oral and print cultures, and interrogating the slave’s act of refusal across both works, we make visible the ways that neo-slave narratives build upon antebellum slave narratives and ultimately position us to find generative uses for our traumatic past.
Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2018
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed offer insights into the fema... more Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed offer insights into the female experience and the influence of prescriptive gender roles on the formation of individual identity. Consciousness, a debatably gender-neutral state of being, is inseparably colored by society’s expectations of maleness and femaleness, femaleness in particular. Within the fluid space provided by the speculative fiction genre, both Atwood and Butler manifest universes speaking to the unique challenges of womanhood in a patriarchal world, ultimately placing reproduction at the center of power within male/female relationships. This article explores the problematic and repressive nature of prescriptive and essentialist definitions of gender, ultimately proving that while gender identity is wholly performative, the influence of patriarchal definitions of womanhood, especially as manifested in instances of reproductive slavery, is harmful to the development of the female consciousness and female self-definition.
International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, 2016
The following article explores the historical and cultural evolution of Negro Spirituals as they ... more The following article explores the historical and cultural evolution of Negro Spirituals as they were revised for use in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Examining the Spirituals, "Wade in the Water" and "Oh, Freedom," this essay seeks to prove that while the legacy of slavery imbued in the Negro Spiritual did serve the purpose of reminding America of its unjust past, these songs took on new meaning in the Civil Rights Era and were put to use as a medium for communication, a salve for spiritual degradation, and above all else, a stepping stone off of which the movement intended to leap into a brighter future of equality for all. This essay challenges the claim that Negro Spirituals were too entrenched in the historical atrocities of the past to offer a revitalized message for the purposes of the CRM.
International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, 2016
The following paper examines the origins of African-American female sexual scripts, particularly ... more The following paper examines the origins of African-American female sexual scripts, particularly the image of the Jezebel, and their consequences as represented in Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Through an analysis of Jacobs’s work, this paper explores the relationships between female slaves and their masters (and mistresses) in the Antebellum American South, locates the historical and cultural sources of negative sexual stereotypes about black women, and ultimately, concludes that these scripts and stereotypes, originating in American slavery, still play a large role in media representation and the formation of a positive sexual identity for African-American women in the United States. Jacobs’s narrative, a monumental self-written memoir, sought to appeal to the white women in the American North whose participation in the abolitionist movement held the power to ameliorate circumstances for female slaves in the South. Her tale of sexually aggressive masters, harried choices, and the sacrifices of a loving mother illuminate the moral and spiritual degradation caused by the “peculiar institution of slavery.” This paper places such considerations in both racial and sociopolitical contexts to examine the psychology of fear, abuse, and miscegenation suffered by American female slaves and perpetrated by southern plantation owners.
Conference Presentations by Aisha Matthews
In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, which has emboldened groups like the KKK and the self-t... more In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, which has emboldened groups like the KKK and the self-titled Alt-Right white nationalists to enact racial violence on the public stage, heated conflict regarding the institutionalization of America’s racial and socioeconomic power structures continues to intensify. At such socially tumultuous periods, the demand for literature speaking to the complexities of demographic difference is at a high. While J.K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter series takes place in 1980s London, a postcolonial reading of the saga underscores the parallels between the representation of Hogwarts as, at once, a colonizing institutional force and a liberal bastion for social reflection and diversity, and the history of America’s colonial foundations. In particular, a comparison of Rowling’s treatment of magical creatures, most notably house elves and centaurs, with American settlers’ treatment of African Americans and Native Americans, respectively, demonstrates the complexity of colonial imperatives alongside the human propensity for racial and socioeconomic hierarchy. My examination of the governance of and attitudes towards house elves in the Harry Potter series will reveal the ways in which ownership, invalidation of personhood, and physical, emotional, and intellectual oppression aptly represent the condition of African-Americans in the antebellum South. In the same vein, my discussion of the centaurs and their association with the forbidden forest will evoke memories of the environmental and social destruction of Native American tribal communities, as provoked by Euro-American colonial interests. Thus, this project, through highlighting the parallels between Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the American colonial past, opens up a larger conversation about the significance of fantasy literature in dismantling and overcoming real-world issues of race and class and offers opportunities for reflection on the gross historical injustices still perpetuated (in various incarnations) today.
Theses and Dissertations by Aisha Matthews
Taking Octavia Butler’s Patternist series as its primary source of inquiry, this paper examines t... more Taking Octavia Butler’s Patternist series as its primary source of inquiry, this paper examines the ontology of power, intersubjectivity, and social reality through the science and speculative fiction tropes of body-swapping and self-transmutation. Butler’s re-invocation of American slavery opens new possibilities for understanding the nature of being and the definition of humanity, while encouraging new perspectives in postmodernist thinking, most notably centered on the belief in the socially constructed nature of identity. More broadly, this paper places such dialogues in conversation with theories on Foucaldian power structures, Cartesian duality, and phenomenology, ultimately concluding that the socially constructed nature of the self obfuscates the truly human desires, such as that for power, which transcend the demographic differences defining current social realities.
Digital Projects by Aisha Matthews
This project explores the critical connections between the traditional antebellum slave narrative... more This project explores the critical connections between the traditional antebellum slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and the various conventional and unconventional neo-slave narratives authored by Octavia E. Butler. Despite the large temporal distance between the publication of Jacobs’s narrative in 1861 and the release of Butler’s first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976, this project aims to demonstrate not only the continuing relevance of the slave narrative in the 21st-century, but also the additional possibilities offered by Butler’s deployment of science fiction tropes. Conventions such as body-swapping, self-transmutation, and alien invasion create intersubjective spaces which challenge existing norms and foreground the importance of the body in the project of liberation. If the neo-slave narrative aims to renew and reinvent the narrative strategies employed in the traditional slave narrative, we can view Butler’s work as a sort of time machine, which collapses the historical distance between publication and narrative to explore the potential pasts, presents, and futures of African, African-American, and Afro-Carribean peoples.
The texts analyzed within this project include the following works by Butler:
Wild Seed
Fledgling
Kindred
Lilith’s Brood (formerly, Xenogenesis)
Through the comparative analysis of each neo-slave narrative (however unconventional) against the backdrop of Jacobs’s work, this project will aim to reveal the ongoing struggle to represent, reclaim, and move past the historical moment of American slavery. Each analysis will address a particular theme common to both works. Selected themes include:
Women/Womanhood
Autonomy
Sexual Scripts
Freedom
Hybridity
Interviews by Aisha Matthews
Critical Insights, 2020
This chapter examines the conspiratorial actions that control the movement of female bodies throu... more This chapter examines the conspiratorial actions that control the movement of female bodies throughout The Handmaid’s Tale and will contend that the ultimate conspiracy of the novel is one through which men’s cultural insecurities about virility and control are projected onto the flesh of the novel’s women. More specifically, by disarticulating and objectifying women’s bodies, dividing them by function, and alienating them from individual subjectivity, the paternalistic fathers of Gilead conspire to obscure the truth about male infertility, reviving the myth of woman’s bodily excess to erase failures in traditional masculinity.
Third Stone, 2021
While literacy may have signified the humanity of male slaves in the antebellum South (at least i... more While literacy may have signified the humanity of male slaves in the antebellum South (at least in their own view), the English language and American print culture did not similarly empower female slaves towards positive subject-formation through discourse. This article will examine the tension between oral culture and print culture in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Ultimately, an analysis of Jacobs’s work through the lens of book history and its power to shape cultural formation will suggest a critical imperative for the contemporary neo-slave narrative genre.
Accordingly, the agency of contemporary neo-slave writers serves as a foil to the problematized authority granted to our literary foremothers, and in many ways redeems the emancipatory potential of the written word. This essay argues that neo-slave narratives, as part of the continuum of slave narratives, attempt to resolve or deconstruct the dualistic myths of Western epistemology and through interaction with speculative tropes, offer a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and healing for the postmodern African American subject. The manipulation of language serves different ends in the neo-slave narrative than it does in its precursor, but by exploring the breakdown of mind/body dualism, challenging the hierarchy of oral and print cultures, and interrogating the slave’s act of refusal across both works, we make visible the ways that neo-slave narratives build upon antebellum slave narratives and ultimately position us to find generative uses for our traumatic past.
Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2018
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed offer insights into the fema... more Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed offer insights into the female experience and the influence of prescriptive gender roles on the formation of individual identity. Consciousness, a debatably gender-neutral state of being, is inseparably colored by society’s expectations of maleness and femaleness, femaleness in particular. Within the fluid space provided by the speculative fiction genre, both Atwood and Butler manifest universes speaking to the unique challenges of womanhood in a patriarchal world, ultimately placing reproduction at the center of power within male/female relationships. This article explores the problematic and repressive nature of prescriptive and essentialist definitions of gender, ultimately proving that while gender identity is wholly performative, the influence of patriarchal definitions of womanhood, especially as manifested in instances of reproductive slavery, is harmful to the development of the female consciousness and female self-definition.
International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, 2016
The following article explores the historical and cultural evolution of Negro Spirituals as they ... more The following article explores the historical and cultural evolution of Negro Spirituals as they were revised for use in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Examining the Spirituals, "Wade in the Water" and "Oh, Freedom," this essay seeks to prove that while the legacy of slavery imbued in the Negro Spiritual did serve the purpose of reminding America of its unjust past, these songs took on new meaning in the Civil Rights Era and were put to use as a medium for communication, a salve for spiritual degradation, and above all else, a stepping stone off of which the movement intended to leap into a brighter future of equality for all. This essay challenges the claim that Negro Spirituals were too entrenched in the historical atrocities of the past to offer a revitalized message for the purposes of the CRM.
International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, 2016
The following paper examines the origins of African-American female sexual scripts, particularly ... more The following paper examines the origins of African-American female sexual scripts, particularly the image of the Jezebel, and their consequences as represented in Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Through an analysis of Jacobs’s work, this paper explores the relationships between female slaves and their masters (and mistresses) in the Antebellum American South, locates the historical and cultural sources of negative sexual stereotypes about black women, and ultimately, concludes that these scripts and stereotypes, originating in American slavery, still play a large role in media representation and the formation of a positive sexual identity for African-American women in the United States. Jacobs’s narrative, a monumental self-written memoir, sought to appeal to the white women in the American North whose participation in the abolitionist movement held the power to ameliorate circumstances for female slaves in the South. Her tale of sexually aggressive masters, harried choices, and the sacrifices of a loving mother illuminate the moral and spiritual degradation caused by the “peculiar institution of slavery.” This paper places such considerations in both racial and sociopolitical contexts to examine the psychology of fear, abuse, and miscegenation suffered by American female slaves and perpetrated by southern plantation owners.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, which has emboldened groups like the KKK and the self-t... more In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, which has emboldened groups like the KKK and the self-titled Alt-Right white nationalists to enact racial violence on the public stage, heated conflict regarding the institutionalization of America’s racial and socioeconomic power structures continues to intensify. At such socially tumultuous periods, the demand for literature speaking to the complexities of demographic difference is at a high. While J.K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter series takes place in 1980s London, a postcolonial reading of the saga underscores the parallels between the representation of Hogwarts as, at once, a colonizing institutional force and a liberal bastion for social reflection and diversity, and the history of America’s colonial foundations. In particular, a comparison of Rowling’s treatment of magical creatures, most notably house elves and centaurs, with American settlers’ treatment of African Americans and Native Americans, respectively, demonstrates the complexity of colonial imperatives alongside the human propensity for racial and socioeconomic hierarchy. My examination of the governance of and attitudes towards house elves in the Harry Potter series will reveal the ways in which ownership, invalidation of personhood, and physical, emotional, and intellectual oppression aptly represent the condition of African-Americans in the antebellum South. In the same vein, my discussion of the centaurs and their association with the forbidden forest will evoke memories of the environmental and social destruction of Native American tribal communities, as provoked by Euro-American colonial interests. Thus, this project, through highlighting the parallels between Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the American colonial past, opens up a larger conversation about the significance of fantasy literature in dismantling and overcoming real-world issues of race and class and offers opportunities for reflection on the gross historical injustices still perpetuated (in various incarnations) today.
Taking Octavia Butler’s Patternist series as its primary source of inquiry, this paper examines t... more Taking Octavia Butler’s Patternist series as its primary source of inquiry, this paper examines the ontology of power, intersubjectivity, and social reality through the science and speculative fiction tropes of body-swapping and self-transmutation. Butler’s re-invocation of American slavery opens new possibilities for understanding the nature of being and the definition of humanity, while encouraging new perspectives in postmodernist thinking, most notably centered on the belief in the socially constructed nature of identity. More broadly, this paper places such dialogues in conversation with theories on Foucaldian power structures, Cartesian duality, and phenomenology, ultimately concluding that the socially constructed nature of the self obfuscates the truly human desires, such as that for power, which transcend the demographic differences defining current social realities.
This project explores the critical connections between the traditional antebellum slave narrative... more This project explores the critical connections between the traditional antebellum slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and the various conventional and unconventional neo-slave narratives authored by Octavia E. Butler. Despite the large temporal distance between the publication of Jacobs’s narrative in 1861 and the release of Butler’s first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976, this project aims to demonstrate not only the continuing relevance of the slave narrative in the 21st-century, but also the additional possibilities offered by Butler’s deployment of science fiction tropes. Conventions such as body-swapping, self-transmutation, and alien invasion create intersubjective spaces which challenge existing norms and foreground the importance of the body in the project of liberation. If the neo-slave narrative aims to renew and reinvent the narrative strategies employed in the traditional slave narrative, we can view Butler’s work as a sort of time machine, which collapses the historical distance between publication and narrative to explore the potential pasts, presents, and futures of African, African-American, and Afro-Carribean peoples.
The texts analyzed within this project include the following works by Butler:
Wild Seed
Fledgling
Kindred
Lilith’s Brood (formerly, Xenogenesis)
Through the comparative analysis of each neo-slave narrative (however unconventional) against the backdrop of Jacobs’s work, this project will aim to reveal the ongoing struggle to represent, reclaim, and move past the historical moment of American slavery. Each analysis will address a particular theme common to both works. Selected themes include:
Women/Womanhood
Autonomy
Sexual Scripts
Freedom
Hybridity