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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Aberrant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hk9s194 Author Onugha, Erica Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Aberrant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Erica Leeanne Onugha 2018 @ Copyright by Erica Leeanne Onugha 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Aberrant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies by Erica Leeanne Onugha Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Richard Yarborough, Chair Aberrant Time argues that the additional burdens of involuntary sexual and reproductive labor during slavery led both male and female slave narrators to articulate black women’s uniquely gendered experiences of time. It also asks how newly emancipated women writers portrayed their work time to express agency during Reconstruction. Black women’s work was unorthodox because they were forced to perform manual and domestic labor in addition to sexual and reproductive labor for the personal gratification and financial benefit of their owners. Even after emancipation, the labor and time of black women remained peculiar as many continued to work outside of the home and were subjected to discrimination in a profoundly racist labor ii market. Drawing from slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup and Elizabeth Keckley, Aberrant Time identifies and analyzes the slave laboring temporalities unique to black women. It also examines how the depictions of black women’s time and labor changes as they progress from puberty to motherhood and transition from slavery to freedom. In analyzing gender and time in African American autobiographies, this dissertation endeavors to correct the implicit scholarly assumption that nineteenth-century African American women and men—slaves in particular—experienced time in the same way. iii The dissertation of Erica Leeanne Onugha is approved. Yogita Goyal Uri McMillan Brenda Stevenson Richard Yarborough, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv For Isioma and Osinachi v CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii VITA ix INTRODUCTION 1 1. THE LIMITS OF THE MALE SLAVE NARRATOR’S GAZE: Black Men’s Portrayal of Black Women’s Laboring Times 33 2. VOLATILE INTERRUPTIONS: The Temporalities of Black Slave Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Labors 68 1 3. “IT WAS A STILL GREATER SATISFACTION” : Excavating Harriet Jacobs’s Pleasure as a Fugitive Slave Mother 99 4. SELF-EMPLOYED BLACK WOMEN ARE AMERICA’S FUTURE: Elizabeth Keckley’s Radical Vision for Rebuilding Reconstruction-Era America in Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House 142 CONCLUSION 206 WORKS CONSULTED 208 1 Jacobs 116. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members—Yogita Goyal, Uri McMillan, Brenda Stevenson, and Richard Yarborough—for their astute guidance and unwavering encouragement. I am especially indebted to Richard Yarborough, my dissertation chair, not only for his generosity with his time and meticulous feedback but also his mentorship and impeccable model of professionalism. I also thank the faculty in the English Department for enriching my studies and providing a stimulating intellectual environment. In particular I wish to thank Arthur Little, Chris Mott, and Caroline Streeter in addition to Nora Elias, Rick Fagin, Jeannette Gilkison, and Michael Lambert for their advice and support at various stages in graduate school. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the UCLA Graduate Division, the UCLA English Department, and the UCLA Institute for American Cultures. I am deeply indebted to the colleagues and friends who inspired me with their brilliance and nourished my spirit during this journey. I especially thank: Kim Mack, Courtney Marshall, Marilu Medrano, Emily Morishima, Theri’ Pickens, Valerie Popp, Dennis Tyler, Brandy Underwood, and Joyce Pualani Warren. Thank you to all of the Revolutionary Women without whom I would not have completed this dissertation. Finally, I must thank my family for always cheering me on despite my steadfast refusal to discuss this dissertation. To my mother Cathy Powe, thank you for teaching me to love books. It all started with our weekly trips to the classics section of the Carson Public Library. To my grandmother Etter Thomas, I return to your example of poise and grace whenever I face adversity—thank you. Thank you to Osita Onugha for your sometimes-baffling yet unshakeable vii belief that I can literally do anything. I am lucky that I can always rely on your optimism and humor. And to my little bears Isioma and Osinachi, you have all of my love forever and forever until the end of time. viii VITA 2003 B.A., English with High Honors University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California 2005-2007 Teaching Associate Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2008 M.A., English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 2008-2016 Instructor (Tenured, 2013) Foothill College, Department of English Los Altos Hills, CA 2010 Visiting Scholar University of Cambridge, Department of English Cambridge, UK 2011 C. Phil, English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 2013 Stanford Human Rights Educator Fellowship Stanford University Stanford, CA 2015 Institute of American Cultures Predoctoral Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2016 Department Dissertation Fellowship Department of English University of California, Los Angeles SELECT PRESENTATIONS Onugha, Erica. “‘Virtuous Freedom’: Elizabeth Keckley’s ‘Hardworking Temporality’ and Black Working Women as Exemplars of American National Character.” Paper presented at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference, Portland, OR, November 2015. ---. “Dignity and Human Rights: Learning to Write and Research with Cultural Humility.” Presentation at the Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative (SHREI) Symposium: “Critical Conversations—Human Rights Across the Curriculum,” Stanford, CA, June 2014. ix Aberrant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies In chapter five of Incidents in the Life a Slave Girl—“The Trials of Girlhood”—Harriet Jacobs describes her entry into her “fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl.”2 By collapsing any distinction between her life story and those of all slave girls, Jacobs indicates that what she experiences is both universal and inevitable. This quotation addresses what Jacobs suggests throughout her slave narrative: that enslaved black women experienced time differently than enslaved men. Jacobs identifies puberty as the precise period in a slave girl’s life when her experience of time will begin to diverge from that of enslaved boys. Jacobs maintains that the experience of puberty is fundamentally different for enslaved girls because of the sexual harassment and forced sexual labor that slave girls will almost certainly face.3 By exposing how enslaved black women perform constant manual and domestic labor while vulnerable to coerced sexual and reproductive labor, Jacobs reveals that it is the demand for black women to perform multiple forms of work that produces their uniquely gendered depictions of time. Jacobs’s narrative reveals not just the racial experience of labor and time, but also the gendered experience of both. My dissertation seeks to widen this window into the experiences of enslaved women by exploring how the burdens of sexual and reproductive labor affect how slave narrators depict 2 Jacobs 27. All citations are taken from the Harvard edition of the text. 3 Although Jacobs discusses the sexual harassment and rape of enslaved men briefly in her narrative (See Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality), she suggests that these instances are rare. In contrast, she describes the sexual harassment and threat of rape as an experience that all slave girls endure. 1 black women’s experiences of time during slavery and immediately after emancipation. My dissertation—Aberrant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies—offers a feminist reading of the multiple temporalities of black women’s labors as narrated in nineteenth-century African- American autobiographies to consider how black women’s labor was “peculiar” in both senses of the word.4 On the one hand, black women’s labor was unorthodox. As Jennifer L. Morgan explains, slave owners “inverted the gender ideology that they applied to white women and work […] African women and girls found themselves in the field.”5 Black women were forced to perform manual and domestic labor—often working side by side with black men in the fields. In addition, they were also treated like sexual property and forced to perform sexual and reproductive labor for the personal gratification and financial benefit of their owners. Even after emancipation, the labor and time of black women remained
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