Introduction: Over-exposed, Under-exposed: Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Summary

As the coeditor of this volume, my tasks have been fairly specific and predictable: I have provided editorial feedback to the contributors, served as a liaison between scholars and press, and written this introductory essay. As a scholar of African American literature who happens also to be an African American female, however, the questions associated with my tasks have been less specific but perhaps more taxing: Where do I stand in relation to this undertaking? That is to say, has my role in putting together this collection, on the autobiography of a long-deceased, female, ex-slave, been overdetermined? Fellow scholar Ann duCille noted recently that the rapid increase of scholarship about black women has “led me to think of myself as a kind of sacred text. Not me personally, of course, but me black woman object, Other.” What does it mean, she inquired, for “black women academics to stand in the midst of … the traffic jam … that black feminist studies has become?” For to introduce a collection of essays about Harriet Jacobs is not simply to present a body of scholarly works; it is also to comment upon the curious resurrection of one particular “black woman object” and her justly renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Such comments may seen strange indeed, especially within the context of an essay that seeks to situate Harriet Jacobs and her contemporary critics for a heterogeneous leadership.