The Repeating Body

"Kimberly Juanita Brown’s The Repeating Body is a spectacular treatment of how black women’s bodies—exploited and broken under trans-Atlantic slavery—fundamentally implicated visual and literary cultures. In her copious treatment of slavery as a historical formation and a present-day preoccupation, Brown identifies the slave woman’s body as a flashpoint for considerations of racialized sexuality and gender, considerations that refuse to “stay put” within any single historical period or any one geographical region. The Repeating Body produces a dazzling transnational archive of texts and images that speak to black women's bodies as records of slavery, records that illuminate it as a global regime of racialized gender and sexuality. This is a must-read for anyone interested in how the visual, the literary, the corporeal, and the enslaved come together." - Roderick A. Ferguson, coeditor of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization

"In this moving study of slavery and its afterlife, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines literature, photography, and contemporary art to retrieve black women from the margins of slavery's representation. The Repeating Body is an invaluable contribution to the study of feminism, diaspora, and visual culture."
- Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route

"The Repeating Body offers a nuanced analysis grounded in detailed readings of embodiment in black diasporic and especially black feminist artistic works. . . . In this thoughtful study, Brown is probing the limits of the very stories that she understands as technologies of survival." - S. Trimble, Contemporary Women's Writing

"...[The Repeating Body] follow[s] through on its promise 'to make legible the multiple enactments of hypervisibility black women cannot escape, and to highlight artistic attempts at using opacity, framing, fragmentation, and repetitions of the visual to illustrate a desire for black subjectivity that includes black women within it.' The book succeeds at showing how and in some ways why 'to give birth to modernity is no small order." - Jennifer DeVere Brody, Signs

"Brown’s book makes an important contribution to discourses on the imaging and reading of black women’s bodies. . . . Brown’s concentrated attention to images of black women’s bodies provides a valuable resource to scholars." - Philathia R. Bolton, College Literature