Congrats to Anne Jones, Winner of the 2021 Esmonde Award
Congratulations to Anne Jones, M.A. ’21, this year's recipient of the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award for best graduate essay. Anne earned this award for her essay, “The Vexed Position of the Black Secret-Bearer: Concealments and Revelation in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman's Narrative.”
The essay examines how Hannah Crafts’ 1850s novel theorizes secrecy both as a form necessary for enslaved peoples and as a tool of racial subjugation. While Hannah, the novel’s enslaved narrator, initially uses secrecy to facilitate intimacy within her community and resistance against slavery’s dictates, the essay demonstrates how and why Hannah becomes increasingly hesitant towards bearing the secrets of others. On the other hand, while wary of shared secrets, Hannah still uses personal secrets for her own survival. The essay argues that “Hannah longs both for the freedom attainable only through secrecy and for freedom from the chokehold of secrecy. Through the functioning of this dialectic relationship, secrecy assumes a status that is beneficial enough for the enslaved to embrace and powerful enough for the enslaver to wield.” The essay also examines how Hannah Crafts uses gothic and sentimental tropes to conceptualize secrecy and to examine its social and discursive structures. If slavery is a political category that refers to the distribution of power in society, then Crafts’ novel reveals how secrecy assists in distributing that power through more covert, mundane modes of domination.
Way to go, Anne!
The essay examines how Hannah Crafts’ 1850s novel theorizes secrecy both as a form necessary for enslaved peoples and as a tool of racial subjugation. While Hannah, the novel’s enslaved narrator, initially uses secrecy to facilitate intimacy within her community and resistance against slavery’s dictates, the essay demonstrates how and why Hannah becomes increasingly hesitant towards bearing the secrets of others. On the other hand, while wary of shared secrets, Hannah still uses personal secrets for her own survival. The essay argues that “Hannah longs both for the freedom attainable only through secrecy and for freedom from the chokehold of secrecy. Through the functioning of this dialectic relationship, secrecy assumes a status that is beneficial enough for the enslaved to embrace and powerful enough for the enslaver to wield.” The essay also examines how Hannah Crafts uses gothic and sentimental tropes to conceptualize secrecy and to examine its social and discursive structures. If slavery is a political category that refers to the distribution of power in society, then Crafts’ novel reveals how secrecy assists in distributing that power through more covert, mundane modes of domination.
Way to go, Anne!
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