Presentation Title
Degree Program
Graduate
Major
African American and African Studies
Abstract
In the wake of the announcement of Harriet Tubman joining Andrew Jackson on the back of the twenty-dollar bill, as well as the recent election of Donald Trump as the nation’s 45th president, this paper employs Christina Sharpe’s notion of monstrous intimacies to assert that the coupling of the two on the bill reinscribes the monstrosity of the intimate encounters between the enslaved and their masters, even though Jackson did not own Tubman herself. Further, the appropriation of Tubman’s image and the revisionist underpinnings of her inclusion on money, once offered for her bounty, serves no other purpose than to rally Americans around the spectacle of a false national narrative of reconciliation. A reconciliation, that at this historical and cultural moment, has been proven to be a farce by the election of Trump and the spike of racially and ethnically motivated crimes immediately following.
Start Date
24-2-2017 9:00 AM
End Date
24-2-2017 9:50 AM
Included in
Andrew Jackson and Harriet Tubman: A Monstrous Intimacy
In the wake of the announcement of Harriet Tubman joining Andrew Jackson on the back of the twenty-dollar bill, as well as the recent election of Donald Trump as the nation’s 45th president, this paper employs Christina Sharpe’s notion of monstrous intimacies to assert that the coupling of the two on the bill reinscribes the monstrosity of the intimate encounters between the enslaved and their masters, even though Jackson did not own Tubman herself. Further, the appropriation of Tubman’s image and the revisionist underpinnings of her inclusion on money, once offered for her bounty, serves no other purpose than to rally Americans around the spectacle of a false national narrative of reconciliation. A reconciliation, that at this historical and cultural moment, has been proven to be a farce by the election of Trump and the spike of racially and ethnically motivated crimes immediately following.