Conjugal Union The Body, the House, and the Black American

This book argues that during the antebellum period a community of freeblack northeastern intellectuals sought to establish the stability of a BlackAmerican subjectivity by figuring the black body as the necessary antecedent toany inteligible Black American public presence. Reid-Pharr goes on to argue thatthe fact of the the black body's constsnt and often spectacular displaydemonstrates an incredible uncertainty as to that body's status. Thus antebellumblack intellectuals were always anxious about how a stable relationship betweenthe black community might be maintained. Paying particular attention BlackAmerican novels written before the Civil War, the author shows how the householdwas utilized by these writers to normalize this relationship of body tocommunity such that a person could enter a household as a white and leave it asa black.

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Program in Comparative American Cultures at Johns Hopkins University.