2026/01/22 by Tuire Valkeakari · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Cultural History and Identity Formation #Literature: history, themes, analysis #Modernist Literature and Criticism
paper · doi:10.1080/0013838x.2026.2615896
openalex publication_date 2026/01/22 · openalex created_date 2026/01/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
When Harriet Jacobs situates herself within her family history in Incidents (1861), she narrates her genealogy by referencing her family’s relationship to spatiality. In so doing, I argue, she underscores not only the vast geographical reach and inherent injustice of slavery but also the strategic capabilities of the enslaved to negotiate with their owners, when possible, to strengthen their own agency and thus practice “black livingness” (Katherine McKittrick’s coinage). Moreover, Jacobs frames her self-confinement in the garret attached to her grandmother Molly’s house as domestic fugitivity (Tina Campt’s term) facilitated by a sustained family effort. To support this reading, I demonstrate how systematically even the pre-fugitivity chapters narrate the crucial importance of Molly’s household, a (bell) hooksian “homeplace”, to young Jacobs. Finally, rather than calling Jacobs’s domestic fugitivity “marronage”, I seek to honour the historical specificity of marronage while acknowledging the subtle ways in which Incidents signals solidarity with southern maroons.