MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

ABC’s Scandal, a soapy political thriller about the life of Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope, a flinty Washington fixer hiding her scandalous on again, off again affair with Republican President Fitzgerald Thomas Grant II (Tony Goldwyn), has become one of several important cultural references of African-American representation in the twenty-first century America. While Scandal often avoids addressing race explicitly, Olivia Pope has referred to her role in her tumultuous relationship with the president as a reenactment of Sally Hemings to his Thomas Jefferson, a reference to how the interracial and hierarchal nature of their relationship subordinates and alienates her from any sense of agency. This allusion to one of the most well-known interracial and master/slave relationships indicates that on some level, the legacies of slavery and the possession and power(lessness) of the black body are still rewriting themselves in U.S. television and media.

I refer to Scandal to begin a conversation both about complex cultural investments in representation in terms of race and gender as well as about the history of slavery that haunts discourses about these investments. Just as with the momentary but significant allusions to Sally Hemings in Scandal, the figure of the slave body, owned, silenced, and bound, continues to shape the importance we place on representation that proves one’s humanity and agency as a way to rewrite a history that strips racialized groups of these characteristics. As part of a deeper discussion of race and representation, I address cultural and literary source material from the nineteenth century and onward that explores how raced narrative voices are constructed in discourses about black subjectivity and its iterations in particular linguistic, cultural, national and hemispheric spaces that liberate or limit its existence and mobility.