Pornotroping

Focusing on acts of (sexual) violence directed against the black female body, Harman knows that her attempt to represent the past necessarily "translates into a potential for pornotroping."

This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body as the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time -- in stunning contradiction-- it is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor; (3) in this distance from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “otherness”; (4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general "powerlessness," resonating through various centers of human and social meaning.

Unlike Douglass, who turns away from representing the exteriority of black femininity, pornotroping functions as the complex generative source of Brown's identity construction, which rhetorically hovers between maternal fleshiliness and masculine personhood.

The offensive typology of blackness offered up in Mam's law seems to set up an impassable barrier to anything like an originary African ethnicity: any proud reclaiming of African origins is always already anticipated by a voracious pornotroping.