We see resistance to accounting for and reckoning with the mothers, lovers, citizens, fathers, and builders living in full color beneath those encrusted, enforced, fradulent false faces masked by servitude. We see the all too familiar happy mammy, the wanton Jezebel, the ne'er-do-well lazy Willie shuckin' and jivin', the dangerous brute. Jordan shines clear light on the inclination of some writers to project and sustain damaging stereotypes. Without understanding the legacy of Black servitude as America's racialized past, we cannot begin to illuminate the significance that race continues to play in our daily lives and most intimate spaces." - Mary Romero, author of Maid in USA African American Servitude and Historical Imaginings challenges current scholarship on the commodification of care work and material consumption that rely solely on gendered metaphors for serving and being served. Servitude continues today as racialized occupations built on the blood, sweat and tears of the working poor, many of whom are immigrants. Margaret Jordan's brilliant analysis of fictional representations of servitude in the US reminds us of the extent to which the reproduction of the American family, community, and nation has been accomplished through racialized human interactions. "As a historical legacy, and in the present, servitude remains an ideal macrocosm for examining the racial and class stratification that built this country. Jordan contends that they do not read or misread history, they imagine history as meditations on social realties and reconstruct the past as a way to confront the present. She examines the ideological underpinnings of retrospective fiction by writers who are clearly social theorists and philosophers. Jordan demonstrates how African American servants and servitude are strategically deployed and engaged in ways which encourage a rethinking of the past. Jordan argues that those who even those seemingly innocuous, infrequently visible, or silent servants are vehicles through which history, culture and social values and practices are cultivated and perpetuated, challenged and destabilized. Twentieth-century retrospective fiction is the site for this compelling investigation about how African American servants and slaves have enormous utility as cultural artifacts, objects to be acted upon, agents in place, or agents provocateurs. In African-American Servitude and Historical Imaginings Margaret Jordan initiates a new way of looking at the African American presence in American literature.
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