1935–1950s: (The Methodological Framework — Sanders Johnson’s Approach of Dwelling in Practice and Subtext Rather Than Judging Political Efficacy, Using the …

1935–1950s: (The Methodological Framework — Sanders Johnson’s Approach of Dwelling in Practice and Subtext Rather Than Judging Political Efficacy, Using the Bountiful Yet Largely Ignored Textual Archive of Women’s Rights Politics Including Manifestos Essays Speeches and Research Reports, Tracing Parenthetical Notes Mentions of Melancholy Undeveloped Photos and Addendums to Letters to Account for These Women’s Political Praxis, the Book Moving Away from the Tempting Debate About the Spectrum of Representation and Turning Instead to Practice and What Could Be Accounted For Achieved Learned From Built Upon or Avoided): Sanders Johnson uses the bountiful, yet largely ignored, textual archive of women’s rights politics — manifestos, essays, speeches, and research reports — to account for the women’s movement in the history of post-US occupation Haitian politics. The book attends to the small adjustments, like the LFAS author’s parenthetical notation, that open up the semilegibility of these women’s practice. Sanders Johnson offers that these women’s most profound articulations are found in the subtext of the spectacle of political performance — in parenthetical notes, mentions of melancholy, undeveloped photos, and addendums to letters. The book moves away from the tempting debate about the spectrum of representation articulated in the assemblyman’s 1946 comments, turning instead to practice: what could be accounted for, achieved, learned from, built upon, or avoided. Sanders Johnson is less concerned with the moral assessment of whether elite and middle-class women can represent themselves and other women than with how they represented and worked with women — or did not do so — within the multilayered spectrum of political and social locations in Haiti. Where other scholars have used LFAS women’s class status — signaled through education, wealth, religion, color, travel, comportment, and clothing — as a reason to question their politics, Sanders Johnson offers that their class performance is a place to dwell and study the intersections of gender, race, class, and culture. This attention to political practice and performance is not an erasure of these women’s privilege or exclusionary practices: as the book shows, these women were culpable in fortifying the very inequalities they sought to undo. But attending to their lives and work from the sole perspective of radical efficacy flattens the theoretical, practical, and historical complexity of their work, ideas, and ultimate outcomes.