Blog Post 5: Farah, Amanda, and Mario

           To start off this week’s blog post, I (Farah) would like to begin by looking at Saidiya Harmtan’s “Venus in Two Acts.” This was extremely powerful to me, and I feel that it’s exactly what I needed to read in order to remind myself of the importance of doing literary work. Hartman grapples with the hard work of how to go into the archives of history- specifically when thinking about slavery and the middle passage- and re-construct counter-histories that allow space for a potential “free state.” Her work in this essay particularly is focused on one particular young woman- known by the name of Venus – who was murdered while on a ship carrying her to be a slave in the United States. Venus is one of two girls who were killed by the Recovery’s captain, John Kimber, however her story is barely mentioned. Her death is referenced vaguely in the archives: “There was another girl on board the Recovery…whom they named Venus…”

        Hartman discusses her struggle to either write about or not write about Venus. She ultimately does not write about her because she says she fears she would have invented a “romance” where Venus and the other murdered girl would have struck up a friendship, loved each other, and comforted each other in the midst of horror. “But in the end I was forced to admit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic…I could not have arrived at another conclusion. So it was better to leave them as I had found them. Two girls, alone” (9).  But then Hartman goes on to wonder more deeply about how we can construct a free state from history. She asks, “Must the future of abolition be first performed on the page? By retreating from the story of these two girls, was I simply upholding the rules of the historical guild and the ‘manufactured certainties’ of their killers, and by doing so, hadn’t I sealed their fate? Hadn’t I too consigned them to oblivion? IN the end, was it better to leave them as I found them?” (10).  This discussion reminds me a lot of a discussion I had in my Blues Literature class this week on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Walker was critique by bell hooks for giving her protagonist, Celie, a fantastical “happy” ending that seemingly came without any form of collective struggle. However, I read it – as did many of my classmates- as a radical gesture of Walker to allow some sort of radical happiness and security for her character. As my professor said in class, in some ways Walker prioritized the notion of radical self-care above the idea of writing a critically “good” literary ending. Of course Hartman here is talking about constructing or re-constructing counter-histories, not fictions, but I found so much overlap between the two.

As Farah says, Hartman’s conundrum is about using the archives to (re)construct history, particularly the history of oppressed peoples. I think Lisa Lowe takes this argument one step further in arguing that we do need to reconstruct historical narratives because they themselves are highly constructed. Lowe provocatively argues that “The history of modernity is, in one sense, a history of liberal forms monopolizing the meaning of freedom for the human and denying it to others placed at a distance from the human” (89). In other words, our notions about freedom, constructed from a linear, teleological form of history, are themselves colonized. We’ve only known a colonized form of freedom, if we listen to dominant historical narratives. So how do we find freedom if we’ve never been free and never known what freedom actually means?

Well, for Lowe, we can devise a new meaning of freedom, and history, by reading dominant narratives radically as well as exploring alternative archives. She spends less time on talking about alternative archives because, I think, that seems sort of self-explanatory, and describes her global approach to colonial archives as asymmetrical and kind of metaphorically atemporal. Rather than read historical colonization in a linear fashion like cause and effect or influence, she takes a bunch of simultaneous events and reads them for their differences. She’s not interested in how countries employed similar rhetorics, but, rather, is focused on “unlike texts, places, scales, and operations to attend to the absent or overlooked and to specify different moments of coloniality operating as the discipline, subjugation, and organization of peoples into normative forms of subject, society, and state” (91). Lowe’s interaction with the canonical archive is to destroy the things that are canonical about it-instead of reading about slave trade that ends up in American and English contexts, she positions that slave trade with colonial operations in the other hemisphere. She rejects traditional readings and highlights the ways in which these different practices produced different definitions of liberalism and freedom that allowed the obfuscation of the underlying violence and horror. Thus, even the accounts of slavery that we presume to be “objective” (those cargo lists, etc, that seem devoid of affect so we think it’s a picture of how it “really was”) reveal their constructedness and we can find the silenced voices among them. Instead of thinking about history as this array of hegemonic facts, we should think about history as an emerging narrative that is always constructing itself in our present time through the ways we grapple with it. Returning to Farah’s insights, we can see that historians have made an Alice Walker type move-they’ve prioritized creating an objective history from the archives (and therefore participating in colonialism) above the idea of recovering or reconstructing absent voices.

Farah and Amanda have done a great job at explaining Lowes and Hartman’s articles I wish I could say that I do not need to contribute but alas, I must. Though in reality I do. Both Farah and Amanda bring up two issues that I noticed in the articles we were assigned and relate the research that I find pertinent to understanding my own roots and research interest, Central America. The 2 issues are as follows and I am paraphrasing my colleagues in this: how is a construct created by a dominant colonial narrative while excluding others and second, the aspect of liberty and its vast amount of meanings in the context of alternative histories. I will try to explain the latter a bit more as I go on.

However, first things first, I understand now why we read Williams, Kant, and Levine and want to give a grand nod to them, it helped me understand how history is in a sense of form constructed accorded to what is being recognized by the dominant group, in this case colonial. Now on to the first point, History is a construct, written by colonial powers that pushes out alternative and equally valid histories. Hartman discusses this pushing out of these alternative histories – such as that of Venus- by showing how they are ultimately portrayed under the colonial gaze, ridding other aspects of humanity such as romance. Here is the long quote:

There are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and these circumstances have generated few stories. And the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes. The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history (2)

This quote hits home and relates to my research in Central America. As an undergrad one of the quotes that struck me the most as I did research on the topic was “violencia es parte de salvadorenidad” (sorry not wanting to look for the source but it is academic) violence is part of salvadorenidad. This simple quote makes parallel to what Hartman states above in showing that the dominant narrative in history, in the case of El Salvador, a people plagued by violence, corruption, of trauma. Both types of quotes show how dominant histories of peoples abstract and fragment collective groups from a sense of spirit, culture, or history that can resist the dominant narrative or justification of something such as slave labor. This then brings in the aspect of recovery and Amanda makes a great point Levine does point out towards a necessity to recover alternative archives that illustrate a history that does not only show suffering or a singular role of a group but rather allows for multiplicity.

            Now very briefly onto the aspect or state of liberty. From my understanding, it seems that Hartman’s discussion of the “state of liberty” and Lowe’s discussion of “liberalism” are somehow linked together as a similar thing if not then I apologize.  The quote that interested was closer to the end of Lowe’s article in which they state:

I discuss liberalism as a formalism that translates the world through an economy of affirmation and forgetting within a regime of desiring freedom. The differentiations of race and nation, the geopolitical designations south, north, east, and west, and the attributions of fitness for life or death, modernity or extinction—these are all traces of liberalism’s affirmation and forgetting  . . . Hesitation may provide a space, a different temporality, so that we may attend to the meanings of slavery and freedom in our critical projects and reckon with the connections that could have been but were lost and are thus not yet—before we conceive the freedoms yet to come. (98)

Liberalism as a formalism of affirmation and forgetting within a dominant group is an interesting concept. As attempts to recover different histories and placing terms such as north or south or first and third world or even calling all Spanish cultures south of the border as Latin America causes a recovery of their histories but also forgets those of others. What Lowe seems to get at is that as societies attempt to construct an ideal of freedom or history they lose out or are force ignore the multiplicity of history that can resist or change their definition of liberty. That’s why Lowe’s idea of hesitation is so interesting because it attempts to observe already existent connections between histories instead of just constructing new ones through recovery.