Saidiya Hartman and Lisa Lowe each wrestle with the difficulty of recovering/reclaiming narratives of the enslaved African experience. The only accounts of the Middle Passage are unreliable records, tainted from ship captains and traders who were not held liable for their actions. Hartman points out that “there is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage” (3). Lowe argues that “even the most eloquent Black Atlantic or African American slave narratives . . . are limited by the archive and the conditions of possibility by which they could be read and written . . . [T]he publication of the slave narrative depended upon the white abolitionist editor and white reading public” (87-8). Together they show that accounts by the oppressed are either non-existent or else not necessarily their own, and both cases exhibit a loss. Both essays explore how current accounts of history belong to the enslavers and how to recover the lives of the enslaved.
In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman desires to fill in the blanks through a combination of narration and archival research to, in essence, rescue the women whose deaths were given no resolution. Above all, she wants to give the women’s lives meaning and to combat the stark underrepresentation they have in the trade logs. Further, “the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that ceased hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes” (Hartman 2). While Hartman acknowledges in one of her books that she ended up leaving out the women, “to leave them as I found them,” she ultimately finds that “what could have been” provides a more comprehensive approach (10-11). This form, a double gesture she calls “critical fabulation,” is “described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration” (11). While this process will not “resuscitate” the women from an unjust history, Hartman admits, it situates the deaths within the present, which is one of the greatest challenges as it forces the present to reconcile with intolerable injustices.
Archival research is problematic for both critics. Hartman wants to fill in the blanks through a combination of narration and archival research to, in essence, rescue the women whose deaths were given no resolution. However, this brings up various questions about the nature of historical representation. One issue is that by inserting stories where there are none “subjects the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence” (Hartman 5). It is possible by attempting to recreate an inventive history through narrative can be a disservice to the lives lost. Hartman also admits that the desire to provide a story for those we do not have one stems from wanting to comfort herself from the horrors of what she encounters in her research.
Although the archive for Hartman is an empty space she desires to fill, for Lowe, it is a place to understand the slave “technologies” that provide evidence for a critique of the systems that created them. Her aim is to view slavery as policy: through its instability, contradictions, and mechanisms for control. For Hartman, the archival research allows her to put together parts that do not go together to acknowledge the lack. Her aim is to “combine 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” (Lowe 91). This process is a departure from Hartman as it lessens the focus on the individual and emphasizes the universal impact.
Part of Hartman’s intention is to examine her role in controlling the enslaved woman’s narrative. She wants for the girl’s story to be recovered, but realizes she is limited by its present inexistence. Would piecing together a story that may not be perfectly true be a new silencing of the girl’s narrative? Is leaving the girl’s story untold actually a better way to stay true to her experience? What is the point of restoring this girl’s story? The girl is dead and cannot benefit from it. Does it benefit us, inheritors of the legacy of slavery? Are we trying to fill in these holes so that we can finally put the past away? Is it really impossible to move forward without all the answers? Hartman is deeply conflicted in her ideas about how best to honor the dead, as well as their living descendants. If we do leave the girl in the dark, leave her story untold, unrecovered, are we any different than those who wrote her experience for her in the first place?
Lowe is also concerned with “what is to be recovered and under what conditions” (85) in “History Hesitant.” Her main argument is that the system of “liberalism” that Europeans created and used in order to make ourselves more free and equal is responsible for otherizing and dehumanizing foreign peoples. Basically, she sees the system as contradictory for being unable to imagine unity without something to unite against. Europeans began colonizing and empire building, declaring themselves superior and affording opportunity to every man, but in order to do that had to enslave natives and Africans for labor. When Europeans incorporated Africans into the human category with their emancipation (if they were, in fact, really emancipated), a new labor source was required and shifted our otherizing to new continents. The system of liberalism requires that someone is less free than another. Furthermore, Lowe maintains that colonial practices resist being viewed temporally. Rather, the dehumanizing and racializing systems are ongoing and the effects still permeate worldwide, specifically through practices of exclusivity and inclusivity.
Lowe recommends “hesitating” to recover what is lost. By hesitating, we recognize that colonial acts exist and are made possible by “current epistemological orthodoxy” and may prevent the “risk [of] reproducing the very forms of violent erasure” that attempt to be corrected (Lowe 98). This suggestion confirms Hartman’s instinct to leave the girl in the dark and hesitate before filling in her story. For if we have the answers, what will we have to think about? We will forget about the holes and ignore all the possible ways they might have been filled in. But what are we waiting for? Hesitation implies further action that follows after the pause. Are we waiting for the present system to be past so as not to perpetuate these problems? Or is the hesitation to be permanent so that, like Hartman, we draw attention to a girl who had a story, note that the story is missing, observe the system which caused it to be lost, yet resist speaking for her?
My group also wrote on Hartman's piece, and one of the questions that you posed ("If we do leave the girl in the dark, leave her story untold, unrecovered, are we any different than those who wrote her experience for her in the first place?") caught my eye. I had come at this from the opposite direction, trying to think about the violence that was caused by imposing a narrative on the enslaved women--effectively, seeking to exert further control over their narrative under the guise of recovering their subjectivity, more so because we're already painfully aware of the vicious gate-keeping that determined how they were allowed to enter the historical record. I had assumed that it was implicit that their continued silence was a mark of historical violence, but your question highlights it as also being an act of complicity. By allowing their silence to continue, it suggests that we're not just allowing an old act of violence to sit but also perpetuating further violence against those who were silenced or written over. This creates a bit of a dilemma; one can't try to reconstruct the narrative but also can't leave it untouched. Critical fabulation seems like a plausible middle ground, though I do wonder if acknowledged speculation can do justice to what's been lost when all of its foundations are tinged with hegemonic Whiteness.
ReplyDeleteI've been also thinking about one of the questions you bring up at near the end of your post: "But what are we waiting for?" I was wondering about this in the last paragraph of Lowe's piece, where she writes this: "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). I saw in Lowe's argument the idea that recovery itself attempts an "affirmation of presence" in a vein of liberal freedom (98) and that this must create a pause, a hesitation. It's interesting to place this argument alongside Hartman's claim that the "necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future" (13). Hartman see a "necessity" here where Lowe calls for a hesitation, but at the same time, calls that necessity an "impossibility."
ReplyDeleteI think Lowe and Hartman are actually in agreement in regards to this notion of the seeming impossibility of recovery. I think, albeit quite differently, Lowe and Berlant are interested with articulating or positing an issue with temporality itself. To suggest going to the archive is a means of recovering a past, is to suggest that there is a past to go back to. If slavery, perhaps, is not a past condition then recovery doesn't seem possible. However, Lowe is still interested in recovery, later on using the term, "questioning recovery," whereas the present and past are situated along the same temporal plane, much like an extended present of crisis that Berlant talks about in Cruel Optimism. And Lowe, in her own way, seems to be asking the similar question of "when did the present begin?" (Berlant): "questioning recover...scrutinizes the present as both aftermath and continuity and calls attention to the conditions of slavery and colonialism that infuse the conditions, memories, and possibilities of the present" (86). Another way of phrasing that might be Hartman and Lowe's interest in the silences of these dominant archival materials, these gaps and absences, as places of haunting. Perhaps they are trying to merely make those hauntings legible without invoking or pantomiming the voices they do not and cannot have access to, but rather, acknowledge these bodies as speaking bodies rather than silenced ones.
ReplyDeleteI think Lowe and Hartman are actually in agreement in regards to this notion of the seeming impossibility of recovery. I think, albeit quite differently, Lowe and Berlant are interested with articulating or positing an issue with temporality itself. To suggest going to the archive is a means of recovering a past, is to suggest that there is a past to go back to. If slavery, perhaps, is not a past condition then recovery doesn't seem possible. However, Lowe is still interested in recovery, later on using the term, "questioning recovery," whereas the present and past are situated along the same temporal plane, much like an extended present of crisis that Berlant talks about in Cruel Optimism. And Lowe, in her own way, seems to be asking the similar question of "when did the present begin?" (Berlant): "questioning recover...scrutinizes the present as both aftermath and continuity and calls attention to the conditions of slavery and colonialism that infuse the conditions, memories, and possibilities of the present" (86). Another way of phrasing that might be Hartman and Lowe's interest in the silences of these dominant archival materials, these gaps and absences, as places of haunting. Perhaps they are trying to merely make those hauntings legible without invoking or pantomiming the voices they do not and cannot have access to, but rather, acknowledge these bodies as speaking bodies rather than silenced ones.
ReplyDelete