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Hartman Wilderson - Position of The Unthought
Hartman Wilderson - Position of The Unthought
13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 183-201 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686156 Accessed: 17/11/2010 01:54
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Frank B. Wilderson,
1 of the firstthings want to say ishow thankful Iam that you wrote Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, I and Self-Making inNineteenth-Century America. And want to say Ill- One
and as someone aspiring academic ingeneral, when one in the machine but not of it.Because caught one is another black scholar reads the work of black scholars - if one prepares oneself for a disappointment, or or a black student into the reading. And one doesn't have to works a disappointment uate studenta so-called do thatwith this particular book. 1 is that so often in black What mean, scholarship, people or unconsciously peel away from the strength and the consciously inorder to propose some kind of coherent, terrorof their evidence in moving through these hopeful solution to things. Your book,
And
scenes of subjection as they take place in slavery, refuses to do that. to think that just as importantly, itdoes not allow the reader therewas
a radical enough break to reposition the black body after it, is that itcorroborates the experience of
and of strange black people likeyou black people today, ordinary andme intheacademy [Iaughter].
Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2003
important about
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
the registers of subjectivity as being preconscious interest, or identifications, and positionality, then a lot unconscious identity of the work in the social sciences organizes itselfaround precon about interest; itassumes a subject of consent, and as you have a subject of exploitation, which you reposition as the subject said, of accumulation.2 Now when this sort of social science engages the itassumes that itcan if and when itdoes issue of positionality do so in an un-raced manner. That's the best of thework. The worst scious is a kind of multiculturalism that assumes we all have identities that can be put into a basket of stories, and analogous then that basket of stories can lead to similar interests. Forme, what you've done in this book is to split the hair here. In other words, this is not a book that celebrates an essential Afrocentrism that could be captured by the multicultural discourse. And yet it'snot a book that remains on the surface of preconscious
I want
to
of the work
which so much history and social science does. Instead, it interest, demands a radical racialization of any analysis of positionality. So. Why don't we talk about that? - Well! That's a lot, and a number of things Saidiya V Hartman come tomind. I think forme the book isabout the problem of craft
whole
issue of empathic identification is central forme. Because it seems that every attempt to emplot the slave in a narrative ulti just mately resulted in his or her obliteration, regardless of whether it was a leftistnarrative of political agency the slave stepping into or someone else's shoes and then becoming a political agent -
ing a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionali ty, asking, "Who does that narrative enable?" That's where the
was about being able to unveil the slave's humanity whether it by oneself inthat actuallyfinding position.
was was trying to do as a cultural historian Inmany ways, what I to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the limits of most available narratives to explain the one hand, the slave is the foundation
185
of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the posi mean to try to tion of the unthought. So what does it bring that into view without making ita locus of positive value, or position
implicitly integrationist even lary/imaginary/desires have been when we imagine our claims are more radical. This goes to the sec ond part of the book that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is towards an integration into the national project, and partic always ularly when that project to affirm it. is in crisis, black people are called upon
What
orable
investment in certain notions of the subject and subjection, then that language of freedom no longer becomes thatwhich res cues the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that condition, F.W This rather than its transformation.
isone of the reasons why your book has been called "pessimistic" by Anita Patterson.3 But it's interesting that she does n't say what I said when we first started talking, that it'senabling. I'm assuming that she's white I don't know, but it certainly sounds like it. integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider obscene: the But I think there's a certain
S.VH. -
lastfewcenturies, but to stillfinda way to feelgood about our selves.That's notmy projectat all, though I thinkit's actually the of a numberof people. Unfortunately, kind of social the project revisionist undertaken many leftists the 1 in 970s, who history by were trying locate theagencyof dominatedgroups, resultedin to it narratives theoppressed.4 of celebratory Ultimately, bled intothis
attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for cel ebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
celebration, as iftherewas a space you could carve out of the ter in order to exist outside its clutches and rorizing state apparatus some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in partic one of my hidden polemics in the book was an argument ular, against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been forge taken up in the context of looking at the status of the slave. it's something FW -
That's very interesting, because thinking about also in respect toGramsci. suggests that Gramsci
I've been
Harriet
Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,7 a white anti-slavery which to talk about this. Now, what's really Northerner, as ways in interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of of Power," you not only explain how the positional ity black women and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness dis we are to think of that notion as articulates the notion of consent, if
hegemony into three influence, leadership, and consent.5 Maybe we could categories: the discussion back to your text then, using the examples of bring
Sassoon
breaks down
master
"[B]eing forced to submit to the will of the in all things defines the predicament of slavery" (S, 110). In other words, the female slave isa possessed, accumulated, and fun gible object, which is to say that she isontologically different than universal. You write: who may, as a house servant or indentured labor er, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for a white woman nonconsent
[as regards, in this case, sex] is required to establish if refusal is not an option.... consent, for consent ismeaningless Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very notion of sub jectivity is predicated S. V.H. upon the negation of will" (S, 111).
Once again, trying to fit into the other's shoes becomes the very possibility of narration. In the chapter "A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl's Life," the question for Jacobs is how she can tell that story
187
can tell a story about sexuality that's meaningful in a white domi nant frame. And I think this is why someone like Hortense Spillers
ing subject, she has to deny the very violence, which elsewhere she said defines her position as a slave: her status as a thing and the negation of her will. In one sense, she has to bracket that so she
Jacobs as an agent versus the objective conditions in which she finds herself. This is something you talk about in your work as well, this existence in the space of death, where negation is sion between the captive's central possibility for action, whether we think of that as a radical refusal of the terms of the social order or these acts that are sometimes called suicide or self-destruction, but which are real lyan embrace of death. Ultimately it'sabout the paradox of agency for those who are in these extreme circumstances. And basically, there are very few political narratives that can account for that.
raises the question of whether gender and sexuality are at all applicable to the condition of the captive community.8 I That's what was working with there, that impossibility or ten
F.W -And
world"9 and "puts the settler out of the picture."10 So, itdoesn't help
trajectory of our life (within our terrain of civil death) isbound up in sometimes individually, sometimes collectively the claiming violence which Fanon writes about in The Wretched of the Earth, that trajectory which, as he says, is "a splinter to the heart of the
we have to ask my own work, obviously I'm not why. In that in this space of negation, which isblackness, there is no saying We have tremendous life.But this life is not analogous to those life. touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the
live isanalogous to how white positionality lives, because, as I think your book suggests, whites gain their coherence by knowing what
are on they not.There istremendous diversity theside ofwhiteness and tremendous conflict betweenwhite men and white women, between Jews and gentiles, and between classes, but thatconflict,
even in itsarticulation, has a certain solidarity. And I think that sol idarity comes from a near or far relation to the black body or bod ies. We give the nation itscoherence because we're itsunderbelly.1
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
S.V.H. Mbembe's
work, colonized subject merly way of defining the predicament. the object F.W. to whom squandered with impunity.12
Essentially, he says, the slave is can be done, whose life can be anything
so interesting for me about Achille he thinks about the position of the for along the lines of the slave as an essential
nefarious uses of slave property" and then demonstrates how "there was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, enti tlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of are formally enslaved blacks proper slavery" (S, 24). So. Not only but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibil ty,
means to be a slave is to And he's suggesting thatwhat it a kind of complete appropriation, what you call be subject to "property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and
which you demonstrate how ing about your argument is theway in not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the proper and this is really keythe ty of white enjoyment, but so is that too belongs
of ity becoming property isone of the essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intrigu
to
which
the ability to occupy blackness was considered transgressive or as a way of refashioning whiteness, and therewere all these rad ical claims thatwere being made for it.14 And I thought, "Oh, no, this is just an extension of the master's prerogative." Itdoesn't mat terwhether you do good or you do bad, the crux is that you can
was writing Scenes of Subjection, Right. You know, as I there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-century culture and on minstrelsy in particular. And there was a certain sense in
choose todo what youwish with theblack body.That's why think of material rela ingabout thedynamicsof enjoymentinterms the
tions of slavery was F.W -Yes, so key forme. that's clarifying. A body that you can do what you want
189
of the body as the property of enjoyment, what I really like iswhen you talk about Rankin. Here's a guylike the prototypical twentieth-century white progressive - who's anti-slavery and uses his powers of observation towrite for itsabo with.
In your discussion
in the South, he's lition, even to his slave-owning brother. He's a slave coffle, and he imagines that these slaves being looking at it beaten could be himself and his family. Through this process sense to him, itbecomes meaningful. His body and his fam members' white bodies become proxies for real enslaved black ily
makes
bodies and, as you point out, the actual object of identification, the slave, disappears. S.V.H. I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical ques West: the status of difference and the tions/problems/crises for the status of the other. It's as though in order to come to any recogni tion of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: "Only if Ican see myself in that position can
state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be .. . exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to F.W.[laughter] A nigga on the warpath!
I understand the crisis of that position." That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see everyday the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist
was those moments thatwere the most S. V.H. Exactly! For me it the moments of the sympathetic ally, who in some ways telling is actually no more able to see the slave than the person who is exploiting him or her as their property. That is the work Rankin does and I think it suggests just how ubiquitous that kind of vio lence, in fact, is. F.W You've just thrown something into crisis, which
is very
much on the table today:the notionof allies.What you've said (and I'm so happy thatsomeone has come along to say it!) is that
the ally
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
to borrow from Fanon's The Wretched of of blacks, due to this means to be the Earth again "species" division between what it a means to be an object: a structural antago subject and what it
there isenough of a structural commonality between the black and the white (working class) position their mantra being: "We are forone to embark upon a political ped both exploited subjects" agogy thatwill somehow help whites become aware of this "com monality." White writers posit the presence of something they call "white skin privilege," and the possibility of "giving that up," as their gesture of being in solidarity with blacks. But what both ges tures disavow
nism. But everything in the academy on race works off of the ques tion, "How do we help white allies?" Black academics assume that
is that subjects just can't make common cause with objects. They can only become objects, say in the case of John Brown or Marilyn Buck, or further instantiate their subjectivity
through modalities of violence (lynching and the prison industrial complex), or through modalities of empathy. In other words, the essence of the white/black relation is that of the essential master/slave regardless of itshistorical or geographic specificity. And masters and slaves, even today, are never allies. S.V.H. a Right. I think of the book as an allegory; history of the present. itsargument is
F.W -
sent. Because
at the moment.
Thank you! I'm so glad you said it'san allegory of the pre now we've got two problems on the table, two crises we have many crises, but only two that I can identify or rather, One is how we deal with the common sense
be in teaching literature to undergraduates around allies, whether it or going to hear Cornel West speak with Michael Lerner, or listen
as is community actuallyas big an enemy toblack revolution Newt And theother I could put as, "How do you go to the Gingrich.
movies?" How does anything? Because going to communicate one, knowing what one it seems like every film knows, sit through if it is in any way can
191
walk
away with
S.VH. -
Yes, yes. Monster's Ball is a great example.15 Not only is Leticia's husband executed, but her son must also die as the pre with her husband's executioner. And the condition for her new life
requirement is rendered as a romance. Rather than closing a note of ambivalence, the film actually ends with her smiling with over the romantic music, as ifto suggest that she's gotten over it, and the future awaits them. And I think that is the frightening death hypocrisy of the context we are living in. There's also the filmUnfaithful where the lover has to be mur
dered
inorder to protect the heterosexual family.16 The white bour can actually livewith murder in order to reconstitute geois family itsdomesticity. F.W Well, why does white in the visual? supremacy seem to be so bound up
I think that visually, the threat of blackness is somehow Fanon's "Look! A Negro": that's the formulation, and heightened. within the racial classificatory schema that is how much of the work isdone, especially in terms of theway racialization has oper ated: how itdisposes of bodies, how itappropriates their products, and how it fixes them in a visual grid. I think those are the three as, again, thiswhole
S.VH. -
ways Iwould explore that problem, as well dimension of the empathic. F.W One
of the things I wanted to bring up is how your book is talking to other very important books. It's talking to Fanon as you've said, and it's talking to Patterson's Slavery and Social Death.17 And of the '70s, and the univer
falls short helpingus of salizingofGramscianhegemonythatreally a position incivil society, notof civil society.Ithas but understand todo, Ithink, with how the idiom power that of black people expe
rience has different kinds of manifestations as we move from slav ery into the era of the Freedmen's Bureau, but there's an umbrella
of despotism
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
book
was so refreshing, because one isan allegory of the present, it can read this book and begin to metaphorize the manifestations of itcontinues in
despotism in the past, and also to think about how the present. S.VH. -
It really is the pressing question of freedom. That's why for the last lines of the book summon up thatmoment of poten me,
tiality between the no longer and the not yet. "Not yet free": that articulation is from the space of the twenty-first century, not the the same nineteenth, and that's the way it's supposed to carry predicament, FW. -And was ass the same condition.
accused
in those termswe might think about how Rodney King of inviting his own beating; you know, he shook his an aggressive manner at a white woman. So maybe you in
could sketch out theway in which the black woman functions sim as somehow outside the statutory, or inside it: she ilarly in slavery, cannot be raped because invite the rapist. S. VH. she's a non-person yet she ispresumed
to
ognize no such crime. Often when I'm looking through the crimi nal record of the nineteenth century, I'm seeing the text of black agency. The people who are resisting their masters and overseers
appear in the records as they're prosecuted for their crime, creating In this displacement of culpability that enables white innocence. the case of State ofMissouri v. Celia (1855), Celia is raped repeat edly by her owner from the moment she's purchased. She begs him to stop; he doesn't, so she kills him. Her crime is the crime on record: she is the culpable agent.18 So in this formulation of law and
itspunishment, blackness
most part, it's Who is the responsible and culpable agent?For the
always
193
F.W -
Which
industrial complex. Actually, I've got an interesting tidbit. I think that Den mark Vesey was the first person ever imprisoned in the South Carolina Penitentiary. F.W S.V.H. comes Really? It's like a seamless transition from slavery to prison. S.VH. -
where the larger narrative of capitalism Right. And this is in the world, into play. Because, basically, inmost places you have a transition from slavery to other modes of involuntary servitude. Inmy work, I critique the received narrative about the transition from slavery to freedom in the American context, but we could also look at that same kind of transformation in relation to
the anti-slavery rhetoric that comes to legitimize the colonial pro ject inAfrica. By the nineteenth century, slavery was the dominant inWest Africa. Eventually, the European mode of production nations decided "This is an awful institution and we
it," so we get King Leopold masking his atrocities the discourse of anti-slavery, or British colonial figures inGhana effectively saying, "Well, we saved you from the slave raider so you should be grateful."19 In both cases, it's the same notion: "We've inour debt." in your book where
The good conduct encouraged by such counsels eased the transition from slavery to freedom by imploring the freed to continue in old forms of subservience, which primarily entailed remaining on the plantation as faith ful, hardworking, and obedient laborers, but also included manners, styles of comportment inwork rela
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
the criminalization
of impudence
enjoying this newly conferred equality. Despite procla mations about the whip's demise, emergent forms of involuntary servitude, the coercive control of black labor, the repressive instrumentality of the law, and the social intercourse of everyday life revealed the entan glements of slavery and freedom. (S, 151) So. There's thiswhole army of white people missionaries, edu and the like who go down South to help rehabilitate the cators, Negro after slavery. And in reading that, a wave of cynicism swept over me, because all of a sudden I thought of Freedom Summer, and the white to have. S.V.H. students in SNCC, which is a blasphemous thought
be productive. And here as everywhere else in theworld, you need violence to make a working class. So what you see are the various means utilized to do that: forms of state violence, extra-state vio
It's too immediate, but yes. Imean, it's incredible: these have made the nation rich and have been working people or not they can actually suddenly there's this question of whether
lence, and the values propagated by moralizing and religious dis courses. And what's interesting is that the black elites become the purveyors of those very values. Kevin Gaines has shown inUplifting the Race how inmany ways the agenda of the black elite is reac
tionary and they are, in effect, the handmaidens of the state.20 For example, in the black feministwork on marriage, I think there's been a one-sided assessment of the institution: the enslaved denied
were
marriage, so now they have access to it and can secure the bonds of their love.21 But it'salso being enforced as part since of an agenda of social control. And it'salso being utilized -
195
to force black men to interracial marriages are prohibited assume the responsibility for the offspring of white men and black women. So in that context, what does itactually mean tomake the ex-slave into a certain kind of subject? And, again, who does that
serve? It is an agenda for creating dutiful workers, and instilling in them a desire for consumption so that they become dependent to the self-sufficient peasants that they upon wages, as opposed otherwise choose to be.
would F.W -
Now, it's really tricky here for us, as black intellectuals, we staywith the second half of the book, as you've said, if because we've got thiswave of do-gooders moving down to the South with these Freedmen Bureau books on everything from these tomes are white and hygiene, to how to speak and what to do. Some some are black. And this is very much like 1964 with SNCC and the white Freedom Riders, and maybe very much like 1999, with the prison abolition movement.22 But, you know, the black ...
S.V.H. -
If I'm clear about what you're getting at, I think it'sthe dif ference between those who wanted to aid the newly freed to fit into the social order and those who had a vision of black freedom that about transforming the social order, about the promise of the revolution, and ultimately, about Jubilee. So I think that's one way
was
solidarity forces in relation to the ambitions and desires of the for merly enslaved community. F.W -
But there is something that the people producing this lib eral discourse of accommodation don't seem to understand that I want to bring to the fore. Evelyn Hammonds in her article on black some kind of conflict a female sexuality suggests that there is
on of Wells prototype conflict the level ideas between the Ida B. are and theBessie Smithprototype.23 both prototypes doing But work on black femalesexuality under theumbrellaof despotism. we And in terms how thatdespotism of manifests itself visually, todeconstruct what Icall settler and by that I narratives, might try mean films like Frin Brockovich, which was reallyabout how
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
over brown and black people, but whose mise-en is reinscribed, at the level of the bodily code, with a whole plethora of Jacksonian white people.24 PG&E messed scene S.V.H. who You're right, because 99.5% of U.S. is a totally You're the only one cinema
instrumental pernicious propaganda machine. seems to realize that [laughter]! You know!
F. W
scenes of Rambo the despotism, get a job.25 S.VH. pernicious F.W allegory. S.VH. -
I'm categorically uninterested in those horrific I'm interested in is killing colored people. What trying to
text is revealed.
Minority Report?26 I went to see was it,but it sold-out. It seems like another
It is, and, of course, what's interesting is that you're in this future where one can pinpoint the "pre-crime." placed Spielberg, trying to be liberal, doesn't have criminals represented as black, but we know that the state machine is a
racializing machine, yet this fact iseffaced in the film. It's interesting that every crime that occurs in the film is a crime against the family.And like every Spielberg film, family values support a eugenics agenda the reconstitution of the white bourgeois family. Even the white working class ispathologized. The space of theworking poor is rife with nineteenth-century metaphors that could be right out of one of my Freedmen's primers: disorder, dirt, sexual impropriety [laugh ter]. This is the twenty-firstcentury anticipation of the future. culture,
I think that there is a struggle to maintain one's sanity in a context in which your consciousness is at war with the given. There's nothing that's simple or taken for granted. EW No, it's all very complicated. And this iswhy Africans say
197
we're
are complex just too complex. They think black Americans I'm very jealous of the African position and moody and depressive. inmany ways. There are all these therapeutic grounding wires, so is slapping them down, they've got this whole when apartheid other psychic space S. V.H. doesn't that they just go into.
House, white people than Africans because colonialism didn't exact the same psychic damage.27 Idon't believe that, I think that's an untrue statement. I think that there's definitely a difference between we who are of theWest
Although I'm very suspicious of the notion that theAfrican also occupy that depressive personality. In InMy Father's are angrier at Anthony Appiah says thatAfrican-Americans
and people elsewhere, but I really challenge is the psychic damage of apartheid that supposition because tremendous. When you look at certain African writers, say Achille and the other so-called "Afro-Pessimists" who are
Mbembe
diag of the colonial nosticians of their society, you see the consequences as extreme or radical as inour case project. The trauma may not be because F.W we're
I still literally living inside this order, but would greatly qualify these positive assessments of African subjectivity. And in those living in this order, black people are still doing the innocent scenes. They're doing the work of dying; in are doing the work of recognizing white women in Mildred
work
Pierce;28 and black men are performing thework of recognizing the sexual virility of white men. That's real to do and still live under ly importantwork thatwe're called upon the specter of despotism. So maybe we're still club was. We're
B.Wells
- where the Ida and this isvery tragic so that they trying to make ourselves over is, "Where do we go
from here?" W F. S.VH. Is that leading us to reparations? Yes. I've been thinking about the notion of focusing one's
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
The reparations appeal to the very state that has inflicted the injury. movement puts itself in this contradictory or impossible position, because reparations are not going to solve the systemic ongoing or any other terms. And production of racial inequality, inmaterial like inequality, racial domination and racial abjection are pro
across generations. In that sense, reparations seem like a very limited reform: a liberal scheme based upon certain notions of commensurability that reinscribe the power of the law and of the duced state to make
once
a right certain situation, when, clearly, itcannot. I think too that such thinking reveals an idealist trap; it'sas if Americans know how the wealth of the country was
mantled, even though it's actually going to affect more white women and children than black people? Because ithas to do with an antipathy to blackness that structures .. . that political will and FW. -
are owed something. My acquired, they'll decide that black people God! Why would you assume that? Like housing segregation is an I think that logic of "if they only knew otherwise" is accident! is the welfare state dis about the disavowal of political will. Why
That structures institutions. And your work on empathy shows that; ithelps us to understand how important blackness is to the libidinal economy of white institutionality.Now, I think I'm fair in generally characterizing the reparations debate and those who've renewed it Randall Robinson and company by saying that they got a tiger by the tail, and then didn't want the tiger to do reparations people present the issue to blacks as is an essentially historical phenomenon that ended, though slavery but the effects ofwhich put blacks at what they call, you know, "an its thing.29 The unfair disadvantage" ing theAmerican
waste a political dull theknife, weapon, they they keep the literally
tiger in the cage, because
to those inother positions who are also chas dream. Through such a move the reparations folks here is a weapon which
199
differently from the way it'spresented. One could present a repa rations agenda in theway in which you present your book, dealing moves from genera with the despotism of black positionality as it tion to generation, from historical moment to historical moment with despotism beirig the almost ahistorical constant. Unleash the
as a weapon that could precipitate a cri thing to be achieved, but sis inAmerican institutionality, then itcould be worked out a lot
S. VH. -- At the very least thatwould social order. F.W. -Yes, theywould
troubles any Rather, Hartman argues that the contiguity of forms of subjection and freedom, so that the text of freedom absolute division between slavery as of Subjection: laden with the vestiges of slavery. Saidiya V. Hartman, in Nineteenth-Century Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making
form. The slave is thus the object that must be de-ani changing commodity inorder to be exchanged and thatwhich, by contrast, defines the mean mated ing of free labor. Anita Patterson, "Scenes Nineteenth-Century America/' of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making African-American vol. 33, no. Review,
in 4
Slave
(Winter 1999): 683. See, for example,George Rawick,FromSundown toSunup: The Making of the The Slave Community: AntebellumSouth (Oxford: Ox PlantationLife in the ford and Press,1979);Herbert Gutman,TheBlack FamilyinSlavery University
(New York: Pantheon, 1976); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture, Black Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973); John Blassingame,
Freedom
Anne
Consciousness (Oxford: Slave OxfordUniversity Press, 1977); Sterling Stuckey, Culture (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987).
Showstack 1982). Sassoon, Approaches to Gramsci (London: Writers and
6
7
in HarrietJacobs,Incidents theLife a SlaveGirl, of Written Herself,ed. Jean by Yellin (1861; reprint, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1987). Fagan Cambridge,
John Rankin, Letters on American Universities Press, 1970). Slavery (1837; reprint, Westport, CT: Negro
Readers,
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SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
8 9 10 11
An American Grammar J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: 17 (Summer 1987): 65-81. Book," Diacritics trans. Charles Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Lam Markmann (New as B. York: Grove Press, 1967), Hereafter cited parentetica!ly Frantz Fanon, York: Grove Wilderson The Wretched 1968), 44. of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New Press,
Hortense
mean tobe white? But tion: What does it what's remarkableisthediversity of that debates thisquestionon opinions surrounding question: as each territory one finds uniform no its definition the way to statehood, regarding inside/out
or even But from territory of whiteness, side, the boundaries quasi-whiteness. to territory there is absolute consistency in the relegation of blackness towhat Fanon calls a Even the dereliction dereliction. of the position of absolute is often best understood, libidinally, through the black body.
It's interesting to note how, in the nineteenth century, as expands: ? etc. ? the Jacksonians Scots, Irish, Catholics, farmers, cowboys, yeomen are access to civil society, those demands are enabled demanding by the ques
Native American
I'm thinking graffiti a men's bathroom:The Indian is living of in proof thatthe fuckedthebuffalo. nigger 12 See AchilleMbembe, On thePostcolony (Berkeley: of University California
13 "[EJnjoyment was attributed to the slave in order to deny, dis the violence of slavery. . . .Thus the efficacy of violence place, and minimize was indicated precisely by its invisibility or transparency and in the copious ... As Slavoj Zizek notes, fantasies about the other's display of slave agency. are ways for us to (25). enjoyment organize our own enjoyment" Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and See, for example, American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Marc Forster, Monster's Ball, 35mm, 111 min., Lion's Gate Films, 2002. Adrian Lyne, Unfaithful, 35mm, 124 min., tion with Fox 2000 Pictures, 2002. Patterson, Slavery and Social a Slave, Epsilon Motion (Cambridge, Pictures MA: the Press, 2002). Hartman writes:
14 15 16 17 18
in associa Uni
Orlando
Death
Harvard
File 4496,
19 See Patrick West Africa (Cambridge: Manning,Slaveryin CambridgeUniversity Mariner Press, 1987), andAdam Hochschild,King Leopold'sGhost (NewYork: 20
21
County
Courthouse,
Court, October
Books,
1999).
22
201
to institutionality (civil society). In both these twentieth-centu rygestures, just as Hartman points out with respect to the Freedmen's Bureau of the nineteenth century, the oppositional force and desire of black antago not that demand to which all other positions must succumb, Prince, and be assimilat
uplift, in access
what leads, is nism,the forceand desireof objects ina world subjects, isnor
or Gramsci's Bureau
Modern
the revolutionary
party,
movements
23
24
in Feminist Genealogies, of Silence," Colonial Legacies, Demo cratic Futures, eds. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpad? Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997). Problematic Steven Soderbergh, Erin Brockovich, 35 mm, 130 min., Universal Studios, 2000.
was foundational to 25 Wilderson further white supremacy suggests:In real life, consumers who thestory California's largest of poisoningand killingits utility were people of color. But inthe film,literally all thecases that of Brockovich mom and a to (as a whiteworkingclasswoman trying be a single investigates speak to atmass paralegal),and 99% of thebodieswhich she and theattorney We're right with small merchantsand yeomen back to thenineteenth century
the railroads, and farmers, homesteaders, tyrannized by the big corporations, the national bank: a national tragedy made possible only by the disavowal of slavery's intensification and the Trail of Tears. Report, 35mm, 146 min., 20th Century Fox, 2002. meetings ? of the plaintiffs, are white the white American ruralworking class.
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