“Young black women were in open rebellion at the beginning of the twentieth century,” says Saidiya Hartman in her more than 400-page study “Rebellious Lives, Beautiful Experiments.” The scene of this hitherto rarely described rebellion is the north of the United States. Hartman, a professor of literature at Columbia University in New York, describes how soon after slavery officially ended, northern cities held the promise of a freer life. And how much enslavement and racist rule continued to have an effect in new forms.
The thesis of the lively “afterlife of slavery” has shaped Hartman’s work since her first book “Scenes of Subjection” published in 1997 and has been enormously influential for the theoretical positions of “Afro-pessimism”, which are now also being discussed in Germany. The assumption here is that the racialized violence of enslavement is also deeply anchored in Western modernity beyond the USA and has an impact on the present. In her last book, which – together with the collection of essays “Diese bittere Erde (is possibly not what it seems)” – is the first German translation of her work, Hartman combines this reflection with a vocabulary of hope: Even if the promise of At the end of racist rule, the black neighborhoods of places like New York and Philadelphia became places of social experimentation.
“How does one go to the scene of submission without reproducing the grammar of violence?”
Black women in particular, according to Hartman, were on the one hand exposed to multiple forms of violence, while on the other hand they can be described as “visionaries and pioneers” for new forms of coexistence. Hartman thus tells a double story: of racism and segregation, of exploitation, poverty and dependency on the one hand – and of resistance and escape, of the fleeting possibilities of a different life, of community and sensuality, on the other hand. She tells the story of the false promise of freedom as well as the actual moments of liberation. Excessive freedom within factual bondage.
This concern is marked by a particular difficulty, because the archives with which she approaches the lives of black women – the photographs and documents that form her material – are themselves components one their two stories. They are instruments of control and surveillance: prison records, sociological studies, newspaper articles. Hartman herself remains caught in the vicious circle—violent images are reproduced to show violence—even as she looks for ways out: “How do you enter the scene of submission without reproducing the grammar of violence?” Hartman asks in “Venus in two acts”, one of the most important essays in the volume “This bitter earth (is perhaps not what it seems)”.
She describes her way of dealing with this difficulty as a method of “critical fabulation”. The archive material becomes the occasion for a “counter-narrative”. When Hartman delves into the lives of black women, she makes them not the subject but the subject of her narrative. She doesn’t want to report on the women, but rather show “the world from their perspective” in order to liberate them from the violent nature of the archive and allow them to become active, feeling protagonists. To do this, she tries to adopt their language and their gaze, traces their thoughts and feelings, for example while strolling through the streets of Harlem, during an arrest or in a romantic relationship. She pulls into the scenes of her stories, builds streets and blocks of flats in front of the reader, captures the noises and smells in favor of a sensual style of writing that is unusual in the academic style.
Saidiya Hartman teaches at Columbia University, New York City, and publishes primarily on African American history.
(Photo: Uncredited/picture alliance/AP Photo)
Only in the massive appendix at the end of the book does it become apparent on what meticulous research work these stories, told in anecdotal mode, are actually based. In this way, Hartman’s work eludes conventional disciplinary classifications and moves with ease between empirical research, fictional storytelling and theoretical, even self-critical, reflection. Finally, the danger that her own narrative is just another, once again exposed look at black women cannot be dismissed out of hand. The hope that through this speculative, empathetic access to archives of violence and bondage another story of freedom can be told and the door to the “archive of the excessive” can be opened always remains precarious.
But what is this other story? Hartman finds in the urban lives of black women a lust for excess, a rollicking waste, a “rush of autonomy.” The expectations of middle-class marriage, traditional gender roles or ‘legitimate’ family relationships seemed hardly achievable for the women, because these expectations and ideas were based on living conditions, the components of a white bourgeois world, which they not only excluded, but basically defined themselves through their exclusion. But those who are excluded from the so-called normality can possibly break up what is considered normality and open up space for new forms of life and relationships. What it means to be a woman or a man, what relationships count as marriage, who counts as family and kin, what types of desire can arise beyond reproductive heterosexuality – all of this Hartman sees in the lifestyles of young black women being questioned and postponed. In this regard, black neighborhoods became places of refuge and longing for anyone in search of a different life beyond the ordinary: “Harlem was undoubtedly as queer as it was black.”
Saidiya Hartman: Unruly lives, beautiful experiments. About rebellious black girls, difficult women and radical queers. Claassen, Berlin 2022. 528 pages, 28 euros.
It is these “experiments” for free living that Hartman calls “beautiful”. The ability to make one’s own life an experiment for another, possible For her, making life becomes an aesthetic category: for her, “aesthetics” means “making an art out of survival”. In this sense, Hartman ascribes a crucial role to the stage, especially dance – as a play on the possibility of being someone else entirely: “The bodies in motion, bodies intimate and close, boldly assert what could be like black people maybe could live.”
She follows the lives of dancers and describes the variety show as a place of subversion, in which not only a specific kind of physicality and sensuality, but also forms of collectivity can arise: the “choir” or the “ensemble”, in which ” the limits of the “limited self” are lifted. In the same way, Hartman describes the collectivity in a prison riot, in which the young inmates protested the massive harassment of the wardens by setting fires, banging on walls — and with their noise, in their “readiness to lose themselves and become something to become greater”, formed a “choir, a crush, an ensemble, a mutual aid association”.
Saidiya Hartman: This bitter earth (may not be what it seems). Translated from the English by Yasemin Dinçer. August Verlag, Berlin 2022. 150 pages, 14 euros.
Insofar as Hartman is concerned with politics at all (she speaks more of rebellion, resistance, anarchy), this seems to be such politics of the ensemble, beyond political organization, beyond the logic of recognition and advancement, beyond ideology and pamphlet. Rather something that is found in the fleeting zones of indistinguishability between freedom and need, between repression and rupture, between violence and beauty, between potentiality and failure – in a spontaneous movement of directionless directionality: “The ensemble is the vehicle for a different kind of history, not that of the great man or the tragic hero, but one (…) in which the untranslatable songs and the seeming nonsense redeem the promise of the revolution.”
It is a great asset that both books – “Rebellious Lives, Beautiful Experiments” and the collection “This Bitter Earth (Ain’t Possibly Not What It Seems)” – are finally available in German. They speak to each other beautifully, meeting in a few places and bringing together different forms of reflection and storytelling. Both illustrate the uniqueness and importance of a thinker like Saidiya Hartman, who is not afraid to show the brutality and persistence of racist violence – and at the same time to think beyond it.