Black Women's Writing Revisited

6      Hartman herself locates the text's raison d'etre in autobiography: she wants to engage the African-American community, and a wider black diasporic readership in a deconstruction of political mythologies of "Africa" while at the same time keeping slavery's time, creating a proactive counter-memory against the repeated and still repeatable loss of human lives in the Middle Passage. As she states very pointedly, she wants to counter mythical notions of the Africa as black haven with a painstaking recording of her encounters with the remnants of slave trading in Africa, including an unflinching look at African tribal elites' responsibility for this barter in human beings, for forsaking the "lost tribes." (235) Her authorial persona undertakes, as it were, a Middle Passage to Ghana in reverse, an imaginary reconstruction of centuries of slave trading of African-origin human beings from the previously non-existent, annihilated position of the human thing, the "commoner" as she terms it.

7      While Hartman's and Spillers' text crucially address what Spillers has called intramural conflicts, and while they have created vanguard theory for critiquing patriarchal and sexist hegemonies within black diasporic communities (a feature that they share with the radical purposes of dozens of African and black diasporic female writers in the last few decades who I cannot even begin to list here) that imminently 'homebound' term of address does not concern me here. I will offer a rather particular reading of Hartman's work. One her most compelling points in her first book Scenes of Subjection (1997), had been the exposure of white US American society's libidinal, emotional, cultural and legal investments in the enslavement and later, racist oppression of black people:

Although assertions of free will, singularity, autonomy and consent necessarily obscure relations of power and domination, the genealogy of freedom, to the contrary, discloses the intimacy of liberty, domination, and subjection. This intimacy is discerned in the inequality enshrined in property rights, the conquest and captivity that established 'we the people,' and the identity of race as property, whether evidenced in the corporeal inscriptions of slavery and its badges or in the bounded bodily integrity of whiteness secured by the abjection of others. (123)

Indirectly, Hartman extends this argument in her recent work, focusing on the triangularized inhumanity of 300 hundred years of trading in enslaved Africans executed by Africans and Arabs, by many European nations, and by Americans to the point of saturating the entire modern transatlantic world with its regime.

8      Black women writers have made it their prominent purpose to go behind the veiling screen (white) abolitionist memory left in the archives, and in white western public memory - which has been recently rejuvenated militantly in ubiquitous bicentennial celebrations. They have persistently raised the question: if slavery did create a modern "behavioral vortex of money, property, consumption and the flesh" (Bhana Young 4), what does that mean for critical thinking today, exactly? Tracing the slave trade in ways as visceral as it has been elusive in history's archives, Hartman's symptomatic reading of the "dead book", as she calls the vast archive of slavery, follows a particular textual strategy by which the trace of enslavement - a notorious deconstructive term in the arsenal of différance - becomes charged with referential value clearly in excess of its metaphorical workings. By way of a particularly striking example, I quote her description of her visit of the slave holding dungeons in Ghana's slave fort, Elmira, now a major tourist attraction:

Human waste covered the floor of the dungeon. To the naked eye it looked like soot. After the last group of captives had been deported, the holding cells were closed but never cleaned out. For a century and a half after the abolition of the slave trade, the waste remained. To control the stench and the pestilence, the floor had been covered with sand and lime. In 1972, a team of archeologists excavated the dungeon and cleaned away 18 inches of dirt and waste. They identified the topmost layer of the floor of the compressed remains of captives - feces, blood, and exfoliated skin. (115)

This strategy of re- referentializing becomes the crucial political lever for Hartman's text to turn the tables on slavery. Paradigmatically, Lose Your Mother calls for a shift of attention towards a protocol of white western investments in the effective system of enslavement. The very mass of details the text assembles to document, against the grain, the catalogued but previously neutralized transgressions of the trading machine, forces a white reader to reconsider the investment in, as well as the short - and long term benefits of the discourses and practices of enslavement for modern white European societies. Beyond its autobiographical context, and beyond its intramural address, Lose Your Mother needs to be read as a major contribution to theorizing transatlantic modernity as driven by the technological machinery, the economy, and epistemology of enslavement. As a sort of coterminous address, the texts contains a rather trenchant critique of - white - modernity:

Impossible to fathom was that all this death (the millions dying in the Middle Passage, my italics) had been incidental to the acquisition of profit and to the rise of capitalism. Today we might describe it as collateral damage. The unavoidable losses created in the pursuit of the greater objective. Death wasn't a goal of its own but just a by-product of commerce, which has had the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost. Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is, in effect, seen as already dead. Unlike the concentration camp, the gulag, and the killing field, which had as their intended end the extermination of a population, the African trade created millions of corpses, but as a corollary to the making of commodities. To my eyes this lack of intention didn't diminish the crime of slavery but from the vantage of judges, juries, and insurers exonerated the culpable agents. In effect, it made it easier for a trader to countenance yet another dead black body or for a captain to dump a shipload of captives into the sea in order to collect the insurance, since it wasn't possible to kill cargo or to murder a thing already denied life. Death was simply a part of the workings of the trade. (31)

9      As with Spillers' "Mama's Baby," I see this critique as a challenge to gender studies that reaches beyond both, the "add-on race approach" that dominated so-called multicultural gender studies in the nineties (see Wiegman), and in the early years of the 21 century; it also provides a rather skeptical angle on the more recently en-vogue discourse of intersectionality which has recently arrived in Germany, at least, with roughly a decade of time-lagging. (see Walgenbach et.al.) It seems to have fallen to a black female epistemological location to articulate the most radical cultural memory of transatlantic modernity, and to unearth a historical baggage of systematic dehumanization at the core of western contemporary societies that gender studies needs to address, because it is to those configurations of violence that gender as we know it, has to be traced. I am writing this against the long deplored but ongoing phenomenon in white feminist and gender studies theory to instrumentalize black women as ethnographical witnesses on their own plight, in direct and not so direct ways, and to constantly ignore or negate black women's theoretical, and critical input as relevant to gender studies as such.

10      After this exposition, let me now move to my close reading proper. How does a reading of the slave trade impact on theory for gender studies? The focus of Hartman's attention in her chapter "The Dead Book", and its accompanying article piece, "Venus in Two Acts" (2008) is on the black female doubly violated: first made into a mere thing, abject in her opaque human subjectivity which the machine of enslavement refuses to constitute in its own terms, and which thus does not exist. That absented claim to human subjectivity, secondly, also entails the dispensation of any access to human differentiation, according to categories like age, region, tribal origins, language, or what passed at the time for gender distinctions - except, crucially, for instructions about slave ship packing, and, of course, except for the suffering of so called sexual transgression and abuse enacted on what amounted to nothing more than a female anatomy. As Hartman writes, following her descent into the archives of enslavement - documents kept by slave ship captains, insurance companies, abolitionist pamphlets, doctors and legal institutions:

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, the display of the violated body, and inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore's life, an asterisk in the grand narrative history. (2008, 2)