Black Women's Writing Revisited

16      (White) Gender Studies may decide to reflect self-critically on its own embeddedness in the Enlightenment proposal of human freedom which strategically split a certain group of humans, namely enslaved African-origin people, from the constitutive freedom to possess themselves and as such, from any access to subjectivity, which entailed, as Hortense Spillers above all has argued, a splitting of African-origin women from gender. If, thus, the knowledge of the slave trade and slavery will become the site of a re-reading of Enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity, a revised theoretical, and material approach to an epistemology of emancipation like Gender Studies will be possible. Gender Studies, too, lives "in the time of slavery," in the "future created by it" (Hartman 2007, 133). It is the economic, cultural and epistemic regime of human commodification, that transgressive nexus of violence, desire and property which first formed the horizon of the Euro-American modernity that US and European intellectuals, including Gender Studies, have known and claimed. The Enlightenment's proposal of human subjectivity and rights which was in fact inscribed into the world the slave trade and slavery had made (Blackburn), created a vertical structure of access claims to self-representation and social participation from which African-origin people, as hereditary commodities, were a priori abjected. It is on the basis of that abjection, that the category of woman, of gender as a framework to negotiate the social, cultural and economic position of white European women was created. To accept that the very constitution of gender as a term in European early modernity was tied to a social, cultural and political system which constitutively pre-figured "wasted lives," and an extreme precariousness of what constitutes human existence, throws contemporary notions of gendered subjectivity into stark relief. Hartman's work, therefore, may be read as just as axiomatic as Bauman's, Butler's or Agamben's in measuring postmodern global challenges to critical theory. Elaine Scary's, Susan Sontag's interventions on pain and voyeurism, and Spillers' or Wood's considerations, more specifically, on the sexualized campaigns of Anglo-American abolition, have compounded the challenge for an epistemology of slavery as a modern episteme not to recycle abolitionist titillation - the risk to become part of a second order abolitionist discourse must, however, be run. To play an active role in the project of decolonizing (post)modern critical theory, gender studies need to acknowledge and reckon with black de-colonial feminist interventions beyond add-on approaches. Those interventions will enable an epistemic turn away from the solipsistic quasi universal presentism of much of contemporary theory, and make it answerable to its own indebtedness to the history of early modern Europe, and the New World. Hartman's and Spiller's texts, as well as Morrison's writing become something like deconstructive guides: we are being asked to look, and listen with black women's perspectives - but at the same time the texts fold back on themselves, and thus on our reading; they disrupt a smooth appropriation of suffering, they derail us from a swift hate for the Thistlewoods (Mother, 61). Those texts under scrutiny here do enact a kind of self-conscious parasitism, forcing readers into complicity - but they refuse to do it innocently, disrupting a renewed take on slavery by way of abolitionist benevolence. They teach readers that the boundaries of the archive cannot be trespassed at will, and without consequence; and they also teach us to respect what Hartman calls, with Fred Moten, "black noise" (2008, 12).

17      "I, too, live in the time of slavery" - is a statement not yet widely enough echoed; gender theory needs to expose itself to the demands of modern history. At a time of rampant takeover by globalized forces of neo-liberalism, for (white) gender studies theory the challenge is to achieve agony instead of complicity with the corporate projects and, particularly in Europe, with the recent onset of a rampant eulogizing of Europe as the mythical ground of universal freedom. This urgency of the modern past as postmodern present may be shored up against all too flippant deployments of Agamben's, Bauman's or Butler's respective terms of "precarious lives" - terms which need to be reloaded with their entire modern history. (White) critical gender theory, as much as it has been a modern critical agent in the negotiation of patriarchal power, has also partaken in the violence of discursive formations that produced the disposable lives of "black flesh". Black women writers like Hartman, Spillers or Morrison argue for creating or maintaining - in the face of much postmodern indifference or abandon - a particular "relationship to loss". Their work, as formulated most clearly by Hartman, calls for a "redress project" which challenges white reading communities - in the present case, a reading public trained in gender studies, that is - to go beyond the confines of gender. To re-arrive in the time of slavery calls for a political orientation in support of "fugitive justice," in Best and Hartman's words,

to interrogate rigorously the kinds of political claims that can be mobilized on behalf of the slave (the stateless, the socially dead, and the disposable) in the political present. [...] [W]e are concerned neither with 'what happened then' nor with 'what is owed because of what happened then,' but rather with the contemporary predicament of freedom, with the melancholy recognition of foreseeable futures still tethered to the past. [...] [W]hat is the story about the slave we ought to tell out of the present we ourselves inhabit -- a present in which torture isn't really torture, a present in which persons have been stripped of rights heretofore deemed inalienable? (Best and Hartman, 3, 4)

Hartman (and her co-author, Stephen Best) have outlined a series of questions for the Redress Project, the most important in my context being the following:

· What is the violence particular to slavery? [...] What is the essential feature of slavery: (1) property in human beings, (2) physical compulsion and corporal correction of the laborer, (3) involuntary servitude, (4) restrictions on mobility or opportunity or personal liberty, (5) restrictions of liberty of contract, (6) the expropriation of material fruits of the slave's labor, (7) absence of collective self-governance or non-citizenship, (8) dishonor and social death, (9) racism? We understand the particular character of slavery's violence to be ongoing and constitutive of the unfinished project of freedom.
· What is the slave -- property, commodity, or disposable life?
· What is the time of slavery? Is it the time of the present, as Hortense Spillers suggests, a death sentence reenacted and transmitted across generations? (Best and Hartman, 5)

18      For the still largely white gender studies academic community in Europe to adopt itself to the redress project means a re-location into the time of slavery, into a genealogical continuum which reaches from the early modern period into postmodernity. This kind of "bracketing" gender might result in an expansion of urgently needed sites of cross-racial alliance, for gender studies to find a position from which to share not only postcolonial melancholia but also transcultural conviviality, as Paul Gilroy has recently phrased it. This conviviality requires white critical communities to read black women writers/critics work not as ethnography, but as lessons in decolonization itself. Working through Fred Moten's In The Break, Hartman postulates:

By throwing into crisis "what happened when" and by exploiting the "transparency of sources" as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe "the resistance of the object," if only by first imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity, trying to narrate "the time of slavery as our present," to "imagine a future in which the afterlife of slavery has ended," and finally, to move beyond "the ongoing state of emergency on which black life remains in peril. (2008, 11, 12)

Euro-American modern societies created the paradox of dehumanized but at the same time racialized and hyper-sexualized group of about 12 million people at the locomotive disposal of white ownership. As black writers have insisted for generations, and Hartman's work confirms yet again, this transatlantic moment of early modernity amply qualifies as the first instance of "the lager." Beyond an innocence of 'gender' as a category rooted in a narrative of universal freedom, the political point that Gender Studies needs to adjust itself to is to trace its own story as much to a story of the realization of subjectivity as to a story of abjection, and foundational commodification of black human beings.