Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments/Thick and Other Essays

I hope everyone had a fulfilling week. Next week, we will read the chapters "A Minor Figure" and "An Unloved Woman" from Saidiya Hartman'sWayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval and the chapters "Thick" and "In the Name of Beauty" from Tressie McMillam Cottom's Thick and Other Essays. It's a lot of pages to read (over 100 total I think), but they go by quickly. 

However, it is important to recognize that the fluidity of Hartman and Cottom's prose is not the result of a lack of academic rigor or intellectual complexity. Rather, Hartman and Cottom have both spent decades working with and against the language of their academic disciplines (history/English and sociology, respectively) to craft methodological and rhetorical techniques that are capable of demonstrating the constructedness of identity and the archive, as well as how our relationships with ourselves and others are filtered through the established narratives of academic disciplines. How do we know what we do not know, at least not yet? What are the historical and structural causes of our fears, our anger, our feelings of alienation, and the gratuitous violence of everyday life? 

Saidiya Hartman began forming answers and questions in response to these queries in her 1996 monograph, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. In the second half of Scenes, Hartman delves into her idea of the "internalization of the whip" by Black Americans post-emancipation. In a very Foucaultian move, Hartman posits after emancipation, the racial, libidinal, and economic logic of slavery persisted through the ways that Black Americans disciplined their own bodies, desires, political projects, and representations of themselves within the "white" world. In the chapter "Instinct and Injury," Hartman writes, "It proved virtually impossible to break with the past because of the endurance of involuntary servitude and the reipscription of racial subjection. Rather, what becomes starkly apparent are the continuities of slavery and freedom as modes of domination, exploitation, and subjection." Hartman's intervention here was/is controversial and desperately needed because it rejects the idea of history as a progress narrative. "The arc of the moral universe,"  as Martin Luther King described it, may very well not inevitably lean toward justice, at least not for those who were dispossessed and subjugated at the moment of the metaphorical "big bang" which created our modern discursive universe. This idea links nicely with Hortense Spillers' description of Black women as the "beached whales" of the sexual universe in "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words." Spillers, like the sociologist Emile Durkheim, is using the word "universe" to refer to the grammar or genealogy of ideas that we are able to access to describe ourselves. In this sense, Black women are rendered "beached whales" or interstitial within the discourse of 20th century feminist criticism. The universe constituted by language is not reducible to the infinite variations within human experience, meaning the complexity which resides in the underside of the stereotype.

Additionally, Spillers' examination of first, second, and third orders of discourse in "Interstices" anticipate Hartman's creation of a methodology called critical fabulation in her essay, "Venus in Two Acts" (2008). Hartman describes her method as "laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. This double gesture can be 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." Just as Spillers observed how biases and elisions that occur in the first order of discourse are repeated and intensified (though made intentionally difficult to identify) in the second and third orders, Hartman recognizes that the task of painting a "full picture" of enslaved Africans and their descendants must always contend with the impossibility of its completion. Hartman is creating a first order of discourse within the disciplines of English and history that prioritizes the recognition of the interstices or gap. She is mapping the black hole itself, not the space around it. For Hartman, the dominant ways of discussing the archive at the beginning of her career promised the reproduction of flesh, hieroglyphs, and human mirrors rather than intimate and compassionate conversations, seances, and wakes for bodies long buried or thrown to the wayside. 

Similarly, Cottom found that the dominant (read: white and male) methodologies and ways of presenting arguments in sociology caused not only the reduction of Black American life to a series of degrading, pathologizing stereotypes, but also the erasure of an entire tradition of Black social thought. Like Spillers, Cottom also recognizes the importance of establishing alternative orders of discourse; and like Spillers, Cottom goes about her task in brilliantly clandestine ways. She signifies on W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 sociological essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, in which he concludes that the white people peppering him with intrusive and humiliating questions about his racial oppression really want to know "How does it feel to be a problem?". Cottom remixes Du Bois' initial query by focusing on the particular ways in which Black girls and women--and especially Black women who think thick, are thick, are disabled/chronically ill, and consider themselves "ugly"-- are made to feel that they are problems to be solved or ignored rather than individuals who are worthy of being remembered and heard on their own terms. Cottom also seeks to disprove this narrative of Black woman-as-problem through her citational choices. Through citing the work of Black feminist scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and Joan Morgan, Cottom uses her own authority as an author and scholar to develop first, second, and third orders of discourse that are structured by the needs, interests, and concerns of Black women thinkers. If you want to understand Cottom's argument, you would have to be familiar with the intellectual legacies of Du Bois, Collins, and Morgan, all three of whom are currently criminally under-taught in most introductory sociology classes. 

Together, Cottom and Hartman's work offer insight into the importance and profound difficulty of Toni Morrison's task while writing The Bluest Eye during the 1960s. At a time when access to any archives of and by Black people was incredibly scarce and had to be created or imagined by collectives of Black folk, Morrison's use of narrative and language in The Bluest Eye directs our line of sight to the presence of what Spillers would later identify as the interstices. The black hole was never just a black hole--she was a girl with feelings and dreams, even if those dreams took the form of a pair of blue eyes. The "I" of Cottom's Thick should not be conflated with the "I" of Pecola's psychosis. To do so would confirm the universe of the hieroglyph and the unspeakability of difference. Instead, I am asking us to think about the distance between the "I" and "myself," between the hieroglyph and your skin. Giving the mirror, the subjugated, the dispossessed the "right" to speak is never enough, especially if we are still limited to the universe of language which forked our tongues in the first place. Rather, Cottom and Hartman (and Spillers and Morrison) are giving us the tools to develop a methodology of the mirror or a grammar of the interstices that enable us to write an archive of our own lives. And hopefully, maybe, those who come after us will have greater and earlier access to a "vocabulary of feeling" (to hijack Spillers) which describes the specificity of their experiences. 


Also, Henry was kind enough to share this great Twitter thread on the history of femme queen performance. New archives are made every day... https://twitter.com/noellearchives/status/1241905973566091264?s=21 

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