![]() ![]() ![]() Of the materials that constitute that trail, she writes, “The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.” The scholar’s route to a different narrative is riddled with obstacles her sources are alternately too scant and too extensive. For theorists, conceptual problems proliferate: how to listen for the dominated in the archives of the dominant? How, for example, might one recover the experiences of enslaved people-barred from literacy on threat of torture, sale, or death-from the records of owners and traders without amplifying the violence that confined them there? In her 2008 essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman attempts to exhume one black woman called Venus, killed aboard a slave ship, from the paper trail of the Middle Passage. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheavalīoth obsession and disappointment are magnified for scholars of the subjugated or the dispossessed.
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