Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Writing at the "limit of the unspeakable and the unknown" in her 2008 article "Venus in Two Acts," literary critic Saidiya Hartman demonstrates how the "scandal and excess" of literature productively disrupts and unfailingly reifies the status of the archive as the exemplar of historical knowledge. [1] For Hartman, the facts and fictions of history bear traces of power and violence that are evident in what can and cannot be said about historical subjects like Venus, "the emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world." Despite her ubiquity in "the archive of Atlantic slavery," Venus nonetheless remains unknowable, perhaps unintelligible under the sweep of historical inquiry. Unknowable. Unintelligible. "What," Hartman seems to ask, "is our antidote for an archive that refuses to save? That trades in violence and loss? That, at worst, implicates our participation in—and, at best, makes us witnesses to—the terrors, pleasures, and libidinal economies of the archive?"
Repository Citation
Hardin, Tayana L., Paul M. Farber, and Grace L. Sanders-Johnson. "Requiems, Reports, Resurrections: Archives and the Alchemy of Historical Inquiry." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss1/14