In October 2019, the Los Angeles Review of Books published an interview between Rizvana Bradley and Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, on the occasion of Hartman’s pathbreaking study, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019). In excerpts from the conversation reproduced here, Bradley and Hartman touch on a number of topics salient to the intersections of aesthetics and feminist thought, including:
Structures of racialized enclosure, past and present;
Black women’s histories of labor and resistance;
The conditions of black maternality;
and the (im)possibilities of love.
(Image: Detail from the cover of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments)
Read the full conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
RIZVANA BRADLEY: The historical figures you discuss [in Wayward Lives] negotiate between the practiced inhabitation of beauty and the politics of confinement. The book re-marks the historical specificity of their sexual ambitions, drives, and desires in relation to the structures of racial enclosure that contour Black life in the present. How is this central aspect of Wayward Lives tied to your previous thinking in Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother, and how does this book mark something of a break from those projects?
SAIDIYA HARTMAN: In Scenes of Subjection, the goal was to think about slavery as a structural relation, to articulate the idioms of power that characterize the institution, to illuminate the foundational imprint of slavery on the social order, and to challenge the limited notions of slavery posited by legal philosophy and liberal politics. One of the challenges was to think about the transformative character of the everyday practices of the enslaved and the necessary limits or failures of such practice in the context of social death and racial terror. These performance practices were antagonistic to the structure [of slavery], and, at the same time, the slave-owning class, in particular, and whites, more generally, utilized and appropriated these practices for producing and reproducing subjection. The point was not to celebrate slave agency, but to note the critical valences of performance and other quotidian practices; and, as well, to acknowledge the insufficiency of any practice, short of abolition and ending the world structured by chattel slavery and racial capitalism, in redressing the conditions of the enslaved.
Similarly, Wayward Lives examines everyday practices in the context of the emergent racialized enclosure that is the ghetto. One racialized enclosure gives way to another — the extension and transformation of the plantation in the city. Again, there is the defining tension between the Black city-within-the-city and the ghetto. What are the structures that are shaping, forming, disfiguring, and making Black life? The book focuses on what Du Bois described as the third revolution of Black intimate life, the next major transformation of Black social life after the ship and the plantation. Forms of practice are being fashioned, yielded, invented, and elaborated to elude and refuse this new enclosure and to imagine how life might be possible….
“Wayward Lives is neither a celebration of the Black city as paradise, nor a dire portrait of poverty and brutality. I hope it is a nuanced and rigorous account of Black social life in a context in which life cannot be taken for granted, since the most basic requirements for its reproduction are unable to be met or sustained.” - Saidiya Hartman
RB: So we could say this wayward cultural history is part of the ongoing project of what you’ve referred to as writing a history of the present, of present dispossession, with and against the architectures of social death?
SH: As someone who has been thinking about the issue of social death for decades, the question I wanted to ask in this book is, what are the forms of life that unfold under the threat of death? Wayward Lives is neither a celebration of the Black city as paradise, nor a dire portrait of poverty and brutality. I hope it is a nuanced and rigorous account of Black social life in a context in which life cannot be taken for granted, since the most basic requirements for its reproduction are unable to be met or sustained. In the context of such enormous structural violence, how was it possible to imagine that a beautiful life is possible? Even more unthinkable was the idea that one might create it, not in the future, but now.
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RB: ...history problematically understands the genealogy of the general strike as part of a legacy of the communist left, tied to the revolts initiated by the masculine white worker. But in your book, you understand the general strike as part of the protracted history of resistance to racial slavery’s afterlife. Following your essay “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” (2016), you center the imagination of the general strike around Black women’s resistance to a general economy of gendered sexual violence that the lawful mandate of partus sequitur ventrem, the transference of dispossession from mother to child, historically insisted upon and extended.
SH: Yes, I find the general strike to be an interesting, expansive concept that needs to be mistranslated, augmented, and extended in ways it’s not meant to be. Basically, you’re right, a classic understanding of the general strike is the proletariat in the context of a strike against industrial capitalism, although anarchists also have a more expansive notion of the general strike as toppling an order that isn’t as restricted. We know Du Bois extended this concept to think about the enslaved, who are never imagined within that frame.
“[Enslaved women] too were involved in a fundamental refusal of the conditions of work and intent on destroying an economy of production in which their wombs and their reproductive capacity were conscripted along with their labor.” - Saidiya Hartman
I think that one of the things that happens both in Du Bois and in C. L. R. James is that at one moment they are addressing the slave, the ex-slave, the fugitive — then suddenly this figure has been translated into the narrative of the worker. And in the worker’s narrative, the very figure that I’m concerned with, the Black female, the fungible life, the minor figure, totally falls out of the frame of what constitutes the political notion of struggle. The “everyday resistance of enslaved women” in the context of a slave economy, for example the refusal to reproduce life, has never been considered as a component of the general strike. Yet, they too were involved in a fundamental refusal of the conditions of work and intent on destroying an economy of production in which their wombs and their reproductive capacity were conscripted along with their labor.
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RB: Perhaps we can shift to talk about love. A history of impossible loves surfaces in the artful rebellion of the wayward...
SH: I think you’re right that these notions like “love” or “beauty” or “communal luxury” are made meaningful in the context of wayward practices. Because love that is not tied to upheaval or anarchy — or love not fashioned in a critical relation to the prevailing terms of order — leads us back to bourgeois romance and the marriage plot.
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RB: Teaching your child about racism and the anti-Blackness of the white world is a burden or responsibility that the mother explicitly bears. There’s something about having to always bear the affective burdens of maternity in precisely the way that you’re describing. Having to transfer knowledge to your child about the anti-Black structures of the world is an ethical charge which is as impossible as it is enduring. I’m trying to say that there are weird, strange affective strategies that Black mothers have probably developed in order to grapple with the weight of having to carry and convey this knowledge. Perhaps it’s the hardest thing to do — to instruct your child in the ways of a world that wasn’t meant for them.
SH: Absolutely. What does it mean to undertake reproductive labor in a context where death and captivity are the prevailing schemes? If, in fact, that condemnation or threat of death is normative, then what does it mean to be assigned the task of making and preserving life as one’s duty in this condition?
“Black women’s resistance to having to care in the face of violence is a way of showing genuine maternal love. And we have to be able to recognize their mutual reinforcement as a real structural thing in Black women’s lives.” - Rizvana Bradley
RB: I agree with you … But I also think that Black women’s resistance to having to care in the face of violence is a way of showing genuine maternal love. And we have to be able to recognize their mutual reinforcement as a real structural thing in Black women’s lives.
SH: Jennifer Morgan has observed that the historical complex of slavery has produced a very polarized approach to the maternal: either the maternal as “absence, dearth, negation,” and neglect, or the plentitude of the maternal, the idealization of maternal love and care. We deny the very real experience of maternal ambivalence. That’s what we have to bring to the table as well, but it’s scary to face that.
In her new book, Jacqueline Rose talks about the demands an inhumane culture places on the mother figure. That’s magnified a thousandfold for the Black maternal.
RB: Yes, and actually all this leads me back to our recent conversation with Hazel Carby over lunch, when she commented: “You love these women. You really love them.” I’m interested in hearing you say something about the relationships you cultivated with these women as you were writing, the intimacies that developed and changed through the very process of writing with and about them.
“Love for Black women always feels unexpected and surprising, especially within the covers of a book. I do think it is at the heart of Black feminism especially, and Black radicalism generally.” - Saidiya Hartman
SH: Yes, I do love them. There’s affective investment in the lives that I write about. I try to attend to them with care. I have regard for them. That’s what love is. It is palpable in the book, and I am proud of this. It is what readers respond to. Love for Black women always feels unexpected and surprising, especially within the covers of a book. I do think it is at the heart of Black feminism especially, and Black radicalism generally. This practice of regard for one another is so important, so critical because Black women are treated with such little regard, such little regard in the world.
We — the surplus life, the nobody, the thing who falls out of the scheme of representation, the void, the tool — expect to be rough-handled. What we think and imagine has been dismissed and ignored. What we want has been belittled and mocked. So when our lives aren’t handled brutally or indifferently, but treated with care, you feel the force of that. I think that’s what Carby felt when she said I love them. Her words made me feel that I had achieved something.