Saidiya Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.

Abstract

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval begins with a note on method that situates the book as the practice of the methodological ground that Hartman laid out in her widely cited article “Venus in Two Acts.” In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman described the archive as a site that “recount[s] the violence” inflicted on black women, often by reducing those women to data and to “fragments of discourse.” This is, Hartman argues, “as close as we come to a biography of the captive and the enslaved.” In place of dominant historical writing practices that treat the archive as the repository of truth, one which reads enslaved women’s lives as a “collective biography of dead subjects,” Hartman’s article developed a method called critical fabulation (“Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 [2008]: 1–14, here 2–3). As a practice of scholarly imagination and as an interpretative practice, critical fabulation mobilizes the archive to construct and to imagine what it can never represent—black life, except when it is conscripted to death. In its attention to the what might have been and in its commitment to imagination as a form of historical inquiry, critical fabulation is particularly attuned to writing black women’s histories, particularly their intimate histories.