Unnamed Woman Research Articles

Irresolution as Historical Practice and the Case of the Unnamed Woman in Timnah

Abstract This article is an experiment with irresolution as methodology in historical re-presentation. The focus is identity irresolution in Timnah, an Iron Age site in the Shephelah of the southern Levant. In biblical narrative, Timnah is brought to life in the stories of an unnamed woman in Judg 14–15. In archaeology, the site has been identified with Tel Batash (Tell el-Batashi in Arabic). The purpose of this article is twofold: to write a counterhistory of the unnamed woman that emphasizes the mystery of her identity and to articulate how irresolution can expand the scope of the historical practice in biblical studies. After an introduction and a discussion of irresolution as methodology, I offer a deep reading and re-presentation of the textual evidence, followed by an examination of the archaeological interpretations at Tel Batash. I conclude by considering the ethics of history writing in biblical studies.

Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman

In ‘Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman: Acting habits beyond the neutral’, Ilinca Todoruț analyses Western theatre’s fraught relationships with acting habits by reading between the lines of Konstantin Stanislavski’s short account of a daring casting experiment gone awry. In a slippery two-page text, Stanislavski narrates how he attempted to cast an unnamed peasant woman in the 1902 production of Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Prying open what went wrong at the Moscow Art Theater, despite the best of intentions, helps guide a critique of contemporary performance training methods geared towards eliminating habit.

Athanasius Pulled Apart: Heresiology and the (Dis)membered (Fe)male Body

AbstractIn this article, I engage Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19. By the fourth century, this story of gang rape—along with other preserved stories of sexual violence—found in Judges, were scattered throughout early Christian literature. Judges 19 holds a particularly troubling history in the late ancient context. The story of the rape and dismemberment of the unnamed woman in Judg 19 gave life to another story and typified a style of writing that I characterize in the article as a heresiology. The spectacle of Judges, along with other gruesome deaths of women, was one way in which heresiological discourse frames rhetorical arguments for writers like Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, I purposely draw our attention to how Athanasian orthodoxy became reliant on gender-based violence.

You Were the Bird: On Petite Maman and motherhood

You Were the BirdOn Petite Maman and motherhood Georgia Cloepfil (bio) In the opening scene of Céline Sciamma's film Petite Maman, a young girl named Nelly moves from room to room saying goodbye to a series of unnamed women, all gray-haired residents of a senior care center. Behind the last door, Nelly finds her own mother, Marion, tidying up in her recently deceased grandmother's all-but-empty room. Her mother takes a seat and overlooks the grounds of the facility. There is a gulf between the threshold of the door, where Nelly stands, and that of the window, where her mother contemplates the reality of her new role as a motherless mother. The movie's title pans across Marion's back. Perhaps for the first time, Nelly is glimpsing the ocean of her mother's grief and experience–and she can't quite stretch across it. [End Page 74] One of the movie's strengths is its ability to lay bare a moment of realization that all young people have at some point: our parents were people (with loves, grief, ambition) before we came into the world. They had mothers. We watch as Nelly recognizes that her own life overlaps with Marion's, but it will never run parallel; the procession of generations marches onward. When they finish packing up her grandmother's room and drive away, Nelly reaches toward her mother around the headrest of her seat and feeds her cheese puffs one by one as she drives. Then a little sip of apple juice. Then a hug. The tender opening scene reminded me of a passage I read (and underlined) in Anne Truitt's Daybook long before I had any plans to have children: Mary's son was born early this morning. After hearing the news, I lay back in the predawn dark and, as the tide of happiness receded, I saw that it had pulled out on some long, bare inner shoreline of myself and had made the slope glisten for the last time: Both my daughters are now mothers and in the proper nature of things more mothers of their children than they are daughters of their mother. We reside on an axis between mother and daughter until birth, death, or another dramatic event threatens to tilt us abruptly in one direction or another. There is a sense of inevitability but also a deep melancholy to this sentiment, and I worried for a long time about making my own mother feel its truth. I discover that I am pregnant on an August morning. The test sits on my dining room table, its two decisive blue lines bisecting. The news is not a surprise, but it still brings with it a feeling that life has unexpectedly accelerated. To me, the passage of time has always felt like a fierce wind. It's something to take shelter from, something to brace myself against or evade. If I am not careful, everyone I love might be taken up by a violent rush of air and carried forward with me. The novelist Samantha Hunt once [End Page 75] Click for larger view View full resolution Joséphine Sanz and Nina Meurisse in Petite Maman. © Liles Films, courtesy NEON. [End Page 76] said that it makes sense to think of mothers as makers of death. She meant that we make our children's deaths. But I'm not there yet. What's inside of me barely feels alive, is barely felt. Embryonic and invisible, the pregnancy still seems like the impetus of some other change. Even if it is "the proper nature of things," my becoming a mother means that my own mother is, suddenly, a grandmother. I have the sense that by becoming pregnant, I am singlehandedly ushering my mother toward the next phase of her life and then toward her death. My worry hardens into fear. The week after I tell her that I am pregnant, my mother's mammogram reveals a tumor in her right breast. She waits weeks for news, for surgery, for a plan. In the silence she can barely sleep, and neither can I. Rationally, I know that the...

The Rest Is History

The Rest Is History

All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland

Reviewed by: All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland William D. Jones All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849. By Jeff Strickland. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 276. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-108-71691-8.) Jeff Strickland has written an excellent account of a little-known slave rebellion that took place in the public workhouse of Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1849. Some twenty enslaved people fought and defeated the guards of the workhouse and engineered the escape of thirty-seven people imprisoned there. The inciting event occurred in the morning, when an enslaved man named Nicholas and some allies defended an unnamed enslaved woman from a slave trader, who had arrived at the workhouse to retrieve her for medical treatment and eventual sale. The jailers and city authorities were slow to respond, providing Nicholas and others with time to organize and arm themselves with tools. Though white militiamen captured most of the escapees within hours of the uprising, and the Charleston Courts of Magistrates and Freeholders tried and executed Nicholas and other accused leaders two days later, the rebellion at the workhouse influenced local politics. Strickland argues that the incident encouraged jail and policing reforms, raised nativist fears, and led enslavers to further question the position of the church in a slave society. He also contends that the city annexed the Charleston Neck because of the rebellion, since the new workhouse in the Neck became the only place [End Page 144] for Charleston enslavers to imprison enslaved people while the old one was under renovation. Strickland weaves together two strands of historical analysis. On the one hand, he contextualizes the 1849 workhouse rebellion, understanding it as a product of the workhouse conditions, urban enslavement, and the revolutionary thought that circulated in the Atlantic world. To understand the rebellion, he contends, the reader must also understand the highly policed nature of urban enslavement and the place of the workhouse in Charleston’s system of racial slavery. Charleston enslavers sent enslaved people to the workhouse to be whipped. Authorities imprisoned fugitive enslaved people there. The work-house was also on the site of the city’s slave market, so slave traders often confined people in it before and after sale. Other elements important to nineteenth-century southern history, including revolutionary rhetoric, slave rebellions, and the domestic slave trade, are likewise important to the story of this uprising. On the other hand, readers must understand who Nicholas was, and Strickland provides the best biography of the rebellion’s leader possible. Born enslaved, Nicholas at a young age fell into the hands of William Kelly, a plasterer, who trained Nicholas in his trade and often hired him out to others. When Nicholas was a young adult in the mid-1840s, Kelly left Charleston for New Orleans and took the people he enslaved to Louisiana with him. There, Kelly allowed Nicholas latitude in his labor arrangements, so much so that when Kelly returned to South Carolina, he left Nicholas behind to continue his lucrative work. After Kelly discovered that Nicholas was withholding the wages he earned in New Orleans, the enslaver transported him back to Charleston against his will. As Kelly tried to sell Nicholas there, the enslaved man resisted a search of his body and assaulted an employee of a slave trader, which landed Nicholas in the workhouse. Strickland’s accessible prose, narrative style, and comprehensive contextualization mix well with his fascinating and enlightening analyses of the workhouse and urban enslavement. All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 will be excellent to teach with. As contemporary public rhetoric emphasizes prison and policing reform, the intertwined histories of the enslavement and the incarceration of Black people that Strickland depicts is as revelatory as it is harrowing. For as much as All for Liberty has to say about the nineteenth-century United States, the story of the 1849 workhouse rebellion may have even more to say about the country today. William D. Jones Rice University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

INTERSECTIONALITY IN CICERONIAN INVECTIVE

AbstractThis article applies an intersectional approach to Roman invective (and praise) to elucidate how those at the centre of Roman power exploited discriminatory and laudatory ideologies relating to intersections of identity to sway a Roman jury. Analysing the depiction of an unnamed woman in the Pro Scauro shows how Cicero plays upon normalized prejudices to bias the jury against ista Sarda. These internalized prejudices could also be utilized to discredit women with privileged intersectional identities, as demonstrated by Cicero's portrayal of Clodia and Sassia in the Pro Caelio and the Pro Cluentio, a process that helps reify the marginalization of certain identities.

New Orleans Coffee in The Awakening: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

New Orleans Coffee in <i>The Awakening</i>: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

Pandemics as the great levellers? Class, community and capital in US-American short stories

This article focuses on literature’s potential for healing – both medical and sociopolitical – in times of severe crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Affect is an important literary tool to make people aware of social inequalities, in particular reading or writing short stories with the experience of a simultaneous real-life pandemic. Reading is an embodied act through which the reader enters into a dialogue with both the author and the text. Emotions emerge that are often more deeply stored in memory than the words as such, and that changes our perception of the world. This effect is also encapsulated in Siri Hustvedt’s analysis of reading practices, Sara Ahmed’s affect theory and Rita Felski’s four ways of engaging with texts. I analyse John O’Hara’s short story ‘The Doctor’s Son’ (1935), situated in rural Pennsylvania at the time of the 1918 Influenza, and Victor LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ (2020), resonating with the COVID-19 pandemic in an isolated apartment building in New York City. Both stories question the concept of pandemics as the great levellers by pointing out social injustice due to class and ethnic hierarchies. Taking Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and Poe’s emphasis on the preconceived and single effect of fear and subsequent horror caused by the ‘Red/Black Death’, as a starting point, the article presents O’Hara’s story as a manifestation of the medical, social and ethnic phenomena at work in 1918: social distancing, facial masks, closed public institutions, people’s resistance to these measures and medical treatment along ethnic and class lines. LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ allows readers a glimpse into the relationship between an unnamed African American woman, who is also the narrator, and Pilar, a Colombian American woman, who dies of the virus. As part of a contemporary Decameron project, ‘Recognition’ stresses the human need for community, communication and, thus mutual human recognition, giving the dead – whether rich or poor – a name and demanding to undo systemic social inequalities. In that sense, literature can heal the nation.

Rachael Baptist: The Career of a Black Singer in Ireland and England, 1750–73

Rachael Baptist, a black woman, was a celebrated singer in the pleasure gardens of Dublin in the 1750s. Subsequently, between 1757 and 1767, she claimed to have ‘performed in London, Bath, and the other principal parts of England, with universal applause’. Some of these English concerts can be documented from contemporary newspapers; but there is no definite record of her having performed in Bath or London. However there are a number of references to an unnamed black woman singer associated with Samuel Foote, the proprietor of the Haymarket Theatre in London in the 1760s, who was probably Rachael Baptist. She returned to Ireland in the autumn of 1767 and over the following winters gave a series of concerts in Irish provincial towns. Her career shows that a black woman could enjoy celebrity as a singer at the height of the slave trade and her colour not preclude the recognition of her talents.

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong Chinelo Ezenwa, Respondent Angie Wong’s article “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” addresses the subtle ways in which two recent acclaimed Hollywood films reinforce cinematic violence against Asian women, who are either hypersexualized, rendered mute, or shown as carriers of deadly diseases that disrupt the Arcadian world of the whiter Westerner. The article shows that in Venom (2018), the two pre-action Asian women are depicted as disease-ridden bodies, whose main role, it seems, is to deliver the disease from Malaysia to San Francisco. Their transference of disease to the white world also conveniently takes place at an airport, at the border where non-white peoples are often designated as non-beings. Kyoko in Ex Machina (2014) is similarly subjugated by Nathan, her white creator; she represents the white male exploitation of the body, labour, and sexuality of the Asian woman by a hypermasculine white society. Wong points out that in both films, there is neither character development for those women nor any escape for them as soon as they serve the perverse purposes of their “creators.” Perhaps this is because, on the aggregate, they are simulations of real people (“SimulAsians”). But, based on Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, Wong argues that using the fragmented prism of a technological form of Orientalism (techno-Orientalism) and creating such “SimulAsians” allows these movies to violate and exploit the Asian female characters. Kyoko, the Asian housekeeper-mistress figure in Ex Machina, is the ultimate “Simulacrum” and “SimulAsian,” as Wong demonstrates. This is because, for most of the film, one is uncertain if Kyoko is a cyborg created to look Asian, or if she is [End Page 232] an Asian deliberately presented to look like a cyborg. Whatever reality exists for her is premised on Nathan’s (her manufacturer’s) stereotypical perception of the Asian woman as cold, silent, and sexually available (Wong 9). But it is not even Kyoko’s poor development that bothers one most about Ex Machina. Instead, it is how the film manages to minimize Kyoko when shown against Ava, the Caucasian cyborg. The latter in fact becomes triumphant by exploiting both Kyoko and the unnamed Asian woman’s body. Ava’s only means of escape, it seems, is by literally cherry picking the skin off the bones of the unnamed female Asian figure in order to achieve “humanity.” Therefore, after their final “battle,” only Ava is triumphant while Kyoko remains a victim of the liberation march. Yet, as Wong equally observes, though the film seems to criticize the “dehumanization” of the Asian cyborgs, it is only able to achieve this critique by presenting them as sacrificial lambs, without any will and ability to achieve liberation. This double subjugation is not uncommon for “women of colour.” In my discussion of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, for instance, I show how the Zimbabwean women are double yoked under colonial and traditional patriarchies. The difference is that where the Zimbabwean girls and women are deliberately portrayed in Nervous Conditions with critical voices, Ex Machina and Venom do not allow the Asian women any such power. They are stereotyped as figures of annihilation, while the extreme physical violence against them is masked under the notion that they are not human. The horror of that form of cinematic occlusion of violence is perhaps clearer when one considers the implications of the two Asian diseased bodies in Venom, as Wong does. They are pitted against the white heroic journalist, Eddie Brock, and his lawyer girlfriend, Anne Weying. Despite their flaws, the latter two characters are somehow found the acceptable bodies of the “future” who are able to not only achieve symbiosis with the alien but still maintain their societal moral codes, act out their heroisms, and rescue their world from the threats of the extraterrestrial disease embodied in the Asian women and the equally Asian-looking genius inventor, Riz Ahmed. In both films, the viewer is encouraged to ignore the scenes of violence against the Asian women because the action is conveniently set in the magical world of the movies. Wong rightly points...

Women on the Move in the New Testament

Abstract This article discusses the relation between gender and migration in the New Testament. Six cases of women on the move are presented: Mary, the mother of Jesus; the women in the Jesus movement; three women from the first generation of Christ-believers, Prisca, Lydia and Phoebe; and the unnamed slave woman from Acts 16:16. It is argued that these cases reveal a variety of causes for migration and also depict women who are quite different when it comes to social location and power. The article also discusses the importance of migrant networks in the first century, including religious networks such as the Jewish diaspora. It is argued that women played a key role in the migrant networks presented in New Testament texts.

Eve, Magdalina, Samaritian... (To the Typology of Female Images in the Novel of L. M. Leonov “Thief”)

Purpose. The article presents the results of the analysis of key female images in the novel by L. M. Leonov “Thief”: Masha Dolomanova, Tatiana Vekshina, Zinaida Balueva, Ksenia Babkina – whose fates are united by a typological commonality. The relevance of the study is due to the rethinking of the role of women in the modern world and art, and the formation of heroines, unhappy men in the world of men, in the literature of the 20th century developed, including under the influence of post-revolutionary, post-war reality, under the influence of urbanization.&#x0D; Methodology. The study based on the works devoted to the poetics of motif, image. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were set: determination of artistically significant motives; comparison of plot lines with precedent texts (mostly biblical); explanation of details that clarify the essence of female images. Using the method of motif analysis, identified the main motives involved in creating the storylines of each heroine, and their variants.&#x0D; Results. The motif of violence is highlighted, which is presented in the following allomotives: sexual violence (including deprivation of innocence) – for all heroines, except for Zinaida Balueva; physical violence (beating) – images of Masha Dolomanova, Zinaida Balueva – and suicide (Ksenia Babkina); psychological abuse (like suppression of will, lack of care) – all heroines. Within the framework of the method of structural-typological analysis, female characters were correlated with the poles of the binary opposition between the evil wife and the good wife, ascending to the Holy Scriptures. It was found that, in addition to the motive of violence, which is present in the storyline of each heroine, but conditioned not by the will of the person, but by chance, Leonov’s female characters are united by the motive of temptation, temptation, which allows one to assess their individual position and explain the tragic outcome of life.&#x0D; Conclusion. The female images in the novel “Thief” are comparable with such biblical personalities as Eve, Mary Magdalene, an unnamed Samaritan woman, Tatiana the Martyr. Their fates are determined by the actions or desires of other heroes, which, given the fact that they have not found their own God, ultimately leads to despair and irrevocable death.

Sympathetic Vibrations

Sympathetic Vibrations

그레코-로만 전기의 장르적 특성에 비추어 본 복음서 해석 - 마가복음 5장을 중심으로 -

This article reinterprets Mark 5 in light of the genre characteristics of Greco-Roman biography. Every interpretation is performed with a specific perspective, and this article aims to extract meaning of Mark 5 from the perspective of Greco-Roman biography. The two genre characteristics to which this article gives special attention are (1) the extensive focus on the protagonist and (2) comparison/contrast.<BR> In the episode of a man with evil spirits in the region of the Gerasenes (5:1-20), Mark accentuates two qualities of Jesus, the protagonist of the Gospel as a Greco-Roman biography. First, Jesus is described as the one who can bind Satan and thus release the man from the oppression of evil spirits. Second, Jesus is depicted as the one who has the same authority with God. In terms of comparison/contrast, the episode contrasts Jesus who is a real bringer of peace with Caesar who merely purports to bring peace. The Roman Empire and its emperor, which are not shy about giving massive propaganda for peace, actually turn out to be the oppressor of a subjugated people. By contrast, Jesus and the kingdom of God can grant the real peace to his people.<BR> In the episode of Jairus and the woman with hemorrhage (5:21-43), comparison/contrast is more explicit than in the previous episode. In this episode, Jairus is more supreme than the woman in many respects: socially, economically, and religiously. In terms of social standing, Jairus who is a named man and a synagogue ruler must have enjoyed more privileges in comparison to the unnamed woman. Economically speaking, the text says that the woman with hemorrhage “had spent all she had” while we can assume that Jairus must have had more secure position in terms of financial status. In the realm of religion, Jairus is respected by people, whereas the woman is despised by people due to her illness. Despite of this, Jesus heals the woman before healing Jairus’ daughter. This teaches two things. First, Jesus takes side with the weak rather than the strong. Second, the most important thing that one needs in getting God’s grace is faith.

Epic Hand Washing

Epic Hand Washing

Bloody ministry: the bleeding woman, & contemporary women as vera-icons

ABSTRACT This article explores the legacy of the bleeding woman healed by Jesus. It considers how her story speaks to modern women, and the norms and taboos of each context. As a bleeding woman, and an ordained minister in the Methodist Church of Great Britain, the author utilises autoethnography, reflecting on the apocryphal account of the bleeding woman’s appearance at Jesus’ trial before Pilate, there named as Veronica/Bereníkē, and the subsequent evolution of her legend, culminating in inclusion in the ‘Stations of the Cross’ devotion. Sharing personal experience, the author explores contemporary women’s experiences through the lens of Methodist doctrine and praxis (reflecting on Holy Communion as an example), and how this shapes faith and ministry. She reflects on the Veronica/Bereníkē figure of history, art, devotion, and iconography, who eventually bore little resemblance to the unnamed woman of the Gospels, and questions whether contemporary women can be true ‘vera-icons’, representative of Christ in the world.

The Beauty of Preaching: God’s Glory in Christian Proclamation by Michael Pasquarello III.

Reviewed by: The Beauty of Preaching: God’s Glory in Christian Proclamation by Michael Pasquarello III. Mark Mattes The Beauty of Preaching: God’s Glory in Christian Proclamation. By Michael Pasquarello III. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. xxxiii + 254 pp. No doubt, some church leaders are apt to associate “beauty” with “pretty.” The concept of beauty carries entirely different connotations for Methodist homiletics professor Pasquarello. What he does instead is to situate preaching within the life of worship. This is no manual on how to preach better. For Pasquarello, worship is not primarily to be understood as communal and diachronic social behaviors but instead as joyous, life-enhancing participation in the triune life of God. To unfold his thesis, he appeals not only to scripture but also to Augustine, John Wesley, and Luther. In his judgment, preaching and worship as currently practiced are too programmatic. They convey moralistic and utilitarianian dispositions that simply feed American self-absorption. Without delight in beauty, the true and the good are subject to instrumental and functional uses (xvi). Preaching succumbs to topical teaching, motivational speaking, or social and political analysis as substitutes for the [End Page 354] gospel. He commends beauty not to prettify preaching but instead to situate preaching within the reality of God’s generosity, goodness, and glory. Pasquarello develops his case first by unfolding the generosity of the poor widow who contributes her last mite to the temple treasury as a beautiful sign indicating that “now is the time to share the gift of divine abundance with the world in the community created by Jesus” (39). Indeed, “the poor widow’s gift was a sign of the Father’s giving away, of God’s freely giving up his beloved Son for the life of the world” (40). Similar to a Lutheran theology of the cross, he highlights beauty as “strange”: “The beauty of God is often revealed under circumstances that we could find offensive: the ugliness of the cross is the strange beauty par excellence. The paradox of this ugly beauty of the cross is that it evokes hope: in ugliness and suffering, beauty shines through and new possibilities are born” (43). Beauty conveyed through generosity is also found in Mark 14 where the unnamed woman “anointed Jesus with expensive perfume as an act of loving devotion and preparation for his death,” which Jesus describes as “beautiful,” a type of God’s generous, costly love” (xxvii). He then turns to Augustine, Wesley, and Luther. In Augustine we encounter the “wonder of God’s good creation, to see all things from the perspective of the love in which it was created” (93). Again, this mystery is paradoxical: “we ascend by descending; we are exalted by humbling ourselves, by true self-knowledge, confession and repentance of our pride” (93). Following Pope Francis, Pasquarello notes that “preaching the truth, then, draws listeners to the beauty of divine love as manifested, although partially and incompletely, in the preacher’s thinking, loving, and speaking as a ‘sign’ of Christ” (116). We learn no steps from Augustine for successful preaching; instead “he offers us a vision of the wisdom of preaching that serves the church on pilgrimage toward its final completion in knowing, praising, and loving God” (135). From Wesley, Pasquarello sees that the sheer generosity of God lends itself to a preaching that attends to personal holiness and the striving for amelioration of social ills. Referencing Luther, he expands on work written by myself and Miikka Antilla which acknowledge the paradoxical strangeness of God’s generous beauty that takes on [End Page 355] human sin all so as to beautify and justify sinners. The book culminates by acknowledging Augustine’s “homiletical beauty . . . the wholeness of his capacity with language to reach all levels of people and society” (218). This book is valuable precisely because it is no “how to” manual but instead a confident recommendation that the gospel is compelling, that it invites us into the life of God, and that nothing is more pertinent or relevant than to deliver this message and welcome people into God’s goodness and beauty. Mark Mattes Grand View University Des Moines, Iowa Copyright © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran...

The Beauty of History

The Beauty of History Grace Elizabeth Hale (bio) Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman W. W. Norton & Company https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393357622 464 Pages; Cloth, $28.95 Like anyone familiar with Saidiya Hartman's work, I expected theory and history and rigor when I sat down to read Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I expected brilliance. What I did not expect was so much beauty: beautiful characters, beautiful prose, and beauty as an idea and a practice of mattering. Hartman takes on the task of resurrecting people mostly left out of the chronicles of past value we call history, working-class Black girls on the cusp of adulthood and the young women they become, trying to make free lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Called wayward girls and surplus women by their critics in New York City and Philadelphia, the cities that are Hartman's focus, these rebels use everything they have, their looks and their gestures, their bodies and their minds, to escape the practices created to contain them in lives of servility and drudgery. In defiance of law and reason and what passes for common sense, they insist on their right to pleasure and to beauty. Often, individually, they lose. But collectively, they create new ways of imagining gender and sex and freedom and desire, characteristics that will come to define the modern world. Like other scholars before her, Hartman confronts the limits of the archives, the way her subjects mostly appear in historical documents created by an army of reformers, social workers, law enforcement officials, journalists, scholars, and doctors who understood Black girls and women as a problem. She reads the traces of her subjects that appear in surviving notebooks, case files, reports, surveys, and photographs "against the grain" to try tease out their lives. And she acknowledges that this by now well-established mode of analysis cannot fully counter the absence at the heart of the archive and the way the documents often perpetuate the erasure of Black girls and Black women's full humanity. Not content to rest with a state that perpetuates the original violence against her subjects, she does something bold and radical and rather unprecedented. She employs theory and empathy "to speculate, listen intently, read between the lines, attend to the disorder and mess of the archive." Rather than simply "breaking open" historical accounts and exposing their limits, she "narrates" the missing stories. Deeply informed by her own and others' research, she imagines the interior lives of her subjects, their mostly unrecorded feelings and pleasures. She conjures their dreams. To recover her subjects' real histories, their lives as human beings rather than as problems, Hartman creates her own beautiful experiment. She leaves history as most scholars understand it behind and creates an assemblage that uses historic documents as a foundation for the informed speculation she calls "critical fabulation," "a dream book for existing otherwise" in which young Black women are "social visionaries and innovators." In the process, she expands our sense of what has been and is possible and illuminates the connections between words and world-making. At the center of Hartman's text is a chorus. This chorus is theatrical, a group of unnamed Black girls and women who comment on the action produced by the assorted do-gooders and law enforcement officials who attempt to understand, control, and "reform" them. This chorus is also a musical structure, the part that repeats after the verses offer up specific lives. The message of this refrain is simple: categories invented by others who "could only ever recognize her as a problem" do not tell us much about the intimate histories of Black girls. Hartman's chorus is also a collective voice, the author and her characters singing the blues, pleasures and sorrows and desires, meanings made of melody and rhythm and mood. Both this chorus and Hartman's named characters convey what she calls "the beauty of the black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise." "Beauty is not a luxury," Hartman insists...

Revisiting the Plague in the Age of Galileo

Revisiting the Plague in the Age of Galileo