In a political moment where black women’s bodies continue to be threatened by both violence and erasure a moment, where some of us are mourning the double tragedy that black womanhood can be in America, such democratization of narrative building can aid in better memorializing black women who die in the hands of the state. In this political moment where many are coming to terms with the specific precarity of black womanhood, Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts becomes a prophetic realization of the painful state of black women’s lives in public memory as well as a constructive template for the battles we shall have to wage in trying to do these stories justice. She then reveals the gaps within the archive of slavery and then proceeds to attempt to redress the violence that situates “Venus” as part of the collateral damage of a slave economy. Ultimately, Hartman questions the ability of the archive to hold black stories without re-victimizing their subjects. Venus acts as a point of reckoning for the corporeal death that the slave ship enacts on black enslaved people and the social death that the archive facilitates in its failure to document black lives. More specifically, she wrestles with the erasure of black girls from the public memory of racial violence through an archival encounter with an enslaved “dead girl” named Venus, on board a British slave ship named Recovery, in 1792. In her essay Venus in Two Acts Saidiya Hartman interrogates the ability of the archive to document black life in the Middle Passage.
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February 2023
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