How do we stand on the dead and smile? I carry so many black souls in my skin, sometimes I swear it vibrates, like a tuning fork when struck.

he said we could redeem the land with our picture— my brown skin acrostic to the row of their white.

for sale like sheep or cattle,

The idea of being sold away from my mother and Miss Betsey was so frightful, that I dared not trust myself to think about it. We had been bought of Mr. Myners, as I have mentioned, by Miss Betsey’s grandfather, and given to her, so that we were by right her property, and I never thought we should be separated or sold away from it.

My obedience to her commands was cheerfully given: it sprung solely from the affection I felt for her, and not from fear of the power which the white people’s law had given her over me.

I was made quite a pet of by Miss Betsey, and loved her very much.

whose ordinarily quiet and unmeaning eyes glimmered with an expression of unusual fire

I can move through its medium.

the Law of the Fath

Authority seizes upon specifi c material qualities of the fl esh, particularly the genitals, as outward indication of future reproductive potential, constructs this fl esh as a sign, and reads it to enculturate the bod

You see, I told myself, wiping snot off my face with a shirt sleeve, bodies are rendered meaningful only through some culturally and historically specifi c mode of grasping their physicality that transforms the fl esh into a useful artifact

If I cannot change my situation I will change myself.

unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist

h e monster accomplishes this resistance by mastering language in order to claim a position as a speaking subject and enact verbally the very subjectivity denied it in the specular realm

Peter Brooks suggests that, whatever else a monster might be, it “may also be that which eludes gender defi nition” (219).

“to warn.”

portent

Filisa Vistima was not a boy, and she found it impossible to take care of herself. Even in death she found no support from the community in which she claimed membership. “Why didn’t Filisa commit herself for psychiatric care?” asked a columnist in the Seattle Gay News. “Why didn’t Filisa demand her civil rights?” In this case, not only did the angry villagers hound their monster to the edge of town, they reproached her for being vulnerable to the torches. Did Filisa Vistima commit suicide, or did the queer community of Seattle kill her?

Don’tdo your own research, because you are probably not competent to do it.

but the parents continue in a state of slavery as long as they live. In observing these slaves, we behold at once, in their countenance and manners, the striking contrast betwixt a state of freedom and slavery.

at length, a silver thread alone encircled her temples: at this boding change, an universal silence prevailed.

Can it be denied, but that the moral principle, which directs the savages to virtuous and praiseworthy actions, is natural or innate?

“White man, thou art my enemy, and thou and thy brethren may have killed mine; yet it may not be so, and even were that the case, thou art now alone, and in my power. Live; the Great Spirit forbids me to touch thy life; go to thy brethren, tell them thou sawest an Indian in the forests, who knew how to be humane and compassionate.”

they were incapable of civilization.

This harmony, with the tender solicitude of the male, alleviates the toils, cares, and distresses of the female, consoles her in solitary retirement whilst sitting, and animates her with affection and attachment to himself in preference to any other

I soon noticed that the object of his wishes was a large fat bomble bee (apis bombylicus), that was visiting the flowers, and piercing their nectariferous tubes

I term it a forest, because their scapes or flower-stems arose erect near 30 feet high)

We gained gradually on our prey by this artifice, without their noticing us

this we term instinct, which faculty we suppose to be inferior to reason in man.

the cause is invisible, incomprehensible; how can it be otherwise? when we cannot see the end or origin of a nerve or vein, while the divisibility of matter or fluid, is infinite.

Let us begin at the source of terrestrial existence. Are not the seeds of vegetables, and the eggs of oviparous animals fecundated, or influenced with the vivific principle of life, through the approximation and intimacy of the sexes?

is it sense or instinct that influences their actions? it must be some impulse; or does the hand of the Almighty act and perform this work in our sight?

motion and volition.

to offer such useful observations on the different productions as may occur

The Indians returning from Northampton, brought with them some horses, and sheep, and other things which they had taken; I desired them that they would carry me to Albany upon one of those horses, and sell me for powder: for so they had sometimes discoursed. I was utterly hopeless of getting home on foot, the way that I came. I could hardly bear to think of the many weary steps I had taken, to come to this place.

e both fell over the horse’s head, at which they, like inhumane creatures, laughed, and rejoiced to see it,

which they had plundered in the town

as they told me

Written by her own hand for her private use, and now made public at the earnest desire of some friends, and for the benefit of the afflicted

How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins?8 Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead?9

The intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. This double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration.

exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities)

I could say after a famous philosopher that what we know of Venus in her many guises amounts to “little more than a register of her encounter with power” and that it provides “a meager sketch of her existence.”

the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it

A ship moving through water generates a particular pattern of waves; the bow wave is in front of the ship, and that wave then spreads out in the recognizable V pattern on either side of and then behind the ship. The size of the bow wave dictates how far out the wake starts. Waves that occur in the wake of the ship move at the same speed as the ship. From at least the sixteenth century onward, a major part of the ocean engineering of ships has been to minimize the bow wave and therefore to minimize the wake. But the effect of trauma is the opposite. It is to make maximal the wake. The transverse waves are those waves that run through the back; they are perpendicular to the direction of the motion of the ship. Transverse waves look straight but are actually arcs of a circle. And every time, every instant that the boat is moving through water it has the potential to generate a new wave.

The Wheatleys made an experiment of her. They allowed and encouraged this Phillis, child of a “bitterly anonymous man and a woman,” to “develop,” to become literate, to write poetry, to become “the first Black human being to be published in America”

the part for the whole

It requires theorizing the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness.

One might say that Aereile Jackson is the film’s insurance—as she lends the film its vocabulary and her abjection underwrites its circulation (figure 2.4).

the abjection, by, on, through, which the system reimagines and reconstitutes itself.

The violence against her is (in Wilderson’s terms) not contingent, it is not violence that occurs between subjects at the level of conflict; it is gratuitous violence that occurs at the level of a structure that constitutes the Black as the constitutive outside. Put another way, the fact and the mode of the inclusion and display of Ms. Jackson’s body and speech are indicative of how the film cannot understand the enactments of a language of gratuitous violence against the Black.

I told him in short that he was a Dissembler, bid him go and do his business without any more ado, or else he should have due Correction, which was the best Remedy I knew for him, he went about his Errand immediately, and perform’d it well, though he came too late for the Pirats.

The Europeans who stood by thought him dead, Blacks thought him bewitch’d, and others were of opinion that he was poyson’d. I examin’d matters as nicely as I could, concluded that this was a new strange Disease, such as I had never seen, or was not mention’d by any Author I had read, or that he Counterfeited it.

Columbus took the advantage of an Eclipse was to be the next night, viz. the 29th of February, 1504. He told them the God of the Christians was angry with them, and would send them Pestilence and Famine, if they did not relieve his Men. As a sign of the truth of it, next night they should see the Moon eclipsed.

It has puzzl’d the Philosophers of all Ages, to give an Account how Parts of Vegetables and Animals, Real Sea-Shells and Substances should be found remote from the Seas, wherein they seem to have been produced and bred.

he Acquiesc’d in the Ecclesiastical History, Doubted the Civil, and Believ’d the Natural.