we too emerge from the encounter with a sense ofincompleteness and with the recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequenceof this engagement.
Archives leave us with fragments and silences. This line acknowledges that engaging with those silences doesn’t just reveal incompleteness in the past it produces incompleteness in us, the ones who encounter it.
The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimismor despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the pastand animates our desire for a liberated future.
Feminist theory values storytelling, embodied knowledge, and reflexivity. This line reflects the feminist method of embracing impossibility by working with fragments, silences, and erasures as sources of insight rather than treating them as dead ends.
I prefer to describe in terms of the afterlife of property, by which I mean the detritus of liveswith which we have yet to attend, a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state ofemergency in which black life remains in peril
Colonialism transformed people into commodities, corpses, or “waste.” The “afterlife of property” refers to how enslaved people were treated as property, and how that logic continues to shape Black life today. The “detritus of lives” is the residue of that commodification, lives reduced, erased, or unattended.
However, the history of black counter-historicalprojects is one of failure, precisely because these accounts have never been able to installthemselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive narratives that are marginalized andderailed before they ever gain a footing.
Official archives privilege dominant voices while silencing marginalized ones. Black counter-historical projects attempts to tell history from the perspective of the oppressed are described here as “insurgent” and “disruptive,” but they fail to become recognized as history because the archive itself is structured to exclude them.
I have attemptedto jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and toimagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done
Feminist rage and refusal as a feminist practice. This line embodies refusal by rejecting the archive’s version of events and insisting on imagining beyond it.
The conditional temporality of “what could have been,” accordingto Lisa Lowe, “symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of produc-tive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompassat once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent,entangled and unavailable by its methods.”
Feminist epistemology values oral traditions, embodied knowledge, and creative methodologies. Lowe’s “productive attention to the scene of loss” is exactly that, using imagination and alternative modes of storytelling to recover what archives cannot.
The furtive communicationthat might have passed between two girls, but which no one among the crew observed orreported affirms what we already know to be true:
Knowledge comes from bodies, trauma, survival, and intimacy. The possibility of communication between the girls is part of that embodied knowledge; truths carried in relationships, even if undocumented.
This violence determines, regulatesand organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it createssubjects and objects of power.
Epistemic power highlights how power shapes what counts as legitimate knowledge. This line shows that violence itself structures the discourse, determining what can be said about slavery, and who gets to speak.
To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed.
Feminist memoryscapes contrast patriarchal, linear archives with feminist memory that is emotional, embodied, and collective. This line embodies that feminist memory practice, mourning as a political act, witnessing as a way of keeping the dead present in the now.
My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yetanother demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, byfinding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history
Knowledge comes from bodies, trauma, and survival. This line recognizes that representing the girl risks reducing her body to a metaphor or lesson, rather than attending to her lived reality.
The promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading, but none that are capable ofresuscitating the girl
Feminist epistemology values oral traditions, embodied knowledge, and storytelling. This line underscores the impossibility of fully recovering erased lives through archival reading alone, pointing to the need for imaginative, disruptive methods.
The necessity of recounting Venus’s death is overshadowed by the inevitable failure of anyattempt to represent her.
Knowledge comes from bodies, trauma, and survival. Venus’s body is central to the story, but colonialism reduced it to an object. Representing her means confronting that violence while acknowledging its limits.
The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine whatcannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—socialand corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in themoment of their disappearance.
Colonialism and slavery highlight how bodies were commodified and dehumanized. “Social death” refers to being stripped of identity, kinship, and recognition; “corporeal death” is literal death. This line situates enslaved lives in the precarious space between those two forms of violence.
Finding an aesthetic mode suitable or adequate to rendering the lives of these two girls,deciding how to arrange the lines on the page, allowing the narrative track to be rerouted orbroken by the sounds of memory, the keens and howls and dirges unloosened on the deck,and trying to unsettle the arrangements of power by imaging Venus and her friend outsidethe terms of statements and judgments that banished them from the category of the human
The archival grain emphasizes how archives erase marginalized voices. Here, the writer is grappling with how to render lives that the archive has silenced, experimenting with aesthetics to break through those erasures.
But in the end I was forced toadmit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of somethingother than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic.
The “slave hold” represents the commodification of human beings under colonialism. The line shows how even attempts to narrate history are haunted by the violence of turning lives into cargo, bodies into waste.
if I could have detailed the small memories banished fromthe ledger, then it might have been possible for me to represent the friendship that could haveblossomed between two frightened and lonely girls.
The ledger symbolizes colonial record-keeping, which reduced people to property, numbers, or commodities. The absence of friendship in those records shows how colonialism stripped away humanity and relationality.
The dream is to liberate themfrom the obscene descriptions that first introduced them to us.
Feminist epistemology values storytelling, oral traditions, and embodied knowledge. This line points to the need to replace degrading colonial accounts with narratives rooted in lived experience, dignity, and self-representation.
the kinds of stories I have fashioned to bridge the past and thepresent and to dramatize the production of nothing—empty rooms, and silence, and livesreduced to waste.
Western knowledge systems privilege written, rational accounts, often reducing lives to statistics or silence. The line reflects how feminist scholars must fashion stories to bridge past and present, because official records fail to capture marginalized realities.
As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate theintimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted bythis past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather asthe anticipated future of this writing.
Knowledge comes from lived experience, trauma, and survival. This line echoes that by insisting that the present is always entangled with embodied histories of violence and survival.
And the stories that exist are not about them, butrather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, trans-formed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off asinsults and crass jokes
This ties into rage because it exposes injustice, this is why rage is so productive because it is a sign of growth, transforming into power. The injustice are from stories that only exist as records of domination, and feminist rage seeks to reclaim those erased voices.
There is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a femalecaptive who survived the Middle Passage
Western epistemologies privilege written records and rational accounts, while oral traditions, embodied knowledge, and silence are dismissed. This line shows how enslaved women’s voices were excluded because they did not or could not fit into the dominant modes of recording knowledge.
s: no oneremembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to sayanything at all.
I think this line refers to the archival grain from lecture on Sept. 22, institutions such as government records, colonial documents, such patriarchal institutions exclude or distort marginalized people. Reading against the grain questions what may be missing from official records. How did no one remember her name?