Venus in Two Acts

Authors

  • Authors

  • عبد الرحيم الشيخ
  • سايدية هارتمان

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31430/makm2494

Keywords:

Slavery, Histography, Archive, Counter-History

Abstract

This study examines the possibility of overcoming the violence of the archive, whether as constituting or preserving, in order to write the history of victims without committing yet additional violence by claiming to represent them. Sadia Hartman takes Venus’ story as an example to employ her method of "critical fabulation"-a revolutionary mode of writing that aspires to transcend historiography. Due to the "constitutive impossibility" of the archive itself and its use towards constructing normative historical writing, Hartman’s method depends on dealing with archival materials in a different modality - one that works towards a moral historical narrative that gives justice to those who were enslaved in the past, so as not to have their story enslaved in the present and in the future. To do so, Hartman brings to life the story of Venus, the black girl of her story who remains only a passing fragment in the archive of slavery. This fragment appears in the indictment against John Kemper, the captain of the British slave ship Recovery, who was tried for the murder of "two female Negro slaves," on 7 June 1792, and was later acquitted. The crime took place on the ship’s journey from Nigeria to Grenada in the summer of 1791. If it is true that driving the victims out of this world at the hands of the white master is the first act, their return (through "critical fabulation") at the hands of a black woman is the second act that promises the possibility of achieving the impossibility of a "free state" within the possibility of a "writing state" about it and about the horrors of slavery.aس

References

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غلاف العدد 16 من دورية أسطور

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2022-07-01

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Vol. 2022 No. 016 (2022): Issue 016

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