Venus In Two Acts
Planet Venus Facts. The diameter of Venus is 12,100 km (7,522 miles). The interior of Venus is composed of a central iron core and a molten rocky mantle, similar to the composition of Earth. The surface of Venus is very dry with flat plains, highland regions, and depressions. Venus is the sixth largest planet in the Solar System. SX26.Venus in Two Acts matters and on issues of markets and trade relations.11 Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive. 'Venus in Two Acts' by Saidiya Hartman, understanding of enslaved black women is foreclosed within the archive http://aaaaarg.org/node/27884. Since the Sun is together with Venus, the romance is accompanied by ego. If Venus is present in a feminine sign, the native’s spouse will be able to compromise within the marriage. If it is in the masculine sign, ego plays a major role. This individual is a very good negotiator. They make great lawyers. Sun & Venus Conjunction in the Eighth House.
“Venus in Two Acts”: “The Violence of the Archive”9/9/2016 On issues of representation in archives – whose materials (whose perspectives) are available, represented, retained and maintained? In her article “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman studies the pervasive symbolism of the Black Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery. Through oppressive archetypes (e.g., “A sulky bitch. A dead negréss. A syphilitic whore”), the white patriarchy constructed a sexually gratuitous commodification of black women’s bodies to justify and assert its power (6). Yet, the failure of the archive, which is almost singularly composed of the contextual perspectives of slavers, is the retrospective disempowerment of a people through a lack of resources. Black women in the Atlantic world are cast as voiceless historical actors who are objectified by a white male gaze. While researching the murder of two captive girls (one of whom was called Venus) aboard a slave ship, Hartman concedes that because she had very few sources to inform her discussion, she opted to say very little at all about Venus, glossing over the major problem of inherent bias in the archive. Looking back on this decision, she realizes the flaw of her method. Hartman’s approach towards historical gaps and omissions (or rather, her avoidance of them) ended up covering over a complex and contested past — an issue itself worthy of discussion in conjunction with her topic. Upon reflection, she arrives at the question: “Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?” (11). Hartman comes to the conclusion that historiography must engage loss — to acknowledge that we, in the present, will never know the full story (“the words exchanged,” “the furtive communication” of excluded historical actors) — and find comfort in our discomfort (10). By trying and failing to capture the complete narrative, we can demonstrate the tangle of history through the limitations of historical writing. In seeking to convey a full historical picture, Hartman is highlighting its unattainability. As a consequence, she encourages us to see this impossibility as that which shapes our understanding of the past and sparks our efforts for an improved future (a “free state”). Hartman effectively discusses the place of the archive in historiography — its ‘violence, silence, scandal, excess, boundaries, discrepancies, and promiscuity’ — by bringing it to life through vivid descriptions of her dilemma. She characterizes the archive as alive, a continually evolving entity that both shapes and is shaped by the oppressive power dynamics that characterize our history. The agency of historical actors to participate in a collective narrative is revealed through the limited contextual evidence produced by the archive (primary sources) and, in turn, informs the ability of historians to re-construct events. “The violence of the archive” is, in essence, the reduction of history into a simplified, quantified, and seemingly “objective” account. The erasure of a people’s history is rooted in the inherently biased (as well as the nonexistent) contents of the archive and in the interpretations layered upon them by academia. 5/11/2018 11:16:53 am Ixe'he, thank you Grace, this essay is full of critical insights into archival erasures, and the importance of the ethics of care / care in ethics which I continually strive to enact and struggle with pervasive lack of--amongst many historians--past and present--working 'on' Indigenous people's history. I'm deeply grateful for your incisive critique. Margo Tamez 5/13/2018 08:03:09 pm Dr. Tamez - Thank you for your wonderful comment. Saidiya Hartman's work is truly an inspiration, as is your own. I'd love to collaborate with you on a project some time in the future. Leave a Reply. |
This is a review of Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts.” I have been thinking about how to make feminist literature more accessible, and I’ve decided to do a series of articles linking feminist literature to social happenings and issues. This is the first of a hopefully exciting journey.
To be black in America can be to remember dozens of afternoons spent on stoops in the summer - laughing, loving and living. In the same breath it can be to approximate where you were when Trayvon Martin’s name first slid through your lips; to remember where you were when Michael Brown was inducted into your living room as “another black man killed in America.”
At the same time, I am reminded that to be black in America is never to remember where you were when you first heard that Miriam Carey, a dental hygienist from Connecticut, had been shot and killed in a car chase in the nation’s capital. It is to never to be able to recall when you first knew that Tanisha Anderson, a schizophrenic mother of one in Cleveland, had been murdered by police, unarmed, outside her mother’s home.
And so it follows that to be a black woman in America is to navigate the mortality that blackness threatens within the intimacy of black community, whilst having to remember that you are also a woman, on your own. It is to split yourself into two daily, unconsciously and unnecessarily. It is to forever remain aware of the possibility of being overlooked.
In her essay Venus in Two Acts Saidiya Hartman interrogates the ability of the archive to document black life in the Middle Passage. 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. 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. Ultimately, Hartman questions the ability of the archive to hold black stories without re-victimizing their subjects. 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. 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.
Hartman begins her essay by telling us that Venus could have been “Harriet, Phibba Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic World”. By invoking names of slaves that could have existed, she reminds us that the violence Venus experienced was spectacular yet at the same time so relatively mundane in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that it is hard to imagine that her specific “encounter with power” deserves any unique attention. In mapping out the systemic violence visited upon the bodies and memories of enslaved black women and girls, Hartman makes her readers recall that the normalization of such spectacular violence is the root of the dehumanization that black women have always encountered both in their lived experiences and in the archive. This is in part the essence of what Hartman wants to address – the double jeopardy that enslaved black women endured in both their lives and their afterlives.
Hartman imagines Venus’ tragedy as two fold. First, her body was ravaged and then “no one remembered her name, or recorded the things she said or observed that she refused to say anything at all”. She was at once killed and silenced. And so for Hartman the archive not only fails to memorialize Venus but also becomes “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body” when confronted with the stories of the enslaved.
Venus In Two Acts Hartman
In the face of such loss, Hartman asks questions and reworks the fragments of discourse she finds in the archive in an attempt to bring us closer to producing a biography of Venus. Through her pensive and sometimes exasperated tone, made obvious by the litany of the questions she asks, “how can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know”, “Is it possible to construct a story from the locus of impossible speech or resurrect lives from the ruins?” she conveys her commitment to redressing the faults of the archive.
In the “The Second Act” she struggles through the painful work of re-constructing an account of Venus’ experience. She guides us through the thought processes that see her wrestling with the decision to not write about Venus in an effort to avoid romanticizing Venus’s trauma or to yield to the necessity of recounting Venus’ death. Though at times long-winded and contradictory, the transparency of this project is only made clear through such confusion – confusion that stems from the “irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade”, as the reader is reminded. Such confusion underscores the difficulty of constructing a narrative about under-documented enslaved people. In communicating the difficulty of such a task, Hartman creates a space for meaningful conversation on narrative construction, and its limitations, therefore democratizing the process of creating these stories.
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. Hartman is conscious of the political moment in which she is writing in and therefore extends her analysis of Venus to the present in order to help us make sense of the current state of black women in public life and memory. Hartman tells us that “if this story of Venus has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to hers”, a phenomenon that she describes as “the afterlife of property”. The killing and subsequent criminal portrayal of women and girls such as Miriam Carey and Tanisha Anderson are evidence of that tethering, of the fact that black women and girls still exist as “property” as “Venuses”. For Hartman, Venus is “Harriet, Phibba Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda and Sally”, but she is also Miriam, Tanisha, Michelle, Charleena and Aiyana. Venus is “found everywhere in the Atlantic World” both in the 17th century and today.
Hartman Venus In Two Acts
And whilst these women’s corporeal loss is not something we can salvage, “in the meantime” Hartman presses us to “recruit the past for the sake of the living”; “to produce knowledge for the sake of the past”. In the meantime, we are reminded that we can remember well. Because in a time where we are declaring that “all black lives matter”, we must make sure that the evidence of black women’s lives, these Venuses - as they lived, loved and worked- is undeniably present and forever haunting the public’s memory, at the very least
Venus In Two Acts Pdf
Link to Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115