The Wayward Form of a History of Waywardness: the Affective Punch of Saidiya Hartman’s new masterwork

The title of Saidiaya Hartman’s new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, refers equally to the early twentieth-century black women (and men) she writes about and the writerly form of her historical account. Achingly researched from hard-to-access archives, Hartman crafts a historical voice that is engaged, affective, rebellious, and experimental. Here is a history that proffers sensorial descriptions as true to the constraints and broken promises of Reconstruction as to the hearts clenched around hopes for a life that is free, beautiful, and more. Hartman’s words–partly speculative, but always titrated from wide-ranging archival data–bring to life the visceral textures of apartments, neighborhoods, police entitlement, vagrancy laws, employment constraints, the happy happenstance of love or friendship, and the desires for love and fashion and all good things that were experienced, grasped, embraced, and rejected by women living from about 1900 to 1929. The book is loosely chronological but not heavy on dates, as if to make clear that chronological time cannot reflect or express the suffocating recursions and chaotic eddies that frame and channel black female life in a white supremacist society.

I read this book the way I open a precious gift: carefully turning each page, drawn into the smallest detail of packaging and presentation, and delighting in the gift’s substance, which cannot but be transformative. When is the last time you read a 350-page book that didn’t seem long enough?

Hartman expresses the goal of her book with words that draw out the meaning of her subtitle, intimate histories of social upheaval: “The endeavor is to recover the insurgent ground of these lives; to exhume open rebellion from the case file, to untether waywardness, refusal, mutual aid, and free love from their identification as deviance, criminality, and pathology; to affirm free motherhood (reproductive choice), intimacy outside the institution of marriage, and queer and outlaw passions; and to illuminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable” (xiv). The verbs here are telling: recover, exhume, untether, affirm, illuminate. Together they describe an arc that is itself wayward, for this is not a typical history (recover, exhume) but a history that gently tugs at the knots of presumed judgment and unrelenting despair (untether) in order to imagine what is “nearly unimaginable” (affirm, illuminate).

The above description is embedded in Hartman’s opening few pages, titled “A Note on Method”, but I found even more compelling her brief, two-page meta-reflection on method that occurs about two-thirds of the way through the book. Titled, “Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible,” Hartman reflects on a word that more directional than referential–an apt prelude, perhaps, to chapters that deal with incarceration and the tactics of musical rebellion. Wayward is vectorial. It is a word brimming with energy and movement, but of a kind that evidences tugging against the grain (or chains). To be wayward is not to be toward something definite, and also not necessarily to be against anything in particular. It is a word that suggests diffusion and palpates a kind of meandering or roaming. Unlike “untoward”, wayward is not simply against (normativity, propriety, expectation, obedience) but suggests a more complicated imbrication. In Hartman’s words, “Waywardness articulates the paradox of cramped creation, the entanglement of escape and confinement, flight and captivity” (p. 227).

Wayward is a term that conveys the affectivity of the Sisyphean task of black women persistingly bursting against constraints that are persistingly bearing down on them. Hartman calls it “a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed” and “the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive” (p. 228, italics in the original). These are precisely the stories and lives Hartment relates to us. Her book begins with the putative objectivity of photographs that Hartman undercuts with captions that “transform the photographs into moral pictures” (paraphrase, 20). And her book ends with the nearly unimagined voice of a chorine, a chorus-line girl, her body in motion within the enclosed boundaries of the stage: “How can I live? I want to be free. Hold on.”  The photographs reach out to readers and jostle us into an active engagement with the capture of the soon-to-be-called slums under the rubrics of science, and then, over the course of the book, the increasing volume and pressure of black women’s voices catch readers up in the straining dynamics of waywardness, tugging at us to pay attention, to know and feel with something that is not empathy but rather something more densely affective, like the vectorial quality of waywardness, like the sheer weight of reality…like the gravity that pulls a stone tumbling down a hill, like the effort that crouches behind the stone and begins to push it up. Again.

Intersectionality Wars: the affects of scholarly struggle

Jennifer Nash’s careful and high-stake book, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality unfolds along two, equally important trajectories, that of the nature of scholarship and that of the nature of the self.  By nature, design, and the sediments of institutional and social violence, these two trajectories cross and re-cross each other and are fueled by an arc of affects that ranges from loss, anxiety, defensiveness, protectiveness, solidarity, and allegiance, to love, curiosity, and a deep yearning for freedom. Nash focuses particularly on the affect of “black feminist defensiveness” and its “proprietary attachments to intersectionality.” While she does at times discuss the affects driving white feminist attachment to intersectionality (including a white defensiveness to demonstrate allyship), her primary addressees are her black feminist peers; they are the “we” of her book.

She sets out her argument this way:

“I imagine black feminism as an affective project–a felt experience–as much as it is an intellectual, theoretical, creative, political, and spiritual tradition. …This book traces how defensiveness is largely articulated by rendering intersectionality black feminist property, as terrain that has been gentrified, colonized, and appropriated, and as territory that must be guarded and protected through the requisite black feminist vigilance, care, and ‘stewardship.'” (p. 3)

By keeping her primary focus on black feminist scholars and their relationship to intersectionality, Nash is able to keep steady pressure on the “affective traps” (p. 3) of property and commodification that continue to frame, capture, and exhaust black women scholars. These capitalist traps repeat on the level of scholarly conceptualization familiar historical conundrums that at once assert and deny personhood and citizenship to black women. Nash’s thorough articulation of the history of the term in the National Women’s Studies Association (Chapter 1) and in scholarly practices that she terms the impulse to tell and heed the “origin stories” of intersectionality (p. 39-45) and to commit to a hermeneutics of “originalism” (p. 61-76) point out the affective and structural resonances between the simultaneous promise/foreclosure of possessive individualism for black bodies in the academy and in our larger, white supremacist US society. Into this chiasm of visibility and invisibility, Nash inserts the claim that black feminist defensiveness over the proper (proprietary) use of intersectionality relegates black feminists–again–as service workers for women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, forever feeling the defensive and possessive obligation to correct and properly credit published accounts of intersectionality and to weigh in on what properly counts as intersectional scholarship. From page 4 to the last page of her text (p. 138), Nash refers to this obligation to perform affective service work (and its correlate in the academic expectation and obligation to perform “diversity” service work) eleven times.

Nash is clearly evoking the long history of black female domestic and other service workers in her nod to black feminist service work on behalf of intersectionality. As a religion scholar, this appeal to service work, along with her discussion of black feminists as “white feminism’s salvific figures” (p. 136) also evoke the labor of priestesses, of theological apologists, and of the service labor that black female bodies continually and voluntarily provide to many religious institutions.  I am perhaps particularly attentive to Nash’s quoting Joan Morgan’s concern that intersectionality has become a kind of “dogma” (p. 112, 113), with the suggestion here of a reified apologetics that is no longer a “productive analytics” (p. 113). To be dogmatic is to defensively protect the scripture and practices of a community, to watch out for hints of heresy and other sinful infractions, and to marshal resources in order to amplify, reconfirm, and recommit to orthodoxy. I realize I am over-reading Nash a bit here, which I do in order to draw out the affective lineaments of dogma so that I can better hear and feel the stakes of Nash’s alternative. Nash sets out to resituate and reclaim the task of black feminists as scholars of care, love, and witness. She affirms that black feminists are invested in myriad “new debates about eroticism, reproduction, visual culture, maternity, and surveillance” (p. 137), and she urges black feminists to embrace and return to their long labor to theorize strong connections between U.S. feminisms and transnational feminisms.  I also hear Nash reminding us about the art and rituals of pedagogy, since the grassroots and counter-hegemonic dynamics of black feminist pedagogy tend to embrace the pushback and change wrought by our students. Nash raises the question to me of what holding onto a “dogma” of intersectionality might be doing to our students, and to our pedagogical politics. Scholars may groan and resist the commodified pressures of publishing that, as Nash spells out, incentivize thin readings or even misreadings for the sake of clearing intellectual space for a young scholar to make her own intervention (p. 47), but I hear Nash asking about what might be gained if black feminists see this contortion of publishing as an unstoppable extension of the ongoing mutations (“travel”, p. 45) of concepts that always do occur in and through our teaching. Nash is imagining what would happen if black feminists refuse defensiveness and, instead, turn to other concepts and other intellectual urgencies.

Charles Peirce felt that William James had stolen and misused Peirce’s term, pragmatism, and so he suggested a new term, pragmaticism, which was, he hoped, “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (CP 5.414). It seems to me a point in Nash’s favor that Peirce’s term was so safe as to become inoperative; pragmaticism is barely known outside of the tiny circle of Peirce scholarship, whereas pragmatism means all sorts of things to all sorts of scholars, business owners, politicians.

I will end with Nash’s own final words, which are beautiful and poignant:

“Letting go untethers black feminism from the endless fighting over intersectionality, the elaborate choreography of rescuing the analytic from misuses, the endless corrections of the analytic’s usage. Letting go allows us to put the visionary genius of black feminism to work otherwise. It is, thus, a practice of freedom” (p. 138).

Questions I brought home from Duke’s 2019 FTW (Feminist Theory Workshop)

My academic location in the study of religion always puts me in a discursive minority at the Feminist Theory Workshop.* There is the occasional religion scholar there, and sometimes graduate students from Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill’s religion program participate. Most academics, though, don’t really know what goes on in religion departments and don’t really care. And that can be…inconvenient.**

My particular way in to the study of religion is through critical questions of valuation and transvaluation, particularly the embodied, inter-relational, and technological forms that affectively transmit and sustain shared valuations. Questions of valuation are affective questions: we value what we hold dear and this “holding dear” multiplies affects and orients us as individuals and communities. Readers of this blog know that I approach religion as an affecognitive structure of valuation in which every affective patterning inevitably makes use of and is constrained by existing discursive and institutional arrangements. As such, our daily lives are saturated with a gooey mess of feelings, intuitions, practices, and assertions of values, and these inevitably press up against and interrupt other values, sometimes with relish or bafflement, sometimes with disgust or rage. I am curious about when these shared valuations express themselves or are denominated as “religious” or “spiritual”—and I seek to understand how they are transmitted and sustained by particular embodied, inter-relational, discursive, and technological forms.

This year’s workshop challenged me to think about a few broad thematics that I have brought home and continue to ponder. I am grateful to the four plenary scholars: Riley Snorton, Lauren Berlant, Jocelyn Olcott, and Kim Tallbear. I also want to shout-out to my on-site workshop interlocutors: Randall Johnson, Kim Hall, Rebecca Moody, and Courtney O’Dell Chaib.

Below I gesture to further thoughts on (1) valuation; (2) the differences and connections between the conceptual rubrics of structure, ecology, and web; and (3) the theoretical and political problem of limited or non-existent available grammars;

1. Valuation. Extending last year’s presentation from Denise Ferreira da Silva, all four papers this year expressed the need to grapple with the ways in which every structure of valuation coalesces on a ground of nullification that in the United States is blackness. This fact of nullification and its relation to valuation raises the question of how attention to forms of embodiment and practice might be supplemented with acute attention to what makes that form both possible and valued. How might we grasp what escapes-form and why certain modalities of survivance come to be valued? As Snorton noted, how does the swamp as a horizontal ecology of external relationality constitute the vertical valuation of the “plantation zone”? As Olcott challenged us, how do we come to ascribe (or not) value to affective fields and practices of care? As Berlant suggested, how might we better attend to and value small gestures of perturbation in a larger social and affective landscape of erotophobia and trauma? The familiar dialectic of naming what is non- or under-valued, and then mobilizing thought and activism to get it valued fails to show how what counts or matters as “value” always coalesces on and out of grounds of nullification. Tallbear suggests this fact to me in the word-war between so-called water activists and self-named water protectors. Protection of water as a value, as a relation, is not valued in dominant culture—any more than care labor is so valued, as Olcott shows—but the question of what forms show up that non-valuing is something I need to think more about.
2. Conceptual rubrics. The need to pursue better models of valuation raises questions about the relation and difference between the three theoretical rubrics raised by the plenary scholars: structure, ecology, and web. What might be the useful differences between scenes of structure (Berlant), scenes of ecology (Snorton), and scenes of web (Tallbear)? How are these frameworks of structure, ecology, and web useful for thinking about what remains, and how we might use what remains, in excess of the White supremacist capture of life? In their book with Lee Edelman, Sex or the Unbearable, Berlant writes that, “Structure is a process, not an imprint, of the reproduction of life” (p. 12). In “Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American Plantation Zone,” M. Allewaert, cited by Snorton, calls ecology “an assemblage of interpenetrating forces” (341). In “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” Tallbear writes of “a web or net in which relations exchange power, and power is in tension, thus holding the web or community together” (Clarke and Haraway, Making Kin not Population, p. 160). Do these different terms attend best to different problems or are they resonant? Do they work better, or differently, at different social or inter-relational scales?
3. Staying with the Trouble of Grammar (Haraway). I heard Lauren Berlant as questioning how we might nudge our affectscape from erotophobia back toward something like erotophilia, while Snorton claimed, at the end, that he was quite simply interested in life, in Black life. How might we push for something like the positivity of sex or comedy or social transformation, without being heard as minimizing or resisting the trauma of violence? It feels to me that attempting such a push quickly runs us up against the limit of available grammars of analysis. Likewise: How might we theorize the swamp as an ecology of fugitivity that is life without minimizing the dynamics of capture and death that are articulated as social, state “care,” as Snorton challenged us? How do we insist on reconceptualizing value outside of capitalist logic and assumptions, as Olcott insisted, when we can barely imagine, much less speak, an outside or beyond of capitalism? How do we wrestle with the fact that all translations between indigeneity and the modern state form when all translations are, as Tallbear rightly noted, “terrible”? All four papers leave me with the challenge to face dead-on (or rather, erotically) the challenges of conceptualization and categorization, to hit my own walls of insufficiency and yet to stay, and to suggest tactics of research and activism that continue to touch and tease out what Amit Rai, in his recent book, Jugaad Time calls the “infinite sponginess” of the world.

 

*I was invited (and honored) to share remarks at the FTW closing round-table. I reproduce those remarks here in a slightly edited form.

**Prof. Lauren Berlant spoke at the workshop on the “inconvenience of others” and “erotophobia.”