Memory and History in Scenes of Subjection
By Gerald Nelson Jr.
For experienced readers of Saidiya Hartman, the violence of the historical archive—its obliterating silences, invisibilizing language, and false portrayals—is sufficiently familiar. Nonetheless, it is seldom remarked that Hartman’s interrogation of history extends beyond an inquisition of archival deposits. Particularly in Scenes of Subjection (hereafter Scenes), Hartman characterizes everyday practices as modes of redress against conditions of enslavement, addressing not merely the violence of the archive but also “the violence of history” (121) itself.
We might be tempted to interpret “history” here as a mundane reference to the series of occurrences constituting the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the United States. However, Hartman’s discussion of enslaved people and their everyday practices of remembering—as a redress to slavery’s horrors—suggests otherwise. She clarifies that these modes of remembering, enacted through spiritual practices such as devotional dances to ancestral spirits, libations for the deceased, and grave-markings, were not intended to reproduce “an inventory of the world lost” (123).
The section “Memory and History” in Scenes obliquely critiques notions of history that obstruct what she endeavors to say about memory. These obstructive ideas of history are typified by the “continuist narratives of tradition grounded in the foundational status of Africa” (125), which, according to Hartman, characterizes a common understanding of memory in Black cultural practice. To approach the modes of remembering introduced by the rupture of slavery, this conventional understanding of history must be deposed.
Thus, Hartman moves away from the idea of history as a continuity of moments organized by a concept. [1] She draws on Pauline Hountondji’s criticism of the “concept of Africa” to reveal how such a narrative prematurely closes history through a “primitive and reductive metaphysics” (Scenes, 126). Interpreting memory —as the survival of past traditions repeated in the present—in Black cultural practice both naively addresses the historical breach of slavery and forecloses the horizon extending from it. The “metaphysics of Africanity,” in Hartman’s uptake of Hountondji, views history as constituted by the full presence of the past, one that is recoverable through a circular history. Along with Hountondji, Hartman rejects the metaphysics of Africanity, but from a different perspective.
The wholeness of connection constitutive of circular or even teleological history is unfelt by the “broken body” of the enslaved. [2] For the enslaved, history can only be pieced together through its ruptures. “The violent discontinuities of history introduced by the Middle Passage,” which suture the end of an African world to the dawn of an American nightmare, are experienced by enslaved people as “sentient recollections of connectedness” occurring at the site of rupture, “where the very consciousness of disconnectedness acts as mode as testimony and memory” (124). This experience of history as both loss and dissociation entails the remembering of a broken body.
What I wish to make explicit here is Hartman’s implicit inversion of the relationship between history and embodied practice, a connection often racistly interpreted in discussions of Africana history. Colonial and postcolonial perspectives frequently frame Africa and its diaspora as timeless and experiential, denying their historical dynamism. Eurocentric historiographical methodologies privilege textual and abstract forms of evidence, dismissing Africana history as “having no historical part of the world” in Hegel’s sense. [3] This Eurocentric bias maintains that those whose bodies are broken, exhausted, and deprived could have no “body of memory” worth remembering. Yet, the embodied history of the captive, passing through the breach of the Middle Passage, transcends this framing.
Memory of Difference
Drawing from Édouard Glissant, Hartman refers to types of history, which are lived through historical rupture and embodied practices of memory, as “nonhistory.” [4] Nonhistory, assembled moment by moment through ruptures and crises, resists totalization. Instead, it unfolds through the re-membering of the dis-membered body of the enslaved. The dis-membering of the enslaved body importantly occurs by means of captivity. Through ravishment, deprivation, and torture, one’s embodied self-identification is rendered disharmonic and disturbed—dis-membered. The re-membering of the body, as a counterinvestment against the body’s occupation by power, acts to redress such situations.
[Ruben Martinez Barricarte, “Sculpture of dancing slaves in the Congo Square at Louis Armstrong Park in NOLA (USA),” 2019]
Remembering a world before slavery, through the reenactment of tradition, disrupts the totality of domination. By recalling a prehistory of enslavement, a comportment of the body is re-membered, serving as an “eroding witness” to a history of terror. To repeat, embodied remembrance functions as a mode of redress, reworking history through performances of the past that redeem the “body as human flesh” (130).
Nonetheless, Hartman makes it clear that this practice of remembering does not retrieve the full presence of a given past. Instead, it constitutes an endless return to the site of rupture. Every action aimed at homogenizing with the past through the retrieval of tradition is simultaneously a moment of heterogeneity with the past. The attempted retrieval of an African world becomes a return to inevitable loss as the reproduction of tradition both distorts and expands it. Hartman refers to these movements toward the past, which inevitably produce difference, as the “memory of difference.” [5]
Hartman’s discussion of this memory of difference, which is always aimed at an irrecoverable past, often emphasizes the tragic nature of reiterated absence as an inadequacy of redressive action. Encouragingly, however, she notes that this inadequacy does not signify failure within these practices. Instead, it highlights their role as “limited figures of social transformation” (129). Hartman argues that repairing the violated condition of the enslaved or undoing the catastrophe of slavery is impossible “without the occurrence of an event of epic and revolutionary proportions” (130). Hartman seems to suggest here that a redemption of the afterlife of slavery would culminate in a spectacular event. However, in keeping with Hartman’s own rejection of centering “spectacle” in understanding the history of American slavery, I wish to reexamine how the impossibility of redress is not an “inadequacy” but already a nascent accomplishment.
As discussed above, the memory of difference does not aim at retrieving an inventory of the past but rather endlessly reproduces rupture. This embodied practice rejects the hegemony of the given and instead performs the repetition of absence, enabling the regeneration of the self through a “continuing process of redefinition” (127). The perceived failure to recover the past can be understood as a revaluation of the supposed worth of its givenness. For the enslaved, remembering resists the alienation and domination inherent in the hegemony of slave society. This practice of memory seizes not upon a given past but instead recovers and enacts a difference that interrupts the violence of captivity. Alongside disrupting the givenness of the present, memory also challenges the givenness of the past by staging inevitable divergences that “show the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself” (128).
Memory breaks up the totality of the given by reiterating the retrieval of absence. This absence opens a clear horizon for the future by denying both the foundation of a progressive history and a circular return to origins. The failure of remembering, therefore, should not be seen as inadequacy; rather, its achievement lies in the repetition of difference. This redressive practice continuously reverses the alienation and domination of a violent history. The goal is not to return to an origin but to achieve the movement of returning itself—not remembering a given thing but purely remembering. The conceptual enclosure of history, which engenders a circular or teleological narrative, is ruptured by the memory of a body that re-members itself, redefining and regenerating itself as a vehicle of history in moments of making a difference.
These small acts of making a difference are thus not so much inadequate as they are incomplete. They remain incomplete precisely because they accumulate, not toward the completion of a telos, but toward the gradual opening of a horizon. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman introduces the concept of the afterlife of slavery, describing the lingering presence of slavery as it accumulates across various sectors of contemporary society (6). However, rather than focusing on the ghostly reanimation of past terrors mediating the present, Hartman also shows that incremental acts of resistance and refusal must also have an afterlife. We must trust that revolutionary vision operates surreptitiously, even within the seemingly innocuous and ordinary.
The Other Side of the Everyday
The remembering of traditions, which resist slavery’s history of violence, occurs as an everyday practice. An “everyday practice” can generally be understood as the counterinvestment of the body against the constraints and coercions of life under slavery through modes of release, i.e. the cultivation of pleasures. In Scenes, Hartman explores how everyday practices of shared ceremony, innocent amusements, worship, etc. serve as forms of redress. Embodied remembrance—wherein our present relationship with the past, our ongoing practices of memory, and the continuous refusal of domination persist—is one such practice.
In conclusion, Scenes is a work that consciously shifts the center of discourse on American slavery from “spectacular” episodes of horror to a subterranean history of struggle at the level of everyday life. Through this work, Hartman highlights a litany of “quotidian terrors” devised to cement the order of slave society by assimilating radical violence into the givenness of the everyday. These practices of the enslaved enacted a negation of this given reality, creating an elsewhere—or other side—to the everyday violence of slavery. Coded work songs, circle dances of worship, secret gatherings of lovers, offering libations to deceased ancestors, and other such acts comprise a “genealogy of refusal” that subtly remapped a world otherwise exhausted by oppression. These practices, far from being inadequate, are better understood as ever-increasing drops in a stream of resistance.
Notes
[1] The thinker most closely associated with the conceptual enclosure of history is, unsurprisingly, G. W.F. Hegel. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the concept (Begriff) unfolds through historical events, manifesting itself as Spirit (Geist), all the while becoming increasingly self-aware. Each historical stage represents a moment in the self-realization of the concept (see, for example, the introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History). As discussed later, Hegel explicitly excludes Africa from the domain of history. Nevertheless, the “concept of Africa,” critiqued by Hountondji in African Philosophy, owes much to Hegel’s influence.
[2] The broken body is a concept introduced and frequently referenced in “Redressing the Pained Body” in Scenes. The broken body describes a state of the body produced by the overwork, sexual violation, and physical torture of captivity.
[3] See G. W. F. Hegel. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications, 1956, 99.
[4] See Édouard Glissant. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989, 62.
[5] Hartman borrows this term from VèVè Clark but her usage differs significantly. See VèVè Clark. "Katherine Dunham and the Memory of Difference." In History and Memory in African-American Culture. Eds. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
References
Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gerald Nelson Jr. is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and a Sparks Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. His emerging research interests focus on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of everyday practice, particularly how it relates to the embodiment of memory and the dynamics of history. Since his time as an undergraduate, he has been interested in the transformative possibilities of reinterpreting the history of transatlantic slavery. In the summer of 2022, he served as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow at Nanzan University in Nagoya. He is also a graduate of the Inter- University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama (2022-2023).