The Position of The Unthought PDF

THE POSITION OF THE UNTHOUGHT
Author(s): Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 183-201
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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An Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman

Conducted by Frank B. Wilderson, III
1
to say ishow
of the firstthings want
thankful Iam that you wrote Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery,
to say
I
and Self-Making inNineteenth-Century America. And want
Frank B. Wilderson,
Ill- One
a little
bit about howmeaningfulthebook istome as a black grad
and as someone
aspiring academic
ingeneral, when one
Because
not
it.
of
in
but
the
machine
caught
reads the work of black scholars - ifone is another black scholar
one prepares oneself for a disappointment, or
or a black studentinto the reading. And one doesn't have to
works a disappointment
uate student-
a so-called
do thatwith this particular book.

1mean,
is that so often in black
What
scholarship, people
or
the
from
away
strength and the
unconsciously peel
consciously
inorder to propose some kind of coherent,
terrorof their evidence
in moving through these
hopeful solution to things. Your book,
scenes of subjection as they take place in slavery, refuses to do that.

to think that
just as importantly, itdoes not allow the reader
And
therewas
a radical enough break to reposition the black body after
Jubilee.1That isa tremendousand courageousmove. And I think

what's
important about
it, is that itcorroborates
the experience
of
ordinaryblack people today,and of strangeblack people likeyou

andme intheacademy [Iaughter].
Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2003

184
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
But there's something else that the book does, and
Iwant
to
we think
talkabout thisat the levelofmethodologyand analysis. If
the registers of subjectivity as being preconscious

interest,
or
a lot
then
unconscious
and
identifications,
identity
positionality,
in
sciences
of the work
the social
itselfaround precon
organizes
about
interest; itassumes a subject of consent, and as you have

a
said,
subject of exploitation, which you reposition as the subject
of accumulation.2 Now when this sort of social science engages the
itassumes that itcan
ifand when itdoes issue of positionality do so in an un-raced manner. That's the best of thework. The worst
scious
of the work
is a kind of multiculturalism
that assumes we
all have
identities that can be put into a basket of stories, and

analogous
then that basket of stories can lead to similar interests.
Forme, what you've done in this book is to split the hair here.
In other words, this is not a book that celebrates an essential
Afrocentrism that could be captured by the multicultural discourse.
And yet it'snot a book that remains on the surface of preconscious
interest,which so much history and social science does. Instead, it

demands a radical racialization of any analysis of positionality. So.
Why don't we talk about that?
- Well! That's a
lot, and a number of things
Saidiya V Hartman
come tomind. I think forme the book isabout the problem of craft
ing a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionali

ty, asking, "Who does that narrative enable?" That's where the
issue of empathic identification is central forme. Because

it
a
in
to
the
narrative
seems
that
slave
ulti
every attempt
just
emplot
mately resulted in his or her obliteration, regardless of whether it
was a leftistnarrative of political agency the slave stepping into
or
someone else's shoes and then becoming a political agent -
whole
whether itwas about being able to unveil the slave's humanityby

oneself inthatposition.
actuallyfinding
Inmany ways, what Iwas trying to do as a cultural historian
to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices
that speak to the limits of most available narratives to explain the
was
position of the enslaved. On
one hand, the slave is the foundation

of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the posi
tion of the unthought. So what does itmean to try to bring that
position into view without making ita locus of positive value, or
to fill inthevoid? So much of our politicalvocabu

without trying
implicitly integrationist even

lary/imaginary/desires have been
when we imagine our claims are more radical. This goes to the sec
ond part of the book that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is
an
towards
always
integration into the national project, and partic
ularly when that project
to affirm it.
is in crisis, black people
are called
upon
So certainly it'sabout more than the desire for inclusion with
inthe limitedsetof possibilitiesthatthenationalprojectprovides.
this language enable? And once you realize
What
then does
the given language of freedomits limits and begin to see its inex
investment in certain notions of the subject and subjection,

then that language of freedom no longer becomes thatwhich res
cues the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the
orable
re-elaboration of that condition,

F.W -
rather than its transformation.
isone of the reasons why your book has been called

"pessimistic" by Anita Patterson.3 But it's interesting that she does
n't say what I said when we first started talking, that it'senabling.
I'm assuming that she's white I don't know, but it certainly
sounds like it.
S.VH. -
This
But I think there's a certain
integrationist rights agenda

that subjects who are variously positioned on the color line can
take up. And that project is something I consider obscene:
the
attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for cel

ebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the
lastfewcenturies,but to stillfinda way to feelgood about our

selves.That's notmy projectat all, though I thinkit'sactually the
the kind of social
projectof a numberof people. Unfortunately,
revisionist
historyundertakenbymany leftistsin the 1970s, who
were tryingto locate theagencyof dominatedgroups, resultedin
of theoppressed.4Ultimately,itbled intothis
celebratorynarratives

185
186
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
celebration, as iftherewas a space you could carve out of the ter

in order to exist outside its clutches and
rorizing state apparatus
some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in partic
one
in the book was an argument
of my hidden polemics
ular,
against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been
forge
taken up in the context of looking at the status of the slave.
FW -
That's very interesting, because

thinking about also in respect toGramsci.
Sassoon
suggests that Gramsci
it's something
I've been
Because Anne Showstack
breaks down
hegemony into three

influence, leadership, and consent.5 Maybe we could
categories:
the
discussion
back to your text then, using the examples of
bring
Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,7 a white anti-slavery

Northerner, as ways inwhich to talk about this. Now, what's really
Harriet
interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of

Power," you not only explain how the positional ityof black women
and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness dis
we are to think of that notion as
articulates the notion of consent, if
"[B]eing forced to submit to the will of the
in all things defines the predicament of slavery" (S, 110). In
other words, the female slave isa possessed, accumulated, and fun
gible object, which is to say that she isontologically different than
universal. You write:
master
who may, as a house servant or indentured labor

er, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for
a white woman
[as regards, in this case, sex] is required to establish

if refusal is not an option....
consent, for consent ismeaningless
Consent is unseemly in a context inwhich the very notion of sub
nonconsent
jectivity is predicated
upon the negation of will"
(S, 111).
S. V.H. -
Once again, trying to fit into the other's shoes becomes

the very possibility of narration. In the chapter "A Perilous Passage
in the Slave Girl's Life," the question for Jacobs is how she can tell
when
her storyina way that'sgoing to solicitherwhite readership
she has to efface her very condition
in order to make
that story
intelligibleto them. I lookat thismessymoment as kindof a vor
tex in Jacobs' narrative, where
in order to fashion herself as a desir

ing subject, she has to deny the very violence, which elsewhere she
said defines her position as a slave: her status as a thing and the
negation of her will. In one sense, she has to bracket that so she
can tell a story about sexuality that's meaningful in a white domi

nant frame. And I think this iswhy someone like Hortense Spillers
raises the question of whether gender and sexuality are at all

applicable to the condition of the captive community.8
I
That's what was
working with there, that impossibility or ten
Jacobs as an agent versus the objective conditions in

which she finds herself. This is something you talk about in your
work as well, this existence in the space of death, where negation is
sion between
the captive's central possibility for action, whether we think of that

as a radical refusal of the terms of the social order or these acts that
suicide or self-destruction, but which are real
lyan embrace of death. Ultimately it'sabout the paradox of agency
for those who are in these extreme circumstances. And basically,
are sometimes called
there are very few political narratives that can account
for that.
own work,
we have to ask
obviously I'm not
why. Inmy
in
is
that
this
of
which
blackness, there is no
space
negation,
saying
not
We have tremendous life.But this life is
life.
analogous to those
touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the
F.W -And
trajectory of our life (within our terrain of civil death) isbound up in

sometimes individually, sometimes collectively the
claiming
violence which Fanon writes about in The Wretched of the Earth,
that trajectory which, as he says, is "a splinter to the heart of the
world"9 and "puts the settler out of the picture."10 So, itdoesn't help
us politicallyor psychologicallyto tryto find

ways inwhich howwe
live isanalogous to how white positionality lives, because, as I think

your book suggests, whites gain their coherence by knowing what
on theside ofwhiteness
theyare not.There istremendous
diversity
and tremendousconflictbetweenwhite men and white women,
between Jewsand gentiles,and between classes, but thatconflict,
even
in itsarticulation, has a certain solidarity. And I think that sol

idarity comes from a near or far relation to the black body or bod
ies.We give the nation itscoherence because we're itsunderbelly.1

187
188
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
S.V.H. -
That's what's
Mbembe's
the way
so interesting for me about Achille

he thinks about the position of the for
along the lines of the slave as an essential
work,
colonized
merly
subject
way of defining the predicament.
the object
to whom
squandered with
Essentially, he says, the slave is

can
be done, whose
life can be
anything
impunity.12
F.W. -
And he's suggesting thatwhat itmeans to be a slave is to

be subject to a kind of complete appropriation, what you call
"property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and
nefarious uses of slave property" and then demonstrates how "there

was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, enti
tlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status
of free blacks was
shaped and compromised by the existence of

are formally enslaved blacks proper
slavery" (S, 24). So. Not only
so
are
One could say that the possibil
but
free
blacks.
ty,
formally
ityof becoming property isone of the essential elements that draws

the line between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intrigu
ing about your argument is theway inwhich you demonstrate how

not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the proper
and this is really keythe
ty of white enjoyment, but so is
slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance:

white people.13
that too belongs
to
S. VH. -
was writing Scenes of Subjection,

Right. You know, as I
there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-century culture
and on minstrelsy in particular. And there was a certain sense in
the ability to occupy blackness was considered transgressive

or as a way of refashioning whiteness, and therewere all these rad
ical claims thatwere being made for it.14
And I thought, "Oh, no,
this is just an extension of the master's prerogative." Itdoesn't mat
which
terwhether you do good or you do bad,
the crux is that you can
choose todo what youwish with theblack body.That'swhy think

ingabout thedynamicsof enjoymentintermsof thematerial rela
tions of slavery was
F.W -Yes,
so key forme.
that's clarifying. A body that you can do what you want

In your discussion
of the body as the property of enjoyment,

what I really like iswhen you talk about Rankin. Here's a guylike the prototypical twentieth-century white progressive - who's
anti-slavery and uses his powers of observation towrite for itsabo
with.
in the South, he's

lition, even to his slave-owning brother. He's
a
slave coffle, and he imagines that these slaves being
looking at
it
beaten could be himself and his family. Through this process
sense to him, itbecomes meaningful. His body and his fam
ilymembers' white bodies become proxies for real enslaved black
makes
bodies and, as you point out, the actual object of identification, the
slave, disappears.
S.V.H. -
I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical ques

tions/problems/crises for theWest: the status of difference and the
status of the other. It's as though in order to come to any recogni
tion of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning
in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: "Only if Ican see myself
in that position can
I understand the crisis of that position." That is

the logic of the moral and political discourses we see everyday the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist
state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be
.. .
exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to
F.W.-
[laughter] A nigga on the warpath!
S. V.H. Exactly! For me itwas those moments thatwere the most

the moments of the sympathetic ally, who in some ways
telling
is actually no more able to see the slave than the person who is
exploiting him or her as their property. That is the work Rankin
does and I think it suggests just how ubiquitous that kind of vio
lence, in fact, is.
F.W -
You've
just thrown something
into crisis, which
is very
much on the table today:the notionof allies.What you've said

(and I'm so happy thatsomeone has come along to say it!) is that
the ally
is not a stable category. There's a structural prohibition
(ratherthanmerelya willful refusal)againstwhites being theallies

189
190
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
to borrow from Fanon's The Wretched of

of blacks, due to thisthe Earth again "species" division between what itmeans to be
a
means to be an object: a structural antago
subject and what it
nism. But everything in the academy on race works off of the ques
tion, "How do we help white allies?" Black academics assume that
there isenough of a structural commonality between the black and

the white (working class) position their mantra being: "We are
forone to embark upon a political ped
both exploited subjects" agogy thatwill somehow help whites become aware of this "com
monality." White writers posit the presence of something they call
"white skin privilege," and the possibility of "giving that up," as
their gesture of being in solidarity with blacks. But what both ges
is that subjects just can't make common cause with

objects. They can only become objects, say in the case of John
Brown or Marilyn Buck, or further instantiate their subjectivity
tures disavow
through modalities of violence (lynching and the prison industrial

complex), or through modalities of empathy. In other words, the
essence
of the white/black
relation is that of the
essential
master/slave
regardless of itshistorical or geographic specificity.
And masters and slaves, even today, are never allies.
S.V.H. a
Right. I think of the book as an allegory;

history of the present.
itsargument
is
F.W -
Thank you! I'm so glad you said it'san allegory of the pre
now we've got two problems on the table, two crises
or rather,we have many crises, but only two that I can identify
sent. Because
-
at the moment.
is how we
One
deal with
the common
sense
around allies, whether itbe in teaching literature to undergraduates

or going to hear Cornel West speak with Michael
Lerner, or listen
in point of fact, itmay be that the progressive
ing to KPFA, since,
as Newt
communityisactuallyas big an enemy toblack revolution
to the
I
And
"How
do
the
other
could
as,
you
go
put
Gingrich.
movies?"
How
does
one, knowing what one

it seems like every film-
anything? Because
going to communicate
sit through
if it is in any way
knows,
some type of empathy that the audience

can
walk
away with
has to have black death as itsprecondition.
S.VH. -
Yes, yes. Monster's Ball is a great example.15 Not only is

Leticia's husband executed, but her son must also die as the pre
condition for her new lifewith her husband's executioner. And the
requirement is rendered as a romance. Rather than closing

a
note of ambivalence, the film actually ends with her smiling
with
over the romantic music, as ifto suggest that she's gotten over it,
and the future awaits them. And I think that is the frightening
death
hypocrisy of the context we are living in.

There's also the filmUnfaithful where the lover has to be mur
inorder to protect the heterosexual family.16The white bour

geois family can actually livewith murder in order to reconstitute
itsdomesticity.
dered
F.W -
Well, why does white

in the visual?
supremacy seem to be so bound up
S.VH. -
I think that visually, the threat of blackness

is somehow
A
Fanon's
that's
the
"Look!
formulation, and
Negro":
heightened.
within the racial classificatory schema that is how much of the
isdone, especially in terms of theway racialization has oper
ated: how itdisposes of bodies, how itappropriates their products,
and how it fixes them in a visual grid. I think those are the three
work
ways Iwould explore that problem, as well

dimension of the empathic.
F.W -
as, again, thiswhole
of the things Iwanted to bring up is how your book is

talking to other very important books. It's talking to Fanon as you've
said, and it's talking to Patterson's Slavery and Social Death.17 And
One
you talked about the leftistdiscourses
of the '70s, and the univer
salizingofGramscianhegemonythatreallyfallsshortof helpingus
understanda position incivil society,but notof civil society.Ithas
todo, Ithink,
with how the idiomofpower thatblack people expe
rience has different kinds of manifestations
as we move
from slav
ery into the era of the Freedmen's Bureau, but there's an umbrella
of despotism
that remains. And when
you suggested earlier that the

191
192
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
isan allegory of the present, itwas so refreshing, because one

can read this book and begin to metaphorize
the manifestations of
book
despotism in the past, and also to think about how

the present.
itcontinues
in
S.VH. -
It really is the pressing question of freedom. That's why

forme, the last lines of the book summon up thatmoment of poten
tiality between the no longer and the not yet. "Not yet free": that
articulation is from the space of the twenty-first century, not the
the same
nineteenth, and that's the way it's supposed to carry
predicament,
the same condition.
in those termswe might think about how Rodney King

of inviting his own beating; you know, he shook his
an
So maybe you
in
aggressive manner at a white woman.
FW. -And
was
ass
accused
could sketch out theway inwhich the black woman functions sim
ilarly in slavery, as somehow outside the statutory, or inside it: she
cannot be raped because
invite the rapist.
S. VH. -
she's a non-person yet she ispresumed
Yes. No crime can occur because
to
the slave statutes rec
ognize no such crime. Often when I'm looking through the crimi
nal record of the nineteenth century, I'm seeing the text of black
agency. The people who are resisting their masters and overseers
appear in the records as they're prosecuted for their crime, creating

In
this displacement of culpability that enables white innocence.
the case of State ofMissouri v. Celia (1855), Celia is raped repeat
edly by her owner from the moment she's purchased. She begs him
to stop; he doesn't, so she kills him. Her crime is the crime on
record: she is the culpable agent.18 So in this formulation of law
and
itspunishment, blackness
is on the side of culpability, which
and affirms
makes thecrimesof propertytransparent
the rightsto
property in captives.
And you're right, that displacement
functions more generally.
Who is the responsibleand culpable agent?For themost part, it's

always
the slave, the native, the black.

F.W -
Which
brings your allegory of the present to the prison
industrial complex.
S.VH. -
Actually, I've got an interesting tidbit. I think that Den

mark Vesey was the first person ever imprisoned in the South
Carolina Penitentiary.
F.W -
Really?
It's like a seamless
transition from slavery to prison.
S.V.H. -
Right. And this iswhere the larger narrative of capitalism

in the world,
into play. Because, basically, inmost places
you have a transition from slavery to other modes of involuntary
servitude. Inmy work, I critique the received narrative about the
comes
transition from slavery to freedom in the American context, but we

could also look at that same kind of transformation in relation to
the anti-slavery rhetoric that comes to legitimize the colonial pro

ject inAfrica. By the nineteenth century, slavery was the dominant
inWest Africa. Eventually, the European
mode of production
nations decided
"This is an awful
institution and we
need to stop
in the Congo
in
it," so we get King Leopold masking his atrocities

the discourse of anti-slavery, or British colonial figures inGhana
effectively saying, "Well, we saved you from the slave raider so you
should be grateful."19 In both cases, it's the same notion: "We've
given you your freedom, so now you're

F.W -
inour debt."
And that brings us to Reconstruction

you're talking about post-jubilee:
in your book where
The good conduct encouraged by such counsels eased

the transition from slavery to freedom by imploring the
freed to continue in old forms of subservience, which
primarily entailed remaining on the plantation as faith
ful, hardworking, and obedient
laborers, but also
included manners, styles of comportment inwork rela
tions,objects of consumption, leisure,and domestic

relations.
schoolbooks
In their emphasis on proper conduct, these

resuscitated the social roles of slavery, not
unlike the regulation of behavior
in labor contracts or

193
194
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
the criminalization
of impudence
in the Black Codes.
The pedagogical injunctionstoobedience and servility

cast the freed in a world
one in
starkly similar to the
one
On
the
had
suffered
under
slavery.
they
hand, these texts heralded the natural rightsof all men;
and on the other, they advised blacks to refrain from
which
enjoying this newly conferred equality. Despite procla

mations about the whip's demise, emergent forms of
involuntary servitude, the coercive control of black
labor, the repressive instrumentality of the law, and the
social intercourse of everyday life revealed the entan
glements of slavery and freedom. (S, 151)
So. There's thiswhole army of white people missionaries, edu
- who
to
like
down
South
and
the
cators,
go
help rehabilitate the
Negro after slavery. And in reading that, a wave of cynicism swept
over me, because all of a sudden I thought of Freedom Summer,
and the white
students in SNCC, which
is a blasphemous
to have.
thought
S.V.H. -
It's too immediate, but yes. Imean, it's incredible: these

have made the nation richand
have
been working people
or
not
they can actually
suddenly there's this question of whether
be productive. And here as everywhere else in theworld, you need

violence to make a working class. So what you see are the various
means utilized to do that: forms of state violence, extra-state vio
lence, and the values propagated by moralizing and religious dis

courses. And what's interesting is that the black elites become the
purveyors of those very values. Kevin Gaines has shown inUplifting
the Race how inmany ways the agenda of the black elite is reac
tionary and they are, in effect, the handmaidens of the state.20

For example, in the black feministwork on marriage, I think
there's been a one-sided
assessment of the institution: the enslaved
marriage, so now they have access to it and can

secure the bonds of their love.21 But it'salso being enforced as part
since
of an agenda of social control. And it'salso being utilized -
were
denied

to force black men to

interracial marriages are prohibited assume the responsibility for the offspring of white men and black
women. So in that context, what does itactually mean tomake the
ex-slave into a certain kind of subject? And, again, who does that
serve? It is an agenda for creating dutiful workers, and instilling in

them a desire for consumption so that they become dependent
to the self-sufficient peasants that they
upon wages, as opposed
would
otherwise choose
to be.
F.W -
Now, it's really tricky here for us, as black intellectuals,

we staywith the second half of the book, as you've said,
if
because
we've got thiswave of do-gooders moving down to the South with
these Freedmen Bureau books on everything from
these tomes are white and
hygiene, to how to speak and what to do. Some
some are black. And this is very much like 1964 with SNCC and
the white Freedom Riders, and maybe very much like 1999, with
the prison abolition movement.22 But, you know, the black ...
S.V.H. -
If I'm clear about what you're getting at, I think it'sthe dif
ference between those who wanted to aid the newly freed to fit into
the social order and those who had a vision of black freedom that
was
about transforming the social order, about the promise of the

revolution, and ultimately, about Jubilee. So I think that's one way
to thinkabout thedifferent
models of communityimaginedby the
solidarity forces in relation to the ambitions and desires of the for

merly enslaved community.
F.W -
But there is something that the people producing this lib

eral discourse of accommodation
don't seem to understand that I
want to bring to the fore. Evelyn Hammonds
in her article on black
some
a
kind of conflict female sexuality suggests that there is
conflicton the levelof ideas- between the Ida B.Wells prototype

and theBessie Smithprototype.23
But both prototypesare doing
work on black femalesexualityunder theumbrellaof despotism.
And in termsof how thatdespotismmanifests itselfvisually,we
what Icall settlernarratives,
and by that I
might trytodeconstruct
mean films like Frin Brockovich,which was reallyabout how

195
196
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
over brown and black people, but whose mise-en

is reinscribed, at the level of the bodily code, with a whole
plethora of Jacksonian white people.24
PG&E messed
scene
S.V.H. -
You're
right, because
99.5%
of U.S.
instrumental pernicious propaganda machine.

seems to realize that [laughter]!
is a totally
You're the only one
cinema
who
F.W -
I'm categorically uninterested in those horrific

I'm interested in is
killing colored people. What
You know!
scenes of Rambo
the despotism,
get a job.25
S.VH. -
the white supremacy, of Erin Brockovich
It's in those moments

social
pernicious
trying to
of seeming innocence where the

I don't know if you've seen
text is revealed.
Minority Report?26
F.W -
Iwent
to see
it,but itwas
sold-out.
It seems
like another
allegory.
S.VH. -
It is, and, of course, what's

interesting is that you're
in this future where one can pinpoint the "pre-crime."
placed
Spielberg, trying to be liberal, doesn't have criminals represented
as black,
but we
know
that the state machine
is a
racializing
machine, yet this fact iseffaced in the film. It's interesting that every
crime that occurs in the film is a crime against the family.And like
every Spielberg film, family values support a eugenics agenda
the reconstitution of the white bourgeois family. Even the white
working class ispathologized. The space of theworking poor is rife
with nineteenth-century metaphors that could be right out of one
of my Freedmen's primers: disorder, dirt, sexual impropriety [laugh
ter]. This is the twenty-firstcentury anticipation of the future.
So, Iagreewith you.And as a black intellectuallivingin this
I think that there is a struggle to maintain one's sanity in a

context in which your consciousness
is at war with the given.
There's nothing that's simple or taken for granted.
culture,
EW -
No,
it's all very complicated.
And
this iswhy Africans say

are
complex
just too complex. They think black Americans
I'm
of
the
African
and moody and depressive.
very jealous
position
inmany ways. There are all these therapeutic grounding wires, so
is slapping them down, they've got this whole
when apartheid
we're
other psychic space

S. V.H. -
that they just go into.
Although I'm very suspicious of the notion that theAfrican

also occupy that depressive personality. In InMy Father's
are angrier at
Anthony Appiah says thatAfrican-Americans
doesn't
House,
white people than Africans because colonialism didn't exact the
same psychic damage.27 Idon't believe that, I think that's an untrue
statement. I think that there's definitely a difference between we
and people elsewhere, but I really challenge

is
the psychic damage of apartheid
that supposition because
tremendous. When you look at certain African writers, say Achille
who
are of theWest
Mbembe
and the other so-called
"Afro-Pessimists" who
are
diag
of the colonial
nosticians of their society, you see the consequences
as extreme or radical as inour case
project. The trauma may not be
I
still
literally living inside this order, but would
greatly qualify these positive assessments of African subjectivity.
we're
because
F.W -
work
And
in those
black women
living in this order, black people are still doing the

innocent scenes. They're doing the work of dying;
in
are doing the work of recognizing white women
Pierce;28 and black men are performing

thework of recognizing the sexual virility of white men. That's real
to do and still live under
ly importantwork thatwe're called upon
their quests as
inMildred
the specter of despotism.

So maybe we're still-
B.Wells
club was. We're
don't kill us.

S. VH. -
And
and this isvery tragic- where the Ida

so that they
trying to make ourselves over
I think the underlying question
is, "Where do we go
from here?"
F.W S.VH. -
Is that leading us to reparations?

Yes. I've been thinking about the notion of focusing one's

197
198
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
appeal to the very state that has inflicted the injury.The reparations
movement puts itself in this contradictory or impossible position,
because
reparations are not going to solve the systemic ongoing
or any other terms. And
production of racial inequality, inmaterial
like inequality, racial domination and racial abjection are pro
across generations.
In that sense, reparations seem like a
very limited reform: a liberal scheme based upon certain notions of
commensurability that reinscribe the power of the law and of the
duced
a
right certain situation, when, clearly, itcannot.
I think too that such thinking reveals an idealist trap; it'sas if
Americans
know how the wealth
of the country was
state to make
once
are owed something. My

acquired, they'll decide that black people
God! Why would you assume that? Like housing segregation is an
I think that logic of "if they only knew otherwise"
is
accident!
is the welfare state dis
about the disavowal of political will. Why
mantled, even though it's actually going to affect more white

women and children than black people? Because
ithas to do with
.. .
an
that political will and
antipathy to blackness that structures
FW. -
That structures institutions. And your work on empathy

shows that; ithelps us to understand how important blackness is to
the libidinal economy of white institutionality.Now, I think I'm fair
in generally characterizing
the reparations debate and those
who've renewed it
Randall Robinson and company by saying
that they got a tiger by the tail, and then didn't want the tiger to do
reparations people present the issue to blacks as
an essentially historical phenomenon
is
that ended,
though slavery
but the effects ofwhich put blacks at what they call, you know, "an
its thing.29 The
to those inother positions who are also chas

dream. Through such a move the reparations folks
unfair disadvantage"
ing theAmerican
waste a politicalweapon, theydull theknife,theykeep the

literally
tiger in the cage, because
here is a weapon
which
could spew forth
in untold directions: I'm thinkinghere of Nat Turner'sgreatest
night. Instead, that weapon
is a denuded
or, maybe
a policed
mobilize
method of conveyance.They'retryingto simultaneously
and manage
black rage. Ifreparations were
thought of not as some

as a weapon
that could precipitate a cri
thing to be achieved, but
sis inAmerican
institutionality, then itcould be worked out a lot
differently from the way it'spresented. One could present a repa

rations agenda in theway inwhich you present your book, dealing
with the despotism of black positionality as itmoves from genera
tion to generation, from historical moment to historical moment with despotism beirig the almost ahistorical constant. Unleash the
tigerand let itdo itsthing.
S. VH. -- At the very least thatwould

social order.
F.W. -Yes,
entail a transformation of the
have to call for revolution.
theywould
Berkeley, California,
1
July6, 2002
troubles any
Rather, Hartman argues that the contiguity of forms of subjection
so
text
and
that
of freedom
absolute division between
the
freedom,
slavery
as
must be understood
Scenes
of Subjection:
laden with the vestiges of slavery. Saidiya V. Hartman,

in Nineteenth-Century
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making
America (NewYork:Oxford UniversityPress, 1997). Hereaftercited paren

2
thetically as S.
For Hartman, the slave as subject unsettles
and primitive accumulation,
ty production
because
between
commodi
the slave embodies
the
form. The slave is thus the object that must be de-ani

changing commodity
inorder to be exchanged
and thatwhich, by contrast, defines the mean
mated
ing of free labor.
Anita
Patterson,
Nineteenth-Century
the distinction
"Scenes
of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making
African-American
vol. 33, no.
Review,
America/'
in
4
(Winter1999): 683.
See, forexample,George Rawick,FromSundown toSunup: TheMaking of the
Slave
Community
(Westport, Conn.:
1973);
Greenwood,
John Blassingame,
The Slave Community:PlantationLife in theAntebellumSouth (Oxford:

Ox
fordUniversity
Press,1979);HerbertGutman,TheBlack FamilyinSlaveryand
Freedom
6
7
(New York: Pantheon,
1976);
Lawrence
Levine, Black Culture,
Black
Consciousness (Oxford:
OxfordUniversity
Press, 1977); SterlingStuckey,Slave
Culture (Oxford:
OxfordUniversityPress, 1987).
Anne
Showstack
Readers,
Sassoon,
Approaches
to Gramsci
(London: Writers
and
1982).
HarrietJacobs,Incidentsin theLifeof a SlaveGirl,WrittenbyHerself,ed. Jean

FaganYellin (1861; reprint,
Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversityPress, 1987).
John Rankin, Letters on American
Universities Press, 1970).
Slavery
(1837;
reprint,Westport,

CT: Negro
199
200
SAIDIYAV. HARTMAN
8
9
10
Hortense
An American
Grammar
J. Spillers, "Mama's
Baby, Papa's Maybe:
17 (Summer 1987): 65-81.
Book," Diacritics
trans. Charles
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
Lam Markmann
(New
as B.
York: Grove Press, 1967), Hereafter cited parentetica!ly
Frantz Fanon,
York: Grove
11
of the Earth, trans. Constance
The Wretched
Press,
Farrington
(New
1968), 44.
It's interesting to note how, in the nineteenth century, as

expands:
?
etc. ?
the Jacksonians
Scots, Irish, Catholics,
farmers, cowboys,
yeomen
are
access to civil society, those demands are enabled
demanding
by the ques
Wilderson
tion:
What does itmean tobe white? Butwhat's remarkableisthediversity
of
thatquestion: as each territory
debates thisquestionon
opinions surrounding
its
definitionregardingthe inside/out
way to statehood,one findsno uniform
or even
But from territory
of whiteness,
side, the boundaries
quasi-whiteness.
to territory there is absolute consistency
in the relegation of blackness
towhat
Fanon
calls
Native American
Even the dereliction

dereliction.
of the
position of absolute
is often best understood,
libidinally, through the black body.
I'm thinking
of graffiti
ina men's bathroom:The Indian is livingproof thatthe
the
fucked
buffalo.
nigger
12 See AchilleMbembe, On thePostcolony (Berkeley:Universityof California
13
14
Press, 2002).
Hartman writes:
"[EJnjoyment was attributed to the slave in order to deny, dis

the violence of slavery. . . .Thus the efficacy of violence
place, and minimize
was
indicated precisely by its invisibility or transparency and in the copious
... As
Slavoj Zizek notes, fantasies about the other's
display of slave agency.
are ways for us to
(25).
enjoyment
organize our own enjoyment"
15
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy

and
See, for example,
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Marc Forster, Monster's
Ball, 35mm, 111 min., Lion's Gate Films, 2002.
16
Adrian
17
Orlando
18
Lyne, Unfaithful, 35mm, 124 min.,

tion with Fox 2000 Pictures, 2002.
Patterson, Slavery
versity Press, 1982).

v. Celia,
State ofMissouri
Term,
1855, Callaway
and Social
a Slave,
County
Epsilon Motion
Death
File 4496,
Courthouse,
(Cambridge,
Pictures
MA:
Callaway County
Fulton, MO.
the
in associa
Harvard
Uni
Court, October
19 See Patrick
Manning,SlaveryinWest Africa (Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity
Press, 1987), andAdam Hochschild,King Leopold'sGhost (NewYork:Mariner
1999).
Books,
20
KevinGaines, UpliftingtheRace (ChapelHill: Universityof NorthCarolina
21
Press, 1996).
See Ann DuCille,
Convention
The Coupling
(New York: Oxford University
of Female Desire
(New
Press, 1993), and Claudia
Tate, Domestic
Allegories
York: Oxford
22
University Press, 1992).

refuses
expands: At a certain level, the prison abolition movement
to be led by the energy and esprit de corps of prisoners themselves ?
it some
times even refuses to be led by the agenda of prisoners,
i.e., abolition. The
?
an exercise
in racial
Freedom Riders were part of a civil rights exercise
Wilderson

uplift, in access
to institutionality (civil society). In both these twentieth-centu

rygestures, just as Hartman points out with respect to the Freedmen's Bureau
of the nineteenth century, the oppositional
force and desire of black antago
nism,the forceand desireof objects ina world subjects, isnorwhat leads, is
not that demand
to which
all other positions
must succumb,
and be assimilat
ed by or perishbeneath (theway it isagreed,on theLeft,that

Marx's dictator
ship of the proletariat,
or Gramsci's
Modern
Prince,
the revolutionary
party,
shouldassimilateor crushthecapitalists).Therein liesthehistoricalcontinuity
between
the Freedmen's
movements
23
Bureau
and
the Freedom
Riders and prison abolition
of the twentieth century.
M. Hammonds, "Towarda Genealogy of Black FemaleSexuality:The

Evelynn,
in Feminist Genealogies,
of Silence,"
Colonial
Legacies, Demo
cratic Futures, eds. M. Jacqui Alexander
and Chandra Talpad? Mohanty
(New
York: Routledge,
1997).
Problematic
24
Steven
Soderbergh,
Erin Brockovich,
35 mm,
130 min.,
Universal
Studios,
2000.
was foundationalto
25 Wilderson further
white supremacy
suggests:In real life,
thestoryofCalifornia's largestutility
poisoningand killingitsconsumerswho
were people of color. But inthe film,literally
of all thecases thatBrockovich
a
woman
tobe a singlemom and a
white
class
(as
trying
investigates
working
paralegal),and 99% of thebodieswhich she and theattorneyspeak to atmass
meetings
?
of the plaintiffs, are white
the white American
ruralworking
class.
We're right
with smallmerchantsand yeomen
back to thenineteenthcentury
26
the railroads, and

farmers, homesteaders,
tyrannized by the big corporations,
the national bank: a national tragedy made possible only by the disavowal
of
slavery's intensification and the Trail of Tears.
Steven Spielberg, Minority
Report, 35mm,
146 min.,
Fox, 2002.
20th Century
27
AnthonyK. Appiah, InMy Father'sHouse: Africa in thePhilosophyofCulture
28
Michael
29
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Curtiz, Mildred
Pierce, 35 mm, 113 min., Warner
Bros.,
to Blacks
The Debt: What America Owes
Randall
Robinson,
Plume,
1945.
(New York:
2001).

201

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THE POSITION OF THE UNTHOUGHT

Author(s): Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III

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