Digital Watts – Page 4 – Digital Scholarship @ LMU

Week #1:Counter History

Hartman states, “…by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said” (11). In many ways the Jet article is doing exactly this, it is attempting to displace an authorized account. It serves as a counter history to the Times article because it is a revisiting and revision of the accounts otherwise told of Emmet’s murder. One can easily see the differences in the articles from the language utilized to the images or lack thereof. The Jet article disrupts the narrative most notably with images that offer everyone the opportunity to, in a sense, reconstruct the past by looking into the casket.

The Times article is a censored version of the real story. It is brief and devoid of details choosing strategically the manner in which the instance is described. The title is “Slain Youth’s Body Seen by Thousands” whereas Jet titles their article “Nation Horrified by Murder”. The times article is surrounded with “business as usual” snippets of news while Jet grants this story a few pages. The Times article is guarded in its language describing everything very lightly, saying the boy was shot and beaten, but there is no mention of the fact that his face was crushed, that he was found with a 200 pound fan tied around his neck or that he was naked. Jet is the one who discloses those details and notes on the very bottom that despite rumors the child wasn’t castrated a real fear and an act reminiscent of the lynchings that were valorized in the south. The Times article includes as its last sentence the mention of Communists and if to further disconnect the reader from the reality of what occurred.

Ultimately, Jet addresses that which the Times article would not, it revisits the violence and places it right before you. As Hartman says, “ My effort to reconstruct the past, is well, an attempt to describe obliquely the forms of violence licensed in the present, that is, the forms of death unleashed in the name of freedom, security, civilization and God/the good” (13). Jet’s article acts as a counter history because it too looks to the past for the purpose of affecting the present. Emmets murder was unleashed in the name of the “good”, for the “security” of the white woman and because of the freedom of two white men. The Jet article does very much what Hartman does to Venus, “ My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand against the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history” (14). Jet does a similar as the article revises the initial account, revisits the violence and ultimately requires that Emmet be a lesson for the future.

Week 1: Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation

Though I initially dismissed the spectral presence of “speculation” in Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts (believing I was under the influence of my own recent engagements with speculative fiction, the speculative turn, the speculative solution to the problem of correlationalism), she explicitly names it towards the end of her piece:

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling (emphasis mine, 11).

What Hartman seems to suggest here is the potential for a type of historical speculation or “critical fabulation” as she calls it — the assertion that in speculating about the inaccessible, silenced voices of the past, one might be able to “tell an impossible story” while simultaneously amplifying the “impossibility of its telling” (11). The implications of this act are not merely confined to “counter-histories” but also a “history of the present… the incomplete project of freedom… [which is] a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence” (4). Before fully exploring Hartman’s account of the latter, I’d like to work through her own engagement with this type of historical labour, as it has helped flesh out my own uncertainties about what it means to “retell” or “rewrite” the past. The recurrence of the words “impossible” and “impossibility” is difficult to ignore (both feature in this piece upwards of 20 times) and refer to the seeming futility of locating a voice for those “two girls” in the “archive of slavery.” It is simultaneously an act (a search? a voyage?) described as a “refashioning of disfigured lives… [a redressal of] the violence” (2); a “recuperation” and “conjuring” — a “resurrection” (3); a “compensation” and “reparation” (4). Its intent is not however “to give voice to the slave” in the face of the silent archive but to demonstrate “Narrative restraint, the refusal to ﬁll in the gaps and provide closure… the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non-sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility” (12).

The first four pages of Hartman’s essay are filled with questions about the nature of her project, its value, its potential, its price. She offers up her own initial skepticism of a type of “speculative history” — “I feared what I might invent, and it would have been a romance” (8). Wary of the way in which the grotesqueries and acts of violence perpetrated on the bodies and minds of slaves were coopted by the language of spectacle (and how closely enmeshed spectacle and speculation are both practically and etymologically), Hartman in her fist discussion of “Venus” (Lose Your Mother) resists this impulse. But this resolves itself in her decision to engage in “fabulation” in “Venus in Two Acts:”

If I could have conjured up more than a name in an indictment, if I could have imagined Venus speaking in her own voice, if I could have detailed the small memories banished from the ledger, then it might have been possible for me to represent the friendship that could have blossomed between two frightened and lonely girls. Shipmates. Then Venus could have beheld her dying friend, whispered comfort in her ear, rocked her with promises, soothed her with “soon, soon” and wished for her a good return” (emphasis mine, 8).

Characteristic here are the “ifs” of the subjunctive tense, a narrative “fashioned,” a “critical reading” of that archive which had silenced Venus in the first place but also “mimetic” — intended to tell that which is “impossible” but never to deny the “impossibility” of its telling. Whereas before Hartman “chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive,” “Venus in Two Acts” seems to be her reckoning with those boundaries, an acknowledgement that the archive is just as much a fiction, constituted by “the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies… [that] determine what can be said about the past” (9).

This drew to mind Pierre Cassou-Nogues’s seminar on how speculative fiction or thought might be the solution to the inaccessibility of the “past.” For those of you who weren’t at the talk, I’ll try to focus on those elements of it that pertain to what I’m discussing in this blog post. Cassou-Nogues suggested that it is through “speculative narratives” that we might be able to answer what Quentin Meillassoux refers to as “ancestral questions” — those “histories” and “bodies” that predate human existence. Meillassoux suggests that because humanity had no experience with those “ancestral” events, it is impossible to truly “speak” about their existence; Cassou-Nouges responds that through a “speculative” act, those bodies might somehow be reclaimed. How this pertains to Hartman might seem tangential (and more than likely is), but I see “Venus in Two Acts” as a localization of this theory in the thread of a human narrative: those “histories” and “bodies” that predate this “modern moment” — “ancestral” in their inaccessibility, in their silence — are opened, retold, reimagined, rewritten, and resurrected within Hartman’s “critical fabulation.” How this might all relate to the original prompt might not necessarily be clear but implicit in a discussion of “speculative narratives” is the “speculative fiction” genre, which includes (as you might imagine) works of science fiction, fantasy, dystopia — narratives that “speculate” about the future of the human race and often seek to induce dread or caution, to catalyze change.

Hartman argues, and I am inclined to agree with her, that this potential for “change” is possible not only in speculations about the future but a speculative engagement with the past. “Counter-histories” and the “history of the present” are “inseparable” as they both touch on an “incomplete project of freedom” (4). Further to this, she believes that “a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing” (emphasis mine, 4). I have attempted to unpack this phrase as best I can, and I hold that there is are higher stakes than the mere claim that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The present is “interrupted” by the past — and is it this “interruption” that permits her to “imagine a free state… as the anticipated future of this writing.” At play here is not merely past and present but futurity: “this history has engendered me,” she writes and as a result, “the kinds of stories I have fashioned… bridge the past and the present” (4). She seeks to “dramatize the production of nothing” or rather throw into sharp relief the absence of narrative. That absence defines her, defines the “history of the present” that is currently being written, and in turn the history of “an alternative future” yet to occur (4, 14). “If this story of Venus,” Hartman’s name for her own “critical fabulation,” “has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to her” (13).

As to what all this means for our own archival practice in this class, I’m not completely certain. How can I give voice to a community to which I do not belong? How could I dramatize its history? How could I possibly ever “retell” its narrative? If anything, I hope the work we do would involve simply locating some narratives that have been long excluded from “the Archive.” While the SCL is in fact an “archive,” yes, does it somehow stand outside the institutional “Archive” to which Hartman makes reference throughout? If so, and in many many ways I believe it does, making those narratives more visible or audible or accessible might allow them to either “speak for themselves” or help the community to discover and use those narratives to their benefit. Youssef has consistently maintained that the work we do on the material from the SCL must and will somehow inform the community as it stands today. Though I am personally wary of “speculating” myself, the opportunity for others with a more deeply-rooted, intimate connection to this material might potentially (hopefully!) benefit.

Week 1 Prompts

1. It was at first difficult for me to connect with the arc of Coleman’s narrative, mostly for the reasons Melanie outlined with Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence:” since Coleman’s “rage was a lifetime deep,” it took describing various, at times disjointed life events and observations to articulate the pain she accrued over decades in Watts (248). The easier story to digest is one of simply a few days of chaos and flames. On a second read, I was struck by the way Coleman structured the arc of this slow violence that I thought could be relevant to how we choose to structure our collection/project.
She laid out how interpersonal and systemic iterations of racism slowly worked their way into her consciousness. As a young child, she was first struck by the personal, immediate effects of this violence, teachers giving preferential treatment to the white peers who called her “nigger” on the playground, while the concept of racism itself was somewhat beyond her, “amorphous, eluding [her] preadolescent expression” (249). Then, as a wave of disaffected Texan and Southern African Americans enveloped her class, she became overwhelmed by the “ignorance and race hate that smothered [her] love of learning” (250). After she begins to understand how these feelings impact a larger group beyond the individual, her understanding of the ‘slow violence’ moves to the systemic as she notices how funding is cut from her school and “Calculus, Greek, Latin, and Journalism were among the classes that disappeared from the curriculum” (254). Her description of Watts ‘65 is surprisingly brief, focused more on her personal upheaval and newfound expression than any attention-grabbing headline events. Her chronicling of slow violence evolves on the next page as she graduates from observations about her school system to South LA as a whole, observing widespread “economic disparity -as the unresolved issues of redlining, police brutality, poverty, and drugs continued to fester, and new, more voracious, youth gangs sprang from the asphalt” (255). We gain a broader and more nuanced understanding of the slow violence attending her community through Coleman’s evolution and broadening of scope over years of life experience.
I thought this move could be instructive for structuring a type of narrative or frame within our project: moving from personal understanding, out to understanding of group and small systems, then out to the broader political and socio-economic factors at play in Watts ‘65. Perhaps we could start with stories from ‘65 or current day like Anthony’s and Kevin’s, ones of specific personal struggles under the weight of slow, systemic, even bureaucratic violence, then zooming out to glimpse the larger systems at work which produce this slow violence? Just a thought.

2. As far as the mechanics of Hartman’s project to link a “counter history” of past events or individuals to a “history of the present,” I think it’s important to consider the questions she raises early on about enacting any kind of narrative structure around past events separate from the often sinister narrative of the archive that is intertwined with the “play of power” that in this case “murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain” (10-11). Is crafting a narrative “its own gift and its own end” and when we do craft it, is it “for us or for them” (3)? This kind of critical self-reflection is key when enacting this kind of counter history using the tools of narrative. Hartman does stress emphatically that her intent is “not to give voice to the slave” but to advance “a series of speculative arguments…in fashioning a narrative, which is based on…a critical reading of the archive” based on the narrative structures and “figurative dimensions of history” (12, 11). This seems to involve an imaginative reconceptualization of her murdered Venus, what Amirhossein Vafa calls a “proleptic narrative,” in which one imagines what could have been possible had a subaltern voice not been silenced or made object (39). Hartman stresses that her narrative is instructive in creating the space for discussion regarding the silencing of this theoretical narrative, noting that she “intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.” (11)
The mechanics and applications of this counter history were frankly a little unclear to me. In a particularly academic way, at least to me, Hartman provides a lengthy preamble, justification, dissection, defense, and partial dismissal of her own imagining of a life for Venus. After composing it, she had to admit that all she really wanted was to console herself and “escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic” (9). However, at the same time, she wonders out loud if “by retreating from the story of these two girls, was I simply upholding the rules of the historical guild and the ‘manufactured certainties’ of their killers, and by doing so, hadn’t I sealed their fate?” (10). After further mining the depths of her doubts, Hartman settles on this consolation, which seems to provide the most appropriate framework for enacting a narrative like this: “If this story of Venus has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to hers” since for her “a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives our now as it is interrupted by” or, at the very least, informed by “this past” (13, 4). In constructing this imagined past, Hartman seeks to speak to the violence, the erasure of black female voices both in our past and in our present. If by providing all of that context, she can clarify the goals of such an endeavor, it can (perhaps) rise above the status of fantasy or wish fulfillment for her audience.

Outside Work Cited:
Vafa, Amirhossein. “Call Me Fedallah: Reading a Proleptic Narrative in Moby Dick.”
Leviathan 16.3 (2014): 39-56. MLA. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

3. The Jet article on the lynching of Emmett Till provides a far more detailed counter history to its brief, detached equivalent in the New York Times. Other than the use of the word “slain” to describe Emmett Till’s death, the New York Times article seems to go far out of its way to sanitize and thoroughly decontextualize the incident from any history of violence against black bodies. Conspicuously absent are both the historical and emotional details used in the Jet article to incense their predominantly African American audience. The Jet article notes that this was the first lynching in the U.S. in four years, it provides strongly worded statements from the NAACP, the governor of Mississippi, a local newspaper editor, and the boy’s mother, and it gave gut-wrenching detail about the boy’s disfigured body along with the horrific image of his recovered body. In light of the Jet article, the brief blurb from the New York Times not only seems to downplay the numbers of mourners at his open casket funeral (though the true number in attendance could have been closer to the Time’s 10,000 than Jet’s 600,000, the NYT inclusion of the descriptor “mourners and curious” seems almost forcefully dismissive), it seems to subtly imply with its syntax that the boy “had it coming” when it notes that the body was found “three days after he reportedly whistled at a white woman in a Money store” (S9). Without the Jet article as a contemporary counter history, the myopic suppression of Emmett Till’s story might have succeeded in its erasure of the widespread impact of this event.

Wanda Coleman’s “The Riot Inside Me”

In The Riot Inside Me, Wanda Coleman’s understanding of space and place in South-Central Los Angeles constitutes a distinct power dynamic which works to systematically oppress the Watts community. For instance, Coleman frequently describes her community, as well as her place in it, in spatial terms. While offering information about her father and mother, she states that they, “hung on the periphery” of a select social circle “of coloreds who had seemingly gained entree into the White world” (248). Here, Coleman observes socially constructed, and internalized, boundaries which work to define her family, the community, and the “White world”. Not only are her parents detached from the “White world”, but they are also only affiliated through peripheral contact with a few people, Coleman refers to as “coloreds,” who have “gained entree.” This understanding of the social ladder depicts a hierarchy among the community which favors the “White world,” as those who have access to it are a select few who possess a certain skill; she refers to these members as the “talented tenth” (Coleman 248). Of her life outside the home, Coleman states that she “lived in a White world” where she had little agency over her own place in space. She states, “The hands of teachers — females — were rough as they snatched my forearms to move me away from one spot or to another, one place to another, without any explanation except ‘You belong over here.'” (249). In this instance Coleman is literally being transferred from place to place, or from “one spot . . . to another” and specifically told where she “belongs” by “White authorities” (249). In this way, social and physical constructs of space determined by “White authorities,” in the case of Coleman in grade school, and internalized by the black community demonstrated by Coleman’s explanation of her parents in relation to the community, play a major role in maintaining power-positions between marginalized communities and dominant authority figures. In examining the conditions of Watts, and the uprising of 1965, the dense population of the community of South-Central with its lack of space, the displacement of Black communities by means of Mexican immigrants (as identified by Coleman), and the “restricted housing” which Coleman argues, “crippled their chances for economic stability” are all factors which contribute to the systematic oppression of the Black community in Los Angeles.
Moving forward, it is important to realize ways in which space is not neutral, and how the way it is designated, controlled, manipulated by those in power, and sequentially internalized. This is something that cannot be ignored when understanding the Watts Uprising and the community in Watts today. Questions to consider further would be: How does designating a certain space as a “Food Desert” tell a narrative which does an injustice to a community? What kind of narrative does the spatial of positioning of bodies in Jorja Leap’s video tell?

¶ Week 1: Questions

1.) There has been a lot of talk recently about “slow” movements: the slow food movement; slow scholarship; the slow professor; the slow university. At a distance from these discourses lies Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” (see Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor). While Nixon is focused on environmental projects and disasters (Bhopal etc.), I kept thinking of the concept as I read Wanda Coleman (and listened to Anthony and Kevin). One of the challenges of responding politically to or organizing to address the negative developments that occur in neighborhoods and communities is that they often occur slowly and incrementally (and thus, in some ways, invisibly). And one of the most effective aspects of Coleman’s narrative is the way she reminds us of the obvious (but often forgotten) fact that large-scale historical events and developments are often experienced, as if, in slow motion as lives slowly unravel. What struck you about the way she weaves together the story of a neighborhood, a community, and her own life story? Are there some early lessons from her story and from the stories of Anthony and Kevin (though very different) that we might adopt provisionally as protocols/adages to inform our work on this project?

2.) “For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of the present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence” (Hartman 4). I am fascinated by this aspect of Saidiya Hartman’s project: linking a “counter history” in a more or less distant past to a “history of the present.” Intuitively, this feels like what we should be striving for in the long term if our work with the Watts material eventually takes shape as a history. But did you get any sense from Hartman’s essay of how that might work?

3.) Coleman references magazines with articles on Emmett Till¹, a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Money, Mississippi in 1955. She writes, “Photographs of his corpse, in state, and the lines of hundreds of mourners, appeared in either Ebony or Jet magazine or both” (Coleman 251). One of the articles to which she refers was published in the September 15, 1955 issue of Jet. Read the Jet article² and its New York Times equivalent (also view the full page) then consider Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts.” As historical documents, how does the Jet article act as a “counter history” to the Times article?

1. Hartman also mentions Till. See the second paragraph on page 4.
2. The article begins on page 6. Be prepared, the imagery is very upsetting.

Just as a point of interest, take a look at Jet page 14. You will make a timely discovery.

Please let us know if you have any questions about the prompt. -Dermot and Melanie