The Otherwise of History. Saidiya Hartman’s New Radical Aesthetic of Historical Representation

In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century Americathe Black American historian Saidiya Hartman writes that “the very effort to represent the situation of the subaltern reveals the provisionality of the archive as well as the interests that shape it and thereby determine the emplotment of history.”(Hartman 2022)This essay examines the recovery by Black feminist writing of the stories of the subaltern that have never been entirely told, proposing a new critical methodology that registers the gaps in the colonial archive and reconstructs a history of violence, injustice and domination without replicating the grammar of it(Hartman 2008). Thanks to her wayward method, Saidiya Hartman recreates the voices, the radical imagination, and the everyday practices of rebellion carried out by young Black women who tried to live as if they were free. Through a combination of different genres and styles, writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, Hartman’s critical fabulation challenges the unidirectional linear representation of marginalized stories and characters. Rooted in archival facts and yet at once “imagined”, her work of reconstruction and fabulation highlights the relationships between power and voice and the constraints that determine not only what can be said but also who can speak.