Our first class discussion touched on issues of representation in archives – whose materials (whose perspectives) are available, represented, retained and maintained? This question reminded me of one of my favorite articles – “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman

Hartman studies the pervasive symbolism of the Black Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery. In doing so, she reflects on the failure of the archive – the retrospective disempowerment of a people through a lack of resources. Black women in the Atlantic world are cast as voiceless historical actors who are objectified by a white male gaze because the archive is almost singularly composed of the contextual perspectives of slavers.

In turn, Hartman asks if it is “possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive” (11). One may note the way Hartman discusses “The Archive” as a seemingly monolithic entity, a composite of all relevant and available historical materials. She explores the place of the archive in historiography — its ‘violence, silence, scandal, excess, boundaries, discrepancies, and promiscuity’ — by bringing it to life through vivid descriptions of her dilemma.  She characterizes the archive as alive, a continually evolving entity that both shapes and is shaped by the oppressive power dynamics that characterize our history.

The agency of historical actors to participate in a collective narrative is revealed through the limited contextual evidence produced by the archive (primary sources) and, in turn, informs the ability of historians to re-construct events.  “The violence of the archive” is, in essence, the reduction of history into a simplified, quantified, and seemingly “objective” account.  The erasure of a people’s history is rooted in the inherently biased (as well as in the nonexistent) contents of the archive and in the interpretations layered upon them by academia.