In Sylvia Wynter’s (1990) seminal essay, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman,” the scholar argues that Western Europe’s colonization of the Americas and Africa shifted the ways in which Europeans conceived of difference. Rather than the use of sex characteristics, which had previously been the defining marker of distinction, “the cultural-physiognomic variations between the dominant expanding European civilization and the non-Western peoples that, encountering, it would now stigmatize as ‘natives’,” (Wynter, 1990, p. 358) took precedence. Wynter’s theorization parallels that of many Black scholars, particularly Afro-Pessimists, who argue that identity markers - like gender – which would be otherwise
…show more content…
11). In other words, Hartman is making an attempt to depict the lives of the enslaved as accurately as possible by imagining what is unsaid, not as a creative exercise, but as a means of resisting the inherent violence of the archive. Her preoccupation with the archive as a site of violence, recalls the work of historian Thavolia Glymph, namely, in texts like the “The Gender of Violence”. Like Hartman, Glymph is concerned with the archive, however, where Hartman is concerned with the gaps and silences, Glymph contests its very presentation. For instance, in her critique of Richard S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations, she contests the author’s depictions of slaves’ lives, particularly that of biracial slaves. She argues that Dunn, “sometimes, [made] speculations that neither sufficiently account for context nor adequately theorize about gendered violence, rape, or plantation records as systems of control” (Glymph, 2015). The speculations that she is referring to, are Dunn’s assertions that “mulatto slaves” enjoyed better social positions within the plantation, despite ample evidence suggesting otherwise (Glymph, 2015). Glymph refutes aspects of Dunn’s work by utilizing the same archive to emphasize the paucity of his claims. In doing so, she does not, as Hartman warns against, in “Venus in Two Acts,” “take for granted the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence” (p.
11). In other words, Hartman is making an attempt to depict the lives of the enslaved as accurately as possible by imagining what is unsaid, not as a creative exercise, but as a means of resisting the inherent violence of the archive. Her preoccupation with the archive as a site of violence, recalls the work of historian Thavolia Glymph, namely, in texts like the “The Gender of Violence”. Like Hartman, Glymph is concerned with the archive, however, where Hartman is concerned with the gaps and silences, Glymph contests its very presentation. For instance, in her critique of Richard S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations, she contests the author’s depictions of slaves’ lives, particularly that of biracial slaves. She argues that Dunn, “sometimes, [made] speculations that neither sufficiently account for context nor adequately theorize about gendered violence, rape, or plantation records as systems of control” (Glymph, 2015). The speculations that she is referring to, are Dunn’s assertions that “mulatto slaves” enjoyed better social positions within the plantation, despite ample evidence suggesting otherwise (Glymph, 2015). Glymph refutes aspects of Dunn’s work by utilizing the same archive to emphasize the paucity of his claims. In doing so, she does not, as Hartman warns against, in “Venus in Two Acts,” “take for granted the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence” (p.