| Saidiya Hartman: | That's what's so interesting for me about Achille Mbembe's work, the way he thinks about the position of the formerly colonized subject along the lines of the slave as an essential way of defining the predicament. Essentially, he says, the slave is the object to whom anything can be done, whose life can be squandered with impunity. |
| Frank B Wilderson III: | And he's suggesting that what it means 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, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery" (S, 24). So. Not only are formally enslaved blacks property, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibility of becoming property is one of the essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intriguing about your argument is the way in which you demonstrate how not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the proper ty of white enjoyment, but so is - and this is really key - the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that too belongs to white people. |
| Saidiya Hartman: | Right. You know, as I was writing Scenes of Subjection, there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-century culture and on minstrelsy in particular. And there was a certain sense in which the ability to occupy blackness was considered transgressive or as a way of refashioning whiteness, and there were all these radical claims that were being made for it.14 And I thought, "Oh, no, this is just an extension of the master's prerogative." It doesn't matter whether you do good or you do bad, the crux is that you can choose to do what you wish with the black body. That's why thinking about the dynamics of enjoyment in terms of the material relations of slavery was so key for me. |
| Frank B Wilderson III: | Yes, that's clarifying. A body that you can do what you want with. In your discussion of the body as the property of enjoyment, what I really like is when you talk about Rankin. Here's a guy - like the prototypical twentieth-century white progressive - who's anti-slavery and uses his powers of observation to write for its abolition, even to his slave-owning brother. He's in the South, he's looking at a slave coffle, and he imagines that these slaves being beaten could be himself and his family. Through this process it makes sense to him, it becomes meaningful. His body and his family members' white bodies become proxies for real enslaved black bodies and, as you point out, the actual object of identification, the slave, disappears. |
| Saidiya Hartman: | I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It's as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: "Only if I can 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 .. . |
| Frank B Wilderson III: | [laughter] A nigga on the warpath! |
| Saidiya Hartman: | Exactly! For me it was those moments that were the most telling - the moments of the sympathetic ally, who in some ways 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 |
