Category: campus on the hill

The Time of Slavery, an article by Saidiya Hartman. i read it at the beach yesterday, liked it a lot. there are still grains of sand in between the pages. yet in class everybody seems to agree that it is a very pessimistic piece. when walking a bit of the way home with one students, he tells how the text got on his nerves – her bourgeois indulgence in sentiments. he is a serious political theory student, into high theory and anarchism. and yes, i see what he means. but there is something in the way she works through what preoccupies and affects her that, precisey because she doesn’t claim an easy “working through” model, takes her readers to different places. coming to think about it, the consensus on the pessimism of the text strikes me as strange. to me it drew lines of hope.

her visit to Elimina Castle in Ghana (one of the places on the West-African coast from where enslaved Africans were merchandised to the Americas). she is addressed as a sister from the other side of the Atlantic, returning. she rejects the idea of “the return”, yet does not remain untouched by the address. “Dear Sister” pierces through the armor of my skepticism, which, like a scab covering a wound, is less the sign of recovery than it is a barrier against the still pulsating state of injury. Without this defense i am exposed and vulnerable, a naive woman on an impossible mission: the search for dead and forgotten kin. the seduction of “sister”, the banality. a placebo, a pretend cure for an irreparable injury.

the tour within the castle invokes reflections on the tourist industry feeding of injury, at times it infuriates her. yet when in the children’s dungeon women start crying, she recognizes something else going on, that exceeds the closures of tourism. When some of the women begin to cry. I am suprised since I have been unable to shed a single tear; moreover, this shoddy and sensationalist tour incites my anger, which seems the only emotion I can express with an ease. Yet watching these women, I realize that they have come here to act as witness.

remembering. the necessity. the traps. the time of remembering – the coevalance of then and how, of us and the dead. It would appear that our lives and even those of the dead depend on such acts of remembrance. Yet how best to remember the dead and represent the past is an issue fraught with difficulty, it not outright contention. The difficulty posed by the plaque’s injunction to remember is as much the faith it bespeaks in the redressive capacities of memory, as the confidence it betrays in the founding distinction or a break between then and now. For the distinction between the past and the present founders on the interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath. How might we understand mourning, when the event had yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?

refusing the return, refusing a fantasy of origins. refusing the idea of repair, refusing that the injury and grief is whiped out by repair. The most disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for the ancestor. […] The ease with which the “greatest crime against humanity” is invoked and instanteously eclipsed but the celebration of the return of those descendants of the Middle Passage would suggest that in the last instance the language of return acts to disavow the very violence that it purportedly gives voice to and insinuates that the derangements of the slave trade can be repaired.

mourning. it perils. and, she suggests (and i feel the classmates skipped over this), the beginning of a counterhistory. Mourning, a public experession of one’s grief, insists that the past is not yet over; this compulsion to grieve also indicates that liberal remedy has yet to be a solution to racist domination and inequality. […] Yet the work of mourning is not without its perils, chief among these are the slippage between responsibility and assimilation and witnessing and incorporation.

we talk about the difference between mourning and melancholia in class. in a text that might feel melancholic, her insistance on mourning is deliberate, as a footnote reference to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia testifies. mourning as a reaction to the loss (of a person or an abstraction, like a motherland), and melancholia when you take the loss in yourself. it’s mourning that raises the question of ethical responsibility, that has a transformative power.

it also strikes me in this class, after listening generously and searching for places to connect, that i don’t like the way the students are trained here – in the sophisticated humanites. the things we read and talk about are disturbing, they affect… yet the students seem only in their comfort zones when talking in a well rehearsed theoretically sophisticated voice (which includes much talk about affects…), about representational strategies and all. so many times i feel like asking, now cut the crap, what exactely do you mean? the moments in between the well-rehearsed parts they seem so clueless…

getting into a UCSC class gets even more tough. Theories of Slavery by Angela Davis. maximum 15 students, of course there’s a waiting list and many people just show up in the desperate hope that there still might be a way to get in. i contacted Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness while i was back in europe, but the same story: since i’m not a student i can’t enroll nor even get on the waiting list. my emails were rather, well, insisting, and i had been telling myself, and friends, that i would take that class. (yesterday evening leta made me do the will-power thing: i will get into angela davis’ class…). but today’s situation was so awkward that i let go.

first an elaborate introduction to the structure and content of class, with all the tangible tension and eagerness of everyone wanting to be participating in what was presented to us. then the moment in which everyone introduced themselves… explaining why and how they really really really needed to be in this class. ay, i can’t do this… finally the moment of truth. angela carefully checked the list with 15 enrolled students. one free space and she got another student, who also wasn’t present, out (she should be writing up her phd these days, not taking classes.) two people from the waitinglist get in. two students from the Humboldt university in Berlin, who stressed that they had been unable to enroll through the normal procedure, got an impossible offer. this is what i propose, we make one extra space in the class, and the two of you decide among yourselves which one takes up the space. they looked at each other in terror… a number of people announced that they would be auditing the class, but angela responded that she had agreed to that before knowing that the class was so full, and that she would have to reconsider.

and that was that, the class was finished and full, as everybody knew all too well it would be. immediately a whole bunch of students queued up to speak with angela. i had put myself in the queue but with every second passing by i thought no, no, no, i can’t do this. i hear the german girls insisting that they can’t make that choice. angela responds that she has to submit the final list with names after this class, and if they can’t give her a name she’ll have to give the open space to someone else. almost angry, the woman just before me tells angela that the old agreement that she could audit the class was the only reason that she stayed in santa cruz after her graduation just before the summer. okay, so you can audit. note that we’re already at 17, with a long line still waiting. hardly disguised desperation on angela’s face. then there’s another thing i can’t help noticing. most of the students who got themselves enrolled, in the days following the announcement of the class in june, are white, and many of those in line are students of color. there clearly is an issue with who is fully and early enrolled (one needs a valid student number in order to officially enrol or even get on the waitinglist) and whose trajectory through these institutions is less evident and more fragile. in the end there’s a small group, all students of color, who insist that they really need the class and who will meet during the official class (but in another room) and do the same readings, and every other week angela will do a tutor session with them after class.

when it’s my turn to sit down with her, i just say “i’m sorry. this is awkward.” i look at her and smile. she nods, “yes, this is awkward.” “i would have wanted to audit the class, that’s what i would still want, but i see the situation. it’s okay.” her turn to smile. “you know what, just come next week. i think it’s okay.”

her presence is impressive. and there’s something about seeing her in action here at UCSC, after that other lousy-actor-Cali-governor (Ronald Reagan) made a public point out of it that Angela Davis would never teach at a public university in California again. and i’m eager to do the trajectory of this course. it’s aim is to look at slavery from the perspective of the failure of its abolition. the course is organized along six sections: (1) Paradoxes of Abolition and Legacies of Slavery; (2) Memory. Representations, Reparations; (3) Gender, Sexuality, Domination, Resistance: Feminist Approaches; (4) Slave Systems/Slave Lives: Classic Texts; (5) Political Economy of Atlantic Slavery: Anti-imperialist approaches; (6) Slavery and the Contemporary Era: Trafficking in Persons and Mass Imprisonment. i hope to be writing more about the classes in these pages, but listen, for next week we have to read the 700 pages of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, and it’s not getting better in the following weeks…