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This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn't already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.

"A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them--domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty--and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires."--Publisher's description

Nach dem Ende der Sklaverei in den Südstaaten der USA zog es viele Schwarze in den Norden, um den rassistischen Strukturen zu entkommen und ein freies Leben aufzubauen. S. Hartman, auf afroamerikanische Kulturgeschichte spezialisierte Professorin an der Columbia University, hat basierende auf Dokumenten, Briefen, Fotos dem Leben von Schwarzen Frauen in den Slums von N.Y. und Philadelphia - literarisch erzählend - aus der imaginierten Perspektive dieser Frauen nachgespürt. Auch im Norden ging es für diese Frauen um das Überleben in einem brutalen gesellschaftlichen Umfeld, geprägt von (sexueller) Gewalt, Ausbeutung und Diskriminierung. Aus dieser Situation heraus entstand aber ein vielstimmiger Chor rebellischer, unangepasster Lebensformen, von Aufruhr und Protest, den die Autorin als Soziogramm einer Schicht in der Zeit ca. 1890-1935 aufgezeichnet hat. In ihrer aus Unterdrückung entstehenden Rebellion bereiten die Frauen aber auch den Weg für andere, freiere Lebensweisen, die ihrer Zeit voraus sind. - Die literarische Form der Darstellung macht das Buch zu einer sehr lesbaren spannenden Lektüre. (2-3) Reinhild Khan

The planting colonies -- The farming colonies -- The trading colonies -- The period of revolution, 1774-1787 -- The federal convention, 1787 -- Toussaint L'Ouverture and anti-slavery effort, 1787-1806 -- The period of attempted suppression, 1807-1825 -- The international status of the slave-trade, 1783-1862 -- The rise of the cotton kingdom, 1820-1850 -- The final crisis, 1850-1870 -- The essentials in the struggle