Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Saidiya Hartman’s long career is characterized by an attention to “minor figures,” lesser-known people who are neglected in history but deserving of attention. Though primarily a literary scholar, Hartman uses the methodologies of a historian to carry out her research. Part of this methodology is a reliance on archival material. The difficulty with the archive is that the kind of material likely to be kept is the kind that dominant authorities and institutions have perceived as worth keeping. This criterion would privilege important people, leaders, and the wealthy, for instance. Conversely, this means that records of minor figures—poor, Black queer folks, for instance—is far less likely to appear in an archive.

To find pieces of such lives, Hartman must be strategic. In his essay, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” French philosopher Michel Foucault discusses the fragments of the lives of marginalized people that pop up in the archives he is studying. These fragments would likely not exist or be too difficult to find. However, he writes, “What rescues them from the darkness of night where they would, and still should perhaps, have been able to remain, is an encounter with power: without this collision, doubtless there would no longer be a single word to recall their fleeting passage” (Foucault, Michel. Power, Truth, Strategy. 1979, 79). In other words, there is only a record of such people because of their brush—under unfortunate circumstances—with record-keeping entities. Hartman uses this same logic to track down materials. For example, in Chapter 15, “Esther brown’s minor history of insurrection went unnoticed until she was apprehended by the police” (232). It is police records that enable Hartman to tell Esther Brown’s story.

Even as she reconstructs an archive of such lives, there are still many details that remain unknown. Wrestling with archival gaps and silences, Hartman writes in a mode she calls “critical fabulation.” Hartman debuted this mode in her 2008 essay, “Venus in Two Acts.” There, she writes about two enslaved girls who were murdered on a slave ship. In the absence of details, Hartman imagines that the girls might have struck up a friendship, and wonders what that could have meant. Writing in the subjunctive (“subjunctive” being the grammatical mode of uncertain possibility), Hartman is able “both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” (Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, 11). She is careful not to fill in blanks but simply to exercise informed imagination. This wondering helps the reader to see these girls not as they are presented in the archive (as murdered slaves) but as people with emotions and thoughts.

Hartman takes this approach with the minor figures in Wayward Lives as well. Of the girl in the Eakins photograph from Chapter 2, she writes:

Had she become prematurely knowing because of what had already been done to her or by observing the world around her? […] If so, how did it determine her course? […] Did it make her vow never to love a man or seek his protection? Did it make her yearn for a tender touch capable of assuaging and redressing the long history of violence captured in a pose? (29).

Through critical fabulation, Hartman explores the very same thing that the minor figures she studies sought to explore: possibility.