![]() Hartman comes to the conclusion that historiography must engage loss - to acknowledge that we, in the present, will never know the full story (“the words exchanged,” “the furtive communication” of excluded historical actors) - and find comfort in our discomfort (10). ![]() Upon reflection, she arrives at the question: “Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?” (11). Hartman’s approach towards historical gaps and omissions (or rather, her avoidance of them) ended up covering over a complex and contested past - an issue itself worthy of discussion in conjunction with her topic. Looking back on this decision, she realizes the flaw of her method. While researching the murder of two captive girls (one of whom was called Venus) aboard a slave ship, Hartman concedes that because she had very few sources to inform her discussion, she opted to say very little at all about Venus, glossing over the major problem of inherent bias in the archive. ![]() Black women in the Atlantic world are cast as voiceless historical actors who are objectified by a white male gaze. Yet, the failure of the archive, which is almost singularly composed of the contextual perspectives of slavers, is the retrospective disempowerment of a people through a lack of resources. A syphilitic whore”), the white patriarchy constructed a sexually gratuitous commodification of black women’s bodies to justify and assert its power (6). Through oppressive archetypes (e.g., “A sulky bitch. ![]() In her article “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman studies the pervasive symbolism of the Black Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery. On issues of representation in archives – whose materials (whose perspectives) are available, represented, retained and maintained? ![]()
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