Archiving Black Diasporas

The three Black women thinkers and authors whose images I have selected for this essay deploy the portraits of young Black girls, taken in diverse contexts and times, as the medium for enacting a form of countervisuality that “seeks to resituate the terms on which reality is to be understood” (Mirzoeff 2011, 28) and envision (image) a different history of the present. In “speaking for” and “about” (ibid., xv) silenced or subaltern histories, African American Saidiya Hartman, Canadian/American Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Canadian Dionne Brand, born respectively in the United States, Haiti, and Trinidad,1 make explicit a radical theoria (in the etymological sense of viewing as spectator) aimed at rethinking the way we see the world while recording and evaluating what is seen as a memento of what is not seen. In the process, the act of looking acquires a hermeneutical function: It becomes an act of interpretation and interpenetration that involves intimacy and distance, implication and explication, and looking and being looked at (Didi-Huberman 2006, 35, 43). In their works the iconic resonance of the “sight of blackness” (Neary 2017, 52)—as extracted from either official or personal archives and visually reproduced in the text or evoked by figurative language—is pondered, lingered over, and queried through a dynamic strategy that shakes up the “static taxonomy” (Smith 2014, 3) and the privileged topology and nomology of the white Euro-American “patriarchive” (Derrida 1996 4).The centrality of photography—one of the earliest manifestations of the “frenzy of the visible”2 that exploded at the end of the nineteenth century—(Mirzoeff 2011, xv) might seem less relevant nowadays, if one considers the extent to which cultural and performance studies have been increasingly concerned with creating and exploring new archives of visual materials (Mirzoeff 2016, 13). And yet, thanks to their intersectional ontology, photographic images are still crucial as a way of looking at and thinking about the world. They can be studied, in fact, as “document et objet de rêve, comme oeuvre et objet de passage, monument et objet de montage, non-savoir et objet de science” (document and dream object, as work and transitory object, monument and object of montage, nonknowledge and object of science) (Didi-Huberman 2006, 15, 14). Furthermore, in spite of or exactly because of their “stillness,” photographic images can be attributed or denied an evidentiary nature, can be considered an archive in their own right (Mirzoeff 2011, xv), independent from a verbal one. Also, they can be considered a textual rather than a visual object—or, anyway, an object that proves the inextricability of visual discourse and textual visuality (Neary 2017, 8).While the by now canonic studies of the nature of the photograph by Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger are still enlightening, more recent trends in the field of visual culture have explored not so much the ontology of the visual image as the link between practices of looking and the dominant structures of authority that underlie them. Thus, from a comparative decolonial framework, Nicholas Mirzoeff sets the visible against the notion of visuality—the “ineluctable” visualizing of history enacted by an Anglo-Celtic imperial imaginary—and counters it with the “right to look” and the right “to be seen” as a claim to autonomy and the key to a democratic politics (Mirzoeff 2011). Accordingly, looking is considered a social performance of race and gender that produces not only racialized/gendered objects for view but also racialized/gendered viewers. In this way the visible, or what is and can be seen, is produced and controlled by a dominant gaze and a dominant mode of looking that not only engender a dominant vision of the world but also operate through strategies of visual containment (Smith 2014, 1–3).The repertoire, Diana Taylor explains, works in tandem with the archive. But insofar as it represents the enactment of embodied memory, it allows for individual agency in line with its etymological meaning of “a treasury, an inventory,” referring also to “the finder, discoverer,” and meaning “to find out” (2003, 20). The above-mentioned authors’ insights into the depth of photographic surfaces—which contain and reflect the sedimentations of coloniality, racism, and racial thinking deposited in the surface of our times3—decisively embody contingent practices of looking that make of a single image the scenario of multiple, shifting acts of viewing and pose a series of questions: What did the photographer see in/of the Black object standing in front of their camera? What did that object see in their turn? What does the author as spectator see in that particular form of objectification/subjectification? What do we (as readers of the written text and viewers of the image it “furnishes forth” (Turner, quoted in Taylor 2003, 3) see when we look at this contested/contesting scenario? And most importantly, who are/is we? What and whose histories does that “we” include and exclude from their sight?4In “A Note on Method,” which introduces her recent book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman maintains that “Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor” (2019, xiii). Hartman's work is a counternarrative that “elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents [in order to] illuminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable” (2019, xiv) at the turn of the twentieth century. The book unfolds as a series of portraits that attends to the “beautiful experiments—to make living an art—undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward” (2019, xiv). It is supported by a series of photographs, drawn from various public libraries and special collections research centers. These pictures portray particular locations (a tenement house, street scenes, slums and their interiors in cities like New York and Philadelphia) and a conspicuous number of young Black women belonging to what the author defines in the introductory “cast of characters” as “the chorus.” These photographs are not always commented upon, but they become, anyway, part of the printed text insofar as their interpolation solicits the readers to evaluate their evidentiary relevance to the understanding of the author's project. A photograph, argues Susan Sontag, “is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (1990, 154).In other words, a girl, a woman like that, once existed or once was seen or looked at, in a particular time, in a particular situation (Barthes 1980, 83; Berger 2013, 18). For Hartman, word and image cooperate in shaping what she prefers to call an “album”: “The album assembled here is an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise” (2019, xv). As such, this archive is marked by the “errantry” it describes (xiv)5 and offers an alternative legibility to the bureaucratic language of the official captions: “The caption seems to amplify the image, to detail what resides within its frame, but instead the caption produces what appears. It subsumes the image to the text” (20). Conversely, Hartman's mode of “close narration [. . .] places the voice of narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text” (xiii–xiv). Photography, the “art of quotation,” translates the world into its own half-language (Berger 2013, 82, 98). By doing so, it complements and fleshes out the language of the narrator. The narrator's language in turn gives voice to what she has seen in those images and that was waiting for a future legibility. 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