#Saidiya Harman

[notchainedtotrauma]

I think that one of the things that happens both in Du Bois and in C. L. R. James is that at one moment they are addressing the slave, the ex-slave, the fugitive — then suddenly this figure has been translated into the narrative of the worker. And in the worker’s narrative, the very figure that I’m concerned with, the Black female, the fungible life, the minor figure, totally falls out of the frame of what constitutes the political notion of struggle. The “everyday resistance of enslaved women” in the context of a slave economy, for example the refusal to reproduce life, has never been considered as a component of the general strike. Yet, they too were involved in a fundamental refusal of the conditions of work and intent on destroying an economy of production in which their wombs and their reproductive capacity were conscripted along with their labor.

Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Rizvana Bradley

[tacomamutualaidcollective]

Ja’Tvoia Gary, Citational Ethics (Saidiya Harman, 2017), 2020.