Week Three: Hartman

This is a challenging text.  Use these notes as guides for themes and key passages.  Of course there is more here than we can uncover during a first discussion.  These notes are not aimed at being reductive, but at allowing points of entry into the text.

 

1.     Hartman outlines the shape of this chapter and her argument on p. 50

2.     Think about “the ambivalence of pleasure and its complicity with dominative strategies”  Also, examine “forms of resistance conducted under the cover of fun”  This about how the opening words of the chapter relate to the final words:  “impossible to separate the use of pleasure as a technique of discipline…the claims made on pleasure are tenuous, provisional and double-edged.” P. 78

3.     The centrality of Practice:  p. 50

4.     The Body p. 51 and Pain:  key words (historicity, articulation of a social condition, extreme need, constant violence, a normative condition) p. 51  What is the difference between socially and humanely tolerable?  p. 51

5.     Paradigmatic and Problematic Images p. 52

6.     The Double Bind:  p. 55

7.     The will and “criminal acts” p. 55   “The slave is a legal person only insofar as he is criminal and a violated body in need of limited forms of protection”

8.     Performing Blackness:  p. 56, note no. 22 also see p. 57 (enactments of social struggle, and contending articulation of racial meaning).  The conflation of Black and Slave p. 58 (What does this mean for the Diaspora and for slaves/slavery?)

9.     Community:  p. 59-61.  Puzzle this out!  “Relations that can neither be reduced to domination nor explained outside of it.”  p. 61  Pay special attention to the idea:  Not an African survival on page 61, note no. 30  and the idea that "relations that can neither be reduced to domination nor explained outside it."  p. 61

10.  Memory and History:  The goal:  "The way in which the quotidian articulates the wounds of history and the enormity of the breach instituted by the transatlantic crossing of Black captives and the consequent process of enslavement" p. 72  Key words:  violent domination, dishonor, natal alienation, chattel status.  Non-history (ala Glissant) p. 75  "the experience of shock, contradiction, painful negation and explosive forces which make a totalitarian philosophy of history an impossibility"

11.  Redress:  p. 76, and 77  And “the body of memory” and the impossibility of origins.  Key words:  re-membering, recognition, articulation, and attending.  Redress as an exercise in agency.  “The incompleteness of redress is therefor related to the magnitude of the breach. . .and the inadequacy of remedy.”  P. 77

12.  The concept of Africa:  p. 74

13.  The breach:  repeatedly referred to throughout this chapter!

Pay special attention to notes nos. 22, 102, and 117