Venus in Two Acts

Abstract

This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn't already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.

Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive

“…As another literary critic has noted on the subject of slavery's archive, "The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them," so how does one disentangle a discovery from interested narratives of rarefaction? 11 What are the risks of conceptualizing the archive of slavery as a space of absence and of imagining slave culture as always already lost?…”

What is This Thing Called Hip Hop Studies?: A Response to Saucier and Woods

“…It is this space of the interval that Hip Hop Studies might attempt to inhabit. It is in this space that Hartman and scholars such as Tavia Nyong'o have insisted on the necessity of "critical fabulation" (Hartman 2008;Nyong'o 2014). It is in this space that one can begin to acknowledge the very real conditions of antiblack violence that structure quotidian life.…”

As Historical Subjects: The African Diaspora in Colonial Latin American History

“…During armed resistance and rebellion, men and women of African descent were, according to some scholars, able to undo or rupture the difficulties of slavery's documentation and its foundational violence that made their stories, and perhaps even subjectivities, impossible. 85 With work on enslaved people suing for their freedom or married slaves arguing in ecclesiastical courts to have their conjugal rights honored, scholars have located slaves as agents with the law. 86 Defiant, dynamic, and creative, these acts against slavery and towards freedom gesture to locating enslaved people as cognizant of their own demands, desires, and sense of self.…”