Venus in Two Acts

In the paper

“There are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and these circumstances have generated few stories.”

In the paper

“Hers is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all.”

In the paper

“On board some ships, the common sailors are allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure. And some of them have been known to take the inconstancy of their paramours so much to heart, as to leap overboard and drown themselves.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade

In the paper

“The captain, John Kimber, was indicted for having 'feloniously, wickedly and with malice aforethought, beaten and tortured a female slave, so as to cause her death: and he was again indicted for having caused the death of another female slave.'”

In the paper

“On 7 June 1792, Mr. Pigot, the counsel for the prisoner, bellowed the name Venus in his cross-examination of the surgeon Thomas Dowling, one of the two witnesses from the crew of the ship who testified that they had seen Captain John Kimber murder a Negro girl.”

In the paper

“According to the surgeon's testimony, the captain flogged her repeatedly with a whip and 'successively for several days, very severely' causing her death.”

In the paper

“Venus was not that Negro girl but another one who died at the hands of the captain and who was mentioned briefly during the trial.”

In the paper

“I could say after a famous philosopher that what we know of Venus in her many guises amounts to 'little more than a register of her encounter with power' and that it provides 'a meager sketch of her existence.'”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Foucault, 'Lives of Infamous Men,'

In the paper

“We only know what can be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed from the world of her captors and masters and applied to her.”

In the paper

“What has been said and what can be said about Venus take for granted the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence.”

In the paper

“It is much too late for the accounts of death to prevent other deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes.”

In the paper

“The necessity of recounting Venus's death is overshadowed by the inevitable failure of any attempt to represent her.”

In the paper

“The promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading, but none that are capable of resuscitating the girl.”

In the paper

“The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know and that will never be recovered.”

In the paper

“those existences relegated to the nonhistorical or deemed waste exercise a claim on the present and demand us to imagine a future in which the afterlife of slavery has ended.”

In the paper

“The archive yields no exhaustive account of the girl's life, but catalogues the statements that licensed her death.”

In the paper

“the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature”

In the paper

“The libidinal investment in violence is everywhere apparent in the documents, statements and institutions that decide our knowledge of the past.”

In the paper

“And the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes.”

In the paper

“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 the paper

“Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery”

In the paper

“the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Mbembe, On the Postcolony

In the paper

“Narrative is central to this effort because of 'the relation it poses, explicit or implied, between past, presents and futures.'40”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 7.

In the paper

“In retelling the story of what happened on board the Recovery , I have emphasized the incommensurability between the prevailing discourses and the event, amplified the instability and discrepancy of the archive, flouted the realist illusion customary in the writing of history, and produced a counter-history at the intersection of the fictive and the historical.”

In the paper

“History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror.”

In the paper

“The archive is inseparable from the play of power that murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain.”

In the paper

“My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history.”

In the paper

“The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence. This violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power.33”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 128-29.

In the paper

“Unfortunately I have not discovered a way of deranging the archive so that it might recall the content of a girl's life or reveal a truer picture, nor have I succeeded in prying open the dead book, which sealed her status as commodity.”

In the paper

“my own narrative does not operate outside the economy of statements that it subjects to critique”

In the paper

“Admittedly my own writing is unable to exceed the limits of the sayable dictated by the archive. It depends upon the legal records, surgeons' journals, ledgers, ship manifests, and captains' logs, and in this regard falters before the archive's silence and reproduces it omissions.”

In the paper

“Infelicitous speech, obscene utterances, and perilous commands give birth to the characters we stumble upon in the archive.”

In the paper

“Given the condition in which we find them, the only certainty is that we will lose them again, that they will expire or elude our grasp or collapse under the pressure of inquiry. This is the only fact about Venus of which we can be sure.”

In the paper

“But in the meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girl's in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom.”

In the paper

“It is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak).”

In the paper

“I chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive.”

In the paper

“Like Dana, we too emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness and with the recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

In the paper

“And this knowledge brings us no closer to an understanding of the lives of two captive girls or the violence that destroyed them and named the ruin: Venus.”

In the paper

“I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history-the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past.”

In the paper

“Thomas Thistlewood's serial rapes and excremental punishments offer a graphic account of the pleasures exacted from the destruction and degradation of life and, at the same time, illuminate the difficulty of recovering enslaved lives from the annihilating force of such description”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Hall, In Miserable Slavery

In the paper

“However, the history of black counter-historical projects is one of failure, precisely because these accounts have never been able to install themselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive narratives that are marginalized and derailed before they ever gain a footing.”

In the paper

“the more difficult task is to exhume the lives buried under this prose, or rather to accept that Phibba and Dido exist only within the confines of these words, and that this is the manner in which they enter history.”

In the paper

“The economy of theft and the power over life, which defined the slave trade, fabricated commodities and corpses.”

In the paper

“The dangers entailed in this endeavor cannot be bracketed or avoided because of the inevitability of the reproduction of such scenes of violence, which define the state of blackness and the life of the ex-slave.”