Exhumando the Rebellion of the case – Danilo dos Santos Rabelo’s (UNB) review of “Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais”, by Saidyia Hartman
Abstract: Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais, by Saidiya Hartman, explores intimate stories of black girls and radical queers, using the critical fabulation method.The goal is to rescue marginalized memories and historical characters, although the explanation of the method is briefly, potentially confusing new readers.
Keywords: Black girls, queers girls, and marginalized characters.
Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais is a work written by Saidiya Hartman. When adding an incisive research in the files to a literary style it was possible to identify that the book aims to dispute the memory of real characters and erased stories, either by the power relationship present in the formation of the archives, or by the dominant interpreters about these collections and their mass documentary.
Saidiya Hartman is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a cultural history researcher and African studies. In addition to the present work, published in 2022, Saidiya Hartman is the author of other books translated into Portuguese: losing her mother: a journey through the Atlantic Route of Slavery (2001) and the seduction and the enemy of power and the womb of the world (2022 ). Although it has written since the end of the nineties, only in the last three years have their books been translated and conveyed in the Brazilian publishing market. Rebel lives, beautiful experiments, distributed in 432 pages, has two initial central chapters for understanding the development of the plots. The first presents the method of critical fabulation, while the second briefly exposes to readers the real characters. The work is divided into three great chapters, appointed as “books” by the author: “Book 1: She walks in the city”; “Book 2: The Sexual Geography of the Black Belt”; “Book 3: Beautiful experiments”.
Given the broadening of the work and the various themes that could be raised from it, three were prioritized in the composition of this review: the method used for the construction of the book – the critical fabulation; the real characters that cross the texts; and the thematic selection and its development.
In the first chapter of the book, Hartman points out that the dedication to historicizing the crowd is always opposed to the need to face authority, power, the limits of the archives. This confrontation to the archive is only possible because the people registered in the wide documentary mass, in police reports, the monographs of the social scientists, in the psychiatric reports, at some point in the past contested, reacted to power relations they sought controlle -las (Foucault, 2010, p.207). Hartman realizes that the same vigilance, punishment and confinement that have described and wrote on paper those bodies as inadequate and promiscuous in the past drag themselves to the present through the archives and their dominant interpreters, which seek to capture a single way to build a memory on them lives.
It is tensioning on the limits of the case/documents added to a literary exercise of creation on the city’s sensory experience (black belts of Philadelphia and New York), the silenced voices and the freedom experiments built in the past than the method of the critical fabulation is created. A method, according to the author, which acts between the archive, the historical revision and the critical fabular transgression about a different existence. A method that creates the land for the presentation of the non-doctors, the tensioning put by black young people and radical queers to the moral codes of an oppressive society. A method that does not aim to rebuild the past as it was, in its entirety, but as it may have been. A careful movement to turn to archives, to the past, to bring out other possibilities of the present.
Although presented the method in three pages, the author could have better detailed the process of birth and production of critical fabulation. For the reader who reaches rebellious lives, beautiful experiments, without first having known critical fabulation through previous texts (HARTMANS; WILDERSON, 2003; HARTMAN, 2020; 2021), can experience a certain strangeness about the Method, its formation, its limits and objectives, since the rapid explanation of the development of the work cannot account for this explanatory/comprehensive exercise.
In the second chapter, Saidyia Hartman makes the presentation of the character (ns). Girls without known names (located in photographs found in the archives), maids, agitating prisoners, young black people who built freedom experiments in a surrounded space. These are also characters mentioned: W. E. B. Du Bois (weaving social research in black ghettos), Ida B. Wells, feminist activist, effervescent political speaker, Billie Holiday, brought to a reformatory after being detained in a “tolerance house” in her youth.
A third group of characters is the “choir”, the conjunction of landless (or non-ordered voices), which in their collective existence improvised dances in the surrounded spaces, denied control, the destination imposed on it. Here, Hartman starts from real characters mostly erased to build a historiography of nonconformity.
The third set of points that deserve to be concerned with the body of the work, the development and the selected stories. If a racist-patriarchal historiography points out the bodies of black young people, the bodies that confront gender duality, such as exotic, inferior, displaced bodies, on the other hand, a historiography that is present as criticism, it does not rarely build an analysis focused exclusively on the Violence, in instruments, in ways in which these bodies are attacked, killed.
Hartman frames racist-patriarchal historiography by demonstrating his interests, his contradictions and falseabilities. Also, subtly, he goes apart from a critical historiography to say that in the ghettos alleys there was not only violence (HARTMAN, 2017, p.20), beauty, love, dreams, fears, desires were all there. Stories taken from the crowd that could fatally become a film production about acceptance and resistance, about the beauty of a moving dancing body, about free love, on the smiles that escape those awaiting the beginning of the hard and invisible housework.
The work “Life rebels, beautiful experiments”, whether in its method, in its characters or in its development, presents a possibility of reconstructing the memory of the oppressed groups in Brazil. An extensive documentary research on the scraps of the interlaced archives with a literary critical creation that a long timely granting the experiments of freedom produced by the black and indigenous people in their class intercroring, race and gender is a path presented by Saidyia, Hartman.
The book in question perfectly fulfills the central objective announced by the author, explained in the presentation of the critical fabulation, in the praise of deleted/distorted real characters, in the construction of stories about escape and freedom experiments. The work in method, in theme, in narrative construction presents an important investigative and narrative path for the growth of studies on class, race and gender in Brazil, especially in universities. It can therefore be read by all those who are interested in the debate on historical reconstruction, memory and resistance of those who were and are subalternized.
References
FOUCAULT, Michel. A vida dos homens infames. In: Estratégia, poder-saber. Ditos e escritos IV. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2010, p. 203-222.
HARTMAN, Saidiya. A sedução e O ventre do mundo: dois ensaios de Saidiya Hartman. São Paulo: Crocodilo, 2022.
HARTMAN, Saidyia. Perder a mãe: uma jornada pela rota atlântica da escravidão. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2021.
HARTMAN, Saidiya; WILDERSON, Frank. The position on the unthought. University of Nebraska Press, v. 13, n. 2, 2003. Disponível em: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686156. Acesso em: 29 de out. 2023.
HARTMAN, Saidiya. Vênus em dois atos. Revista Eco-Pós, v. 23, n. 3, 2020, p. 12–33. Disponível em: https://revistaecopos.eco.ufrj.br/eco_pos/article/view/27640. Acesso em: 11 de jun., 2023.
Summary of de Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais
Uma nota sobre o método
Personagens
I: Ela caminha a esmo pela cidade
A terrível beleza do gueto
Uma figura menor
Uma mulher mal-amada
Uma história íntima da escravidão e liberdade
Manual do trabalho doméstico geral
Um atlas da rebeldia
Uma crônica de necessidade e desejo
Em um momento de ternura o futuro parece possível
II. A geografia sexual do cinturão negro
O Tenderloin. 41 Street West, 241
61 Street West, 601. Uma nova colônia para pessoas de cor ou Malindy na Pequena África.
Mistah Beauty, a autobiografia de uma mulher ex-de cor. Cenas selecionadas de um filme nunca lançado de Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, anos 1920
Álbuns de família, futuros abortados: uma esposa desiludida se torna artista, Seventh, 1890
III. Belos experimentos
Revolução em tom menor
Rebeldia: uma breve introdução ao possível
A anarquia das garotas de cor reunidas na desordem
HARTMAN, Saidyia. Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais. Editora: Fósforo, 2022. 432p. Review by: RABELO, Danilo dos Santos. Exhumando the Rebellion of the case. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.14, Nov/Dec, 2023. Available at <Exhumando the Rebellion of the case – Danilo dos Santos Rabelo’s (UNB) review of “Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais”, by Saidyia Hartman – Crítica Historiografica (criticahistoriografica.com.br)>.
Exhumando the Rebellion of the case – Danilo dos Santos Rabelo’s (UNB) review of “Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais”, by Saidyia Hartman
Abstract: Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais, by Saidiya Hartman, explores intimate stories of black girls and radical queers, using the critical fabulation method.The goal is to rescue marginalized memories and historical characters, although the explanation of the method is briefly, potentially confusing new readers.
Keywords: Black girls, queers girls, and marginalized characters.
Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais is a work written by Saidiya Hartman. When adding an incisive research in the files to a literary style it was possible to identify that the book aims to dispute the memory of real characters and erased stories, either by the power relationship present in the formation of the archives, or by the dominant interpreters about these collections and their mass documentary.
Saidiya Hartman is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a cultural history researcher and African studies. In addition to the present work, published in 2022, Saidiya Hartman is the author of other books translated into Portuguese: losing her mother: a journey through the Atlantic Route of Slavery (2001) and the seduction and the enemy of power and the womb of the world (2022 ). Although it has written since the end of the nineties, only in the last three years have their books been translated and conveyed in the Brazilian publishing market. Rebel lives, beautiful experiments, distributed in 432 pages, has two initial central chapters for understanding the development of the plots. The first presents the method of critical fabulation, while the second briefly exposes to readers the real characters. The work is divided into three great chapters, appointed as “books” by the author: “Book 1: She walks in the city”; “Book 2: The Sexual Geography of the Black Belt”; “Book 3: Beautiful experiments”.
Given the broadening of the work and the various themes that could be raised from it, three were prioritized in the composition of this review: the method used for the construction of the book – the critical fabulation; the real characters that cross the texts; and the thematic selection and its development.
In the first chapter of the book, Hartman points out that the dedication to historicizing the crowd is always opposed to the need to face authority, power, the limits of the archives. This confrontation to the archive is only possible because the people registered in the wide documentary mass, in police reports, the monographs of the social scientists, in the psychiatric reports, at some point in the past contested, reacted to power relations they sought controlle -las (Foucault, 2010, p.207). Hartman realizes that the same vigilance, punishment and confinement that have described and wrote on paper those bodies as inadequate and promiscuous in the past drag themselves to the present through the archives and their dominant interpreters, which seek to capture a single way to build a memory on them lives.
It is tensioning on the limits of the case/documents added to a literary exercise of creation on the city’s sensory experience (black belts of Philadelphia and New York), the silenced voices and the freedom experiments built in the past than the method of the critical fabulation is created. A method, according to the author, which acts between the archive, the historical revision and the critical fabular transgression about a different existence. A method that creates the land for the presentation of the non-doctors, the tensioning put by black young people and radical queers to the moral codes of an oppressive society. A method that does not aim to rebuild the past as it was, in its entirety, but as it may have been. A careful movement to turn to archives, to the past, to bring out other possibilities of the present.
Although presented the method in three pages, the author could have better detailed the process of birth and production of critical fabulation. For the reader who reaches rebellious lives, beautiful experiments, without first having known critical fabulation through previous texts (HARTMANS; WILDERSON, 2003; HARTMAN, 2020; 2021), can experience a certain strangeness about the Method, its formation, its limits and objectives, since the rapid explanation of the development of the work cannot account for this explanatory/comprehensive exercise.
In the second chapter, Saidyia Hartman makes the presentation of the character (ns). Girls without known names (located in photographs found in the archives), maids, agitating prisoners, young black people who built freedom experiments in a surrounded space. These are also characters mentioned: W. E. B. Du Bois (weaving social research in black ghettos), Ida B. Wells, feminist activist, effervescent political speaker, Billie Holiday, brought to a reformatory after being detained in a “tolerance house” in her youth.
A third group of characters is the “choir”, the conjunction of landless (or non-ordered voices), which in their collective existence improvised dances in the surrounded spaces, denied control, the destination imposed on it. Here, Hartman starts from real characters mostly erased to build a historiography of nonconformity.
The third set of points that deserve to be concerned with the body of the work, the development and the selected stories. If a racist-patriarchal historiography points out the bodies of black young people, the bodies that confront gender duality, such as exotic, inferior, displaced bodies, on the other hand, a historiography that is present as criticism, it does not rarely build an analysis focused exclusively on the Violence, in instruments, in ways in which these bodies are attacked, killed.
Hartman frames racist-patriarchal historiography by demonstrating his interests, his contradictions and falseabilities. Also, subtly, he goes apart from a critical historiography to say that in the ghettos alleys there was not only violence (HARTMAN, 2017, p.20), beauty, love, dreams, fears, desires were all there. Stories taken from the crowd that could fatally become a film production about acceptance and resistance, about the beauty of a moving dancing body, about free love, on the smiles that escape those awaiting the beginning of the hard and invisible housework.
The work “Life rebels, beautiful experiments”, whether in its method, in its characters or in its development, presents a possibility of reconstructing the memory of the oppressed groups in Brazil. An extensive documentary research on the scraps of the interlaced archives with a literary critical creation that a long timely granting the experiments of freedom produced by the black and indigenous people in their class intercroring, race and gender is a path presented by Saidyia, Hartman.
The book in question perfectly fulfills the central objective announced by the author, explained in the presentation of the critical fabulation, in the praise of deleted/distorted real characters, in the construction of stories about escape and freedom experiments. The work in method, in theme, in narrative construction presents an important investigative and narrative path for the growth of studies on class, race and gender in Brazil, especially in universities. It can therefore be read by all those who are interested in the debate on historical reconstruction, memory and resistance of those who were and are subalternized.
References
FOUCAULT, Michel. A vida dos homens infames. In: Estratégia, poder-saber. Ditos e escritos IV. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2010, p. 203-222.
HARTMAN, Saidiya. A sedução e O ventre do mundo: dois ensaios de Saidiya Hartman. São Paulo: Crocodilo, 2022.
HARTMAN, Saidyia. Perder a mãe: uma jornada pela rota atlântica da escravidão. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2021.
HARTMAN, Saidiya; WILDERSON, Frank. The position on the unthought. University of Nebraska Press, v. 13, n. 2, 2003. Disponível em: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686156. Acesso em: 29 de out. 2023.
HARTMAN, Saidiya. Vênus em dois atos. Revista Eco-Pós, v. 23, n. 3, 2020, p. 12–33. Disponível em: https://revistaecopos.eco.ufrj.br/eco_pos/article/view/27640. Acesso em: 11 de jun., 2023.
Summary of de Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais
Uma nota sobre o método
Personagens
I: Ela caminha a esmo pela cidade
A terrível beleza do gueto
Uma figura menor
Uma mulher mal-amada
Uma história íntima da escravidão e liberdade
Manual do trabalho doméstico geral
Um atlas da rebeldia
Uma crônica de necessidade e desejo
Em um momento de ternura o futuro parece possível
II. A geografia sexual do cinturão negro
O Tenderloin. 41 Street West, 241
61 Street West, 601. Uma nova colônia para pessoas de cor ou Malindy na Pequena África.
Mistah Beauty, a autobiografia de uma mulher ex-de cor. Cenas selecionadas de um filme nunca lançado de Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, anos 1920
Álbuns de família, futuros abortados: uma esposa desiludida se torna artista, Seventh, 1890
III. Belos experimentos
Revolução em tom menor
Rebeldia: uma breve introdução ao possível
A anarquia das garotas de cor reunidas na desordem
HARTMAN, Saidyia. Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais. Editora: Fósforo, 2022. 432p. Review by: RABELO, Danilo dos Santos. Exhumando the Rebellion of the case. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.14, Nov/Dec, 2023. Available at <Exhumando the Rebellion of the case – Danilo dos Santos Rabelo’s (UNB) review of “Vidas Rebeldes, Belos Experimentos: Histórias íntimas de meninas negras desordeiras, mulheres encrenqueiras e queers radicais”, by Saidyia Hartman – Crítica Historiografica (criticahistoriografica.com.br)>.
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Danilo dos Santos Rabelo is a master of the Graduate Program in Law of the Universidade Federal de Sergipe (PPGD-UFS), graduated in Law from the same University. He is a doctoral student at the Graduate Program in Law at the Universidade de Brasília (PPGD/UnB), in the line “Criminology, Ethnic-Racial and Gender Studies” and Capes Scholarship. It is part of the “Center for Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Studies (Neabi-UFS) and the “Nucleus of Studies and Research in Black Atlantic Culture and Maré” (NEPCJAN-UnB). Among other work, wrote: Entre o contorno legal da escravidão e o trabalhismo: a manutenção do racismo através de uma autonomia dependente, A Importância das narrativas na construção do ensino jurídico antirracista” (2021), Racismo e cidadania: o processo de vulnerabilização institucional do negro na modernidade (2022), os dois últimos em coautoria com Karyna Batista Sposato. ID: LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/4523129123146854; ID: ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6973-0576; Instagram: @dansrabelo; E-mail: danilo13rabelo@gmail.com.
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