#ethn113

“Picture them: The relics of two girls, one cradling the other, plundered innocents; a sailor caught sight of them and later said they were friends. Two world-less girls found a country in each other’s arms. Beside the defeat and the terror, there would be this too: the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility.”

~Saidiya Hartman from Venus in Two Acts

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An Addition to the Glossary of Haunting

Critical Fabulation: The practice of imagining and humanizing the historically marginalized who are usually recorded in the archives as only objects, deaths, and numbers.

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In class we discussed power dynamics that haunt the very grounds of UCSD till this day. Starting from the beginnings of the United States, we brought to light onto how our society was built upon the forced labor and inhumane violence against Black and Indigenious folx. These histories of violence still exists today and can be seen in the horrors of the Compton Cookout that took place in 2010 at UCSD. It can also be seen in the demographics of the student body where less than 3% are black students and 0.43% are native students. Although it takes different forms today, these statistics show how UCSD continues to create a hostile environment for black and native folx. A ghost of the United States historical hostility against these same communities.

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The haunting powers of the archive have been brought to our attention through Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts. Hartman narrates a “counter-history of slavery” where she imagines the stories of black femme slaves recorded as only a number in the archives. In doing so, she makes the reader digest the absolute horror of chattle slavery and its creation of “orphaned beginnings.” The orphaned beginnings in how the slave master has absolute power over every aspect of a slave’s life/being so that they are stripped of their title as “human” and replaced with “object”. The orphaned beginnings of natal alienation that eradicates a slave’s connection to their family, country, and any origin that makes them human. The orphaned beginnings of being degraded, dishonored, and de-dignified until you are no longer considered human. Harter brings all of this into conversation through the ways in which she weaves world-making into the stories of the people who had orphaned beginnings.

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