The Grammar of Violence

“How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”

-Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

In the introduction to her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman asks herself a question that should be at the foundation of all work with the archives of slavery: “[H]ow does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoiced that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features?” In an attempt to answer these provocative questions, she writes, we must not attempt to speak for them or imagine their lives, but engage with the wide modes of resistance from the archive which confines them. These depictions of resistance and their accompanying stories work in defiance of the sum of the anti-slavery archives which are saturated with stories of violence against the Black body. Instead, the physical and ontological violence unfolding before us is enacted in the hands of the subjugated against the subjugator. Each image varies according to the content of the books they are situated in, and thus the intended audience. However, all are entrenched with notions of race, gender, violence, and varied modes of resistance.

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Death of Capt. Ferrer illustrates the 1839 revolt of fifty-three Africans, led by Joseph Cinqué, against the captain of the slave ship Amistad. Published inside a written history of the Amistad rebellion the year following the event, the image privileges Black men’s use of violence against their oppressors, but elides women and children’s participation in the revolt. Undoubtedly, women and children were aboard, but they are left absent from this engraving as an image including their counter-acts of violence would not have been acceptable to the gender politics of the intended audience. The engraver’s decision to depict the rebels as scantily clad in contrast to Captain Ferrer’s “proper” dress – though likely accurate – continues a common trope in depictions of enslaved people that implicitly marks them as inferior to the white men, while also underscoring their  physical vulnerability to acts of violence. Additionally, there is not much differentiation between the enslaved individuals in terms of dress, face, and body as they all seem to be homogenous, lacking individuality and identity. The leader of the revolt, Joseph Cinqué, is not identified within the engraving, only the captain is identifiable. While the men are enacting counter-violence as a means of resistance, they are homogenized and remain othered from the white protagonists of the engraving, signaling that the audience is to find commonality with the captain and not the Africans. 

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A Bold Stroke for Freedom (1872) is markedly different from the other two. This black and white engraving is situated inside William Still’s The Under Ground Railroad. William Still was a Black Abolitionist, historian, and conductor on the Underground Railroad. Still was born free to two former slaves in New Jersey and is often called the “Father of the Underground Railroad” as he helped free more than 800 people. This book is a collection of stories from those he met along the railroad and their narratives towards freedom. Inside the book are a myriad of short stories and pictorial descriptions of what happened to these people, in their own words or through letters and documents. This is a priceless resource as so many of the people and tales who traversed the Underground Railroad are lost in the historical archives, or not even there as secrecy was paramount. On page 125 of Still’s text, we see a pictorial representation of five Black Americans, three women and two men, who have taken their master’s horses and carriage to journey from Virginia to Canada. Along the way, they encountered two white men with guns who threaten recapture. In defiance, the women and men take up arms as a means of resistance to continue their journey to freedom. In the forefront of this engraving are the two women armed with rifles aimed to fire. This engraving illustrates the agency of Black women in their struggle for freedom.

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A more abstract rendering of violence against the institution of slavery in pursuit of freedom lies within Leaven for Dough Faces, an anonymous diatribe against slavery written by a white abolitionist around 1856. On page 42 of the book is a black and white engraving of a white woman with a book in her lap, surrounded by Black children teaching them how to read. The caption on the image is, "Even a woman who teaches a slave to read is dangerous to their masters." The image of a white woman surrounded by Black children subverts the "Black Mammy" stereotype of a Black woman raising white children in the South. The idea of a woman being potentially dangerous to the institution of slavery additionally subverts gender roles as A Bold Stroke for Freedom does. This print and idea are both prescient when contextualized with other objects in the archive as well, which hint at the intersectionality between the women's movement and the Anti-Slavery movement.

These three engravings, produced in different dates and locations, represent varying acts of violence against slavery in the pursuit of freedom. All three were found within the archives and represent violence enacted not upon the Black body, but the institution of slavery, using the white body as a stand in at times, like Captain Ferrer and the white onlookers in Leaven for Dough Faces. Thus, the white bodies in these illustrations become just as symbolic as most Black bodies have been used throughout the archives. These images do not condemn the Black body to death, but the white body in Death of Capt. Ferrer  and A Bold Stroke for Freedom and knowledge previously reserved for only white bodies in Leaven for Dough Faces.