She then reveals the gaps within the archive of slavery and then proceeds to attempt to redress the violence that situates “Venus” as part of the collateral damage of a slave economy. Ultimately, Hartman questions the ability of the archive to hold black stories without re-victimizing their subjects. Venus acts as a point of reckoning for the corporeal death that the slave ship enacts on black enslaved people and the social death that the archive facilitates in its failure to document black lives. More specifically, she wrestles with the erasure of black girls from the public memory of racial violence through an archival encounter with an enslaved “dead girl” named Venus, on board a British slave ship named Recovery, in 1792. ![]() ![]() In her essay Venus in Two Acts Saidiya Hartman interrogates the ability of the archive to document black life in the Middle Passage.
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