The Hesitations of Speculative History

4In July of last year, Saidiya Hartman published an article titled "The Anarchy of Colored Girls." It was an accumulation of a style of writing and an approach to the archive that she calls "critical fabulation."1 By that she means a speculative history, one in which the historian tries to capture or evoke the desires of the people who were systematically silenced, archived in a kind of quicksand. Hartman's "critical fabulation" is part of a growing field of historical work that takes the impossibility of recovery as a beginning, not an end, a call to speculate about what could have been, or as Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously said, a call "to make the silences speak for themselves."2 If "state violence" produced "the archival traces" of the lives of the silenced, says Hartman, then "the desire and want of something better decide the contours of the telling."3 Her telling imagines what these "colored girls" might have wanted when their wants are visible only as a crime. She asks a question fundamental to speculative history, how do you think about their power without thinking they were powerful?

Her narration mostly remains at the level of exposition: scene setting and characterization. As readers, we leave with the sense that this fabled colored girl Esther Brown "smashed things up," beat the walls of her prison cell with fists and screams—we leave with a sense of what she did and the environment of racial booby-traps in which she did it, but we get only a vague sense of what she said and how she said it. What is it about imagining the voice of the undervoiced that this method of "critical fabulation," and speculative history more broadly, finds inadmissible? Reading Marisa Fuentes, Lisa Lowe, David Kazanjian, and other writers in line with Hartman, I wonder, why does this genre of narration avoid narration's liveliest moments, moments so alive they supersede and displace the narrator herself?4 I am thinking of dialogue.

The closest we get to dialogue from Hartman's own hand is free indirect discourse, a shadow without the body. Her hypothetical shadows lack the imaginative freedom she affords her expositions. The dialogic quotes from sources, however, are alive, as in one inmate's letter from the Bedford prison case files, "'I tell you Miss Cobb, it is no slave time with colored girls now.'"5 Notice the difference in sonic vividness, flat, almost choked, when Hartman herself imagines the one thing the detective who arrested Esther might have said: "Do you want to have a good time, Brady asked? Rebecca [Esther's friend] gave him the onceover."6 The speech and the description that follow are tonally synonymous. What is it about imagining the voice of the undervoiced, its details and distinctions, that speculative history finds inadmissible? This avoidance of dialogue facilitates a narrative monotone, a univocality that looks a lot like the archive's univocality, a speech in one register, at odds with the effort to hear the "utterances" in "the long history of black radical sound."7 As intricate as Hartman's montage of quotes and authorial license is, I wonder, are we replacing one homogeneity with another or, having benched the defining feature of historical work—the imperative to recover—in favor of speculating out of the silences, does this imaginative hesitance to puzzle the nuances of speech out of lost mouths wisely protect some integrity of the discipline?  Hesitance and pause toward recovery are, after all, the primary orientations Lisa Lowe recommends in her renowned essay, "History Hesitant."8

The main reason I argue that dialogue has a real role to play in speculative history is that silence, negative space, secrets, the blacked out and snuffed out—all the things that are not said—are, paradoxically, the essence of dialogue. What makes dialogue work? Silence. No silence, no dialogue. Dialogue can be a way of imagining the desire for something better, as Hartman says, when the desire cannot nor would not be named, a way of imagining a presence without the violence of presenting it.

I am going to share one of my own experiments with dialogue as an effort to capture an affect outside of hope or despair, which have too often been offered to explain why social movements succeed or fail. The character here, Ms. May, is modeled after Fannie Lou Hamer. I  transform fragments from the archive to render her speech. She is speaking to a composite of contemporary historians, whom I've named McDuffie.

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"After all those years of battle, do you feel you ever won?"

"Ever won...? Won...?" Her voice flickered out, failed. She said, without moving, staring down, "Look at us." Her tendony hands held the frame she took from the table to the right of her Hastings chair. "Look at them two roosters holding that sign. That's me and Fred." She smiled at the figures singing at something out of frame.

Stuttering up from the sunk settee, McDuffie leaned forward, his baby cheeks bronzed by an ache of firelight. Still, he did not understand what she was trying to tell him. "What year was that, Ms. May?"

"Oh dear, I scarcely remember. Seventy-four maybe, spring."

"You mean, after you had lost the farm?"

She chuckled. Gazing at the photo, which was yellowing as if carrying an inside light, she chuckled. There was something other than joy in it. Concern perhaps, perhaps concern. "When I remember that day, those days, when I remember the joy.... Fred and I, marching, singing, the smell of magnolia." Then she ceased, concerned. She did not move, her arms resting on a lap that has no muscularity on a chair that has no life. "I'm sorry you came all this way. But it's getting dark. And with how many miles you still got to go."

McDuffie did not speak. He did not understand.

"Oh, I see. One more question?"

But staring at her face, unmoving, gaunt, her high cheekbones, low-lit by the low-fire, he forgot the question he prepared, so rephrased the last. "By seventy-four you had lost so much. The land, your house, the houses you secured, for what? A hundred, a hundred fifteen families? Then the right to boycott the theft of all that work. What I don't understand is how you kept the hope?"

"Kept the hope....? Hope? That was life, not hope."

He did not understand. She did not turn from the photo to see him not understand. He waited, ready, leaning for an answer. To drive back six hours with no more than the facts he came down here with—no, nonono.

"Mr. McDuffie, how long have you been fighting to strengthen the lives of our people? I'll bet, not long."

"You mean fight so they can tear it down? Why fight to build what they'll just tear down?" Then he saw something, a thought—no, not a thought, a feeling?—flicker from her left eye to her right. Her tone changed, softened, closer than the draft on the nape of his neck. She scratched for his hand and touched him for the first time.

"Fight because in fighting you'll never not be free. Kneel and you'll believe."

He sighed. He had given up. He would make do with what he got. He would write about the weather. And when the writing came, years later, remembering that night, he said, suddenly seeing, I see, I see. To be alive is to thrive. What a ruse to think it was the other way around.

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The trace of subtle kinds of affects murmured in the silences is something I hope this dialogue points to, if not captures. So much of speculative history is about making some sort of song out of the sounds that were recorded as scandalous noise or muted, hence the predominant trope of "listening" throughout Hartman's essay. To think what these figures sounded like is less about recovery than it is about exploring the possibility of affects of desire and anticipation less progressive than hope, subtler than despair. It is to take seriously Hartman's invitation to imagine how "those inside the circle listened for love and disappointment, the longing and the outrage," and maybe something else besides, something in between, "that fueled this collective utterance" by the silenced and the silence.9

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Irvin Hunt is Assistant Professor of English, African American Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Earning his M.A. at The University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2014, his research interests include African American literature and cultural history, humor studies, performance studies, social movement theory, and political theory. His current book manuscript Before the Utopia: A Cultural History of the Black Cooperative Movement, 1890-The Present uncovers how four generations of African American artists—W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and their circles—established local cooperatives as alternative to global capital. He argues that these artists used cooperatives as arenas to experiment with new ways of forming a leftist social movement, exploring the question, how do you chart a movement without investing in progress? His most recent publications have appeared or are forthcoming in African American Literature: In Transition (Cambridge UP), Contemporary Literature, American Literature, Public Books, and American Literary History. His awards and fellowships include a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Rutgers University Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Literature, and Columbia University's John W. Kluge Award for a New Generation of Faculty Excellence.

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