On “Saidiya”

Abstract

This article attempts to address the contemporary turn to astrophysics lexicons in Black feminism by bringing together scholarship on Indian Ocean slavery and Black studies. Through an experimental reading of encounter with Indian Ocean and African slavery in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, the article suggests that exhaustions of representation manifested in the turn to black theories of the subatomic reveal an absolute nonrecuperability of time-as-history. The argument unfolds through an impossible historicization of racial blackness that engages the figure of the black eunuch slave in medieval Persian history. The difficulty of the historicity of race produces and involves crises of origins that manifest in traumatic encounters with trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slavery that explode the scalar coherence made possible by established narratives of racial modernity.