Enslavement as Regime of Western Modernity: Re-reading Gender Studies Epistemology Through Black Feminist Critique

Abstract

What emerges from Saidiya Hartman's, and Hortense Spillers's work about slavery which I am reading as a rather elaborate argument taking off where Toni Morrison left it with Beloved, is a picture of foundational violence which helped put the modern Euroamerican world's white subjectivity in its place. One of the ways this happened was the structural obliteration of access to gender, that is, gendered subjectivity for black human beings, male or female, while at the same time making black human beings, and particularly females, the target of white transgressively abusive desires of all shades and forms. I will draw out the implications of contemporary meditations on the slave trade for Gender Studies' epistemological horizon. I will follow Hartman's and Spiller's evolving arguments by way of a close reading which challenges (white) gender studies borders erected around the sanctity of gender as the founding difference of western societies.