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  • A Future Beyond Empire: An Introduction
  • Saidiya Hartman (bio) and Tina Campt (bio)

The hands are clasped in a moment of repose. Labor is at a standstill. In this fixed instant, we experience the sturdiness of these hands as implements of labor and creation, and glimpse an innate delicacy suggested by the openness of the half-embrace. The fingers are loosely entwined, as if the hands fell casually into a gesture suspended between flutter, supplication, and self-caress. The weightlessness of the pose—hands that appear to be floating in space rather than anchored to a body—is contrasted by the downward pull of earth and soil. The white chalky substance, perhaps kaolin, which covers the flesh, endows these hands with gravity. These are hands intimate with the earth and claimed by it. These are hands schooled in ritual. These are hands that catch fish, mend clothes, pick crops, make art, and wash babies.

These hands are singular, yet they evoke other hands. As symbols of the physical labor of reconstruction—the work of making, undoing, and excavating—these hands offer a point of departure for the central themes of this special section of Small Axe, “Reconstructing Womanhood: A Future Beyond Empire.” Each of the essays here engages in the labor of reconstruction, which the authors refer to alternatively as “the stranger’s work,” “deciphering practices,” and “an act of translation.” In each of these iterations, the labor of reconstruction is simultaneously an act of deconstruction.

The essays collected in this special section were originally presented as part of a symposium held in November 2007 at Barnard College and Columbia University, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Hazel Carby’s groundbreaking text Reconstructing [End Page 19] Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist.1 In this genealogy of African American women writers, Carby eschews narratives of tradition and efforts at canonbuilding in favor of an analysis of literary production as a site of struggle in an age dominated by the color line, capitalism, and empire. Reckoning with persons and histories suppressed by narratives of nation, state, property, race, and manhood, Carby attends to the life of the commodity, beginning in the nineteenth century with the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and ending in the twentieth century with the coveted consumer objects that signify the truncated freedom of a “woman embedded within capitalist social relations.” In examining the long history of trafficking in black female bodies, Carby attends to the intimate and domestic spaces of racial capital.

As a decisive work in the fields of literary criticism, African American studies, and feminist theory and historiography, Reconstructing Womanhood provides a model for thinking through the imbrications of racism, sexism, and capitalism, especially at the point at which the “commodity becomes flesh.” Critical to Carby’s labor of reconstruction is an interrogation of the ideology and conventions of womanhood that banished black women from the category of woman and of the racialized exclusions constitutive of humanist discourse. The anniversary symposium revisited the import of this work in relation to issues of rewriting the human, excavating forgotten lives and hidden histories; refashioning masculinities, queer sexualities, and black subjectivities; and imagining a future beyond empire.

No one yearns more fervently for a future beyond empire than the child of empire. No one suffers more greatly the knowledge that the past is not yet past. The tragic entanglement of our era with that of the Atlantic slave trade, the weight of dead generations upon the present, and the seemingly eternal return of empire, albeit in new guises, are the themes that Hazel Carby’s corpus so eloquently addresses. As she writes in her forthcoming memoir “Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post World War II Britain,” “the discursive emergence of the modern black self into Britain’s transatlantic world confounds the contemporary reader’s expectations of the conventions of biography.” Having noted the constellation between our era and the earlier formative moment of black modernity in the Atlantic slave trade, Carby’s self-writing invokes The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, published in 1789, and The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole...

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