The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors

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About the Author

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997). She has published several articles on slavery, including “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Time of Slavery.” She is completing a book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which examines the sexual upheaval and radical transformation of everyday life that took place in the slums in the early decades of the 20th century.

Notes

See Eduoard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6, 75; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Laboring Women was one of the first historical monographs devoted to examining enslaved women's sexuality and reproductive lives and the centrality of reproduction to the social and legal machinery of colonial slavery.

W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (1935; reprint, New York: The Free Press, 1992), 13, 44, 39, 67.

Angela Davis, “Reflections on Black Women's Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Black Scholar 13 no. 4 (1971): 2–15; Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14 no. 4 (1989): 912–20; Darlene Clark Hine, “Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 3 no. 2 (1979): 123–27.

Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in her Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 203–29; Morgan, Laboring Women; Alys Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Alys Weinbaum, “Gendering the General Strike: W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction and Black Feminism's ‘Propaganda of History’,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 no. 3 (2013): 437–63; Neferti Tadiar, Things Fall Away (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Neferti Tadiar, “Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Social Text 31 no. 2 (2013): 19–48.

Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Spillers, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” 215. Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley describes this anomalous intimacy in terms of a queer Atlantic in “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” GLQ 14 nos. 2–3 (191–215): 191–215. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten describe the experience of the shipped as “hapticality in the hold” in The Undercommons (New York: Autonomedia, 2013).

Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

Jennifer Morgan, “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery,” A Workshop with Jennifer Morgan (Irvine: University of California, Irvine, 2014); Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” 75.

Christina Sharpe, “In the Wake,” The Black Scholar 44 no. 2 (2014): 59–69.

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 73. Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17 no. 3 (2013): 1–15.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899; reprint, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989).

Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Fred Moten, “Uplift and Criminality,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Alys Weinbaum and Susan Gilman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 317–49.

Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Welfare (New York: Basic Civitas Book, 2003); Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,” in Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power, ed. Toni Morrison and Leon Higginbotham (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 323–63; Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities, 11 no. 2 (2013): 237–45.

Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 4, 15.

This is a restatement with a difference of Fred Moten: “All that we have (and are) is what we hold in our outstretched hands.”.

Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 136.