Archiving Black Diasporas: Looking at Photographs with Saidiya Hartman, Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Dionne Brand

The three Black women thinkers and authors whose images I have selected for this essay deploy the portraits of young Black girls, taken in diverse contexts and times, as the medium for enacting a form of countervisuality that “seeks to resituate the terms on which reality is to be understood” (Mirzoeff 2011, 28) and envision (image) a different history of the present. In “speaking for” and “about” (ibid., xv) silenced or subaltern histories, African American Saidiya Hartman, Canadian/American Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Canadian Dionne Brand, born respectively in the United States, Haiti, and Trinidad,¹ make explicit a radical theoria (in the etymological sense of viewing as spectator) aimed at rethinking the way we see the world while recording and evaluating what is seen as a memento of what is not seen. In the process, the act of looking acquires a hermeneutical function: It becomes an act of...