Forgotten Labours

Sadiya Hartman’s “Note on Black Women’s Labors” exemplifies the limitations of using conceptual categories such as race, class, and gender in isolation and is thus a testament to the necessity of the intersectional feminist project in augmenting the narratives of social struggle. In this essay, I will respond to Hartman’s intersectional revamping of the conceptual category of labor and illustrate how the lack of sexual and gendered differentiation undermines the articulations of suffering in the black radical tradition.

Hartman highlights how the seminal works of the black radical tradition by Dubois and C.L.R. James render the agency of the slave wholly legible at the moment they are transformed “along the lines of the insurgent proletariat”. Yet in engendering the black worker with such an agency, these monolithic understandings of labor and the worker are unable to tend to sexual and gendered forms of violence that enable the processes of accumulation. In other words, without sexual and gendered differentiation, the entire narrative of the accumulation of labor, value stands incomplete and the category of labor is rendered insufficient to tell such a narrative.

We must now highlight why and how the narrative of the accumulation of labor value stands incomplete as previously mentioned and thus how the black radical tradition is undermined. Like Angela Davis, Hartman refers to how on the slave ship the categories of flesh and body were used to articulate a new mode of relation such that on the plantation gender held no symbolic integrity, and therefore the “un-gendering” continued. This “fungibility of the slave” and “wanton use of the black body” regardless of gender is expressly what obscures the sexual and gendered differentiation in narratives of resistance. In other words, the collective thingification of the slave overshadows the distinct forms of violence that occurred. One such labor that is obscured is reproductive labor which was crucial in the production of commodities for the market place wherein the “future of the enslaved was a form of speculative value for shareholders”. Such differentiation also allows us to understand the importance of the acts of resistance which the female slave committed such as infanticide and allows us to fill distinct gaps in the black radical tradition. Understanding the multiplicity of the female body which could be used for future increases in the labor force, seeded, murdered, or traded, allows us to understand it as the definitional site in the entire institution of slavery and thus the definitional sites for the forcible extraction of value. Without paying due attention to the reproductive capacities of female slaves, we cannot understand the inheritability of slavery and conscription of the unborn to slavery. In essence, gendered and sexual differentiation allows us to see how slavery functioned at its most fundamental level and narratives that employ monolithic understandings of labor are bound to miss it.

The shortcomings of the black radical tradition with respect to the extraction of value from female bodies become more apparent in narratives about labor after slavery. Black women’s adoption of the role of breadwinners and thus their troubling of gender conventions due to the deliberate destabilization of their kinship networks through slavery troubled Dubois and so his narrative has likely not emphasized how it was black women’s labor that explains the continuities between slavery and freedom for black people. It was black women being forced to labor in white households, limiting their mobility in the labor market, which inspired the economic genocide of the entire community. As Hartman notes, the black woman was forced to sacrifice the well-being of her own children for the children of her white employers, all while being subjected to the risk of sexual abuse and violence within the household. It can be said the gendered and sexual differentiation allows us to see how the valorization of labor value from black bodies is exemplified best through the treatment of female black slaves and servants and therefore the entire black radical tradition is augmented when such narratives are invested in. Such narratives cannot be lumped in under the “template or grid of the black worker” as the works of the black radical tradition have done and instead “nourish the latent text of the fugitive”. Thus the lack of sexual and gendered differentiation undermines articulations of suffering in the black radical tradition.