The name of the "Girl No. 1" is not known.

But it has a story.

It "roams the streets of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward and New York's Tenderloin, 1900. She's young and yet so old and hurt." 400 pages will tell.

Novina Goehlsdorf

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper

  • Follow I follow

There are many protagonists and some protagonists.

You may know some of them, like Eleanora Fagan – who later became singer Billie Holiday – or the sociologist WEB Du Bois.

But the list starts with "Girl #1".

It represents all of the girls and young women Hartman gives a starring role to, tracing their journeys through their neighborhoods and lives between 1890 and 1935.

Saidiya Hartman is a professor of African-American literature and cultural history at Columbia University in New York, but is also a major influence outside of academic circles, including among political activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Years before its founding, Hartman wrote of the "state of emergency" in which Black life still finds itself today, which she referred to as the "afterlife of slavery."

Her third book, Aufraessige Leben, schön Experimente, which has now been published in German, also revolves around slavery and its afterlife.

life in a state of emergency

In it she follows the "story of the social revolution and the change in intimate life" that "unfolded in the black city within the city" around the turn of the last century.

After the official abolition of slavery in the United States, many blacks moved to big cities like Philadelphia, New York City or Chicago to leave the plantations in the south and their bondage behind.

What awaited them, however, was a different, often devastatingly similar lack of freedom, poverty and unemployment, discrimination and violence.

This was especially true for girls and women.

Most were able to enter slave-like dependency as domestic servants for white families or prostitutes, were abused at work, on the streets and at home, or raped.

What awaited them were tiny, crowded, barely affordable apartments and rooms in seedy neighborhoods called "Little Africa" ​​or "'Negro' neighborhoods."

In accordance with the legally anchored segregation, the

Color Line

, these were kept separate from the rest of the city and gradually developed into ghettos, monitored by police officers and rent collectors, probation officers, sociologists and so-called social reformers who allegedly wanted to alleviate grievances and often created them in the first place.

What she didn't expect was a future.

Hartman's book is about the confined confines of the "slums," white households, and "correctional homes" where the freed slaves struggled to exist.

But it is also about their rebellion and desire, their celebration of life under hostile conditions: about wresting a "spark of the possible" from nothing.

Celebration of life in hostile conditions

Hartman used archival footage but decisively turned it around.

The archive too, she writes elsewhere, is violent.

It perpetuates the world view of the oppressors and not that of the oppressed, whose existence it usually only testifies to in prison files, psychiatric reports or social science studies, as objects of observation, as a disturbance of order and danger.

Hartman refers to such documents but exposes them in their blindness and brutality.

And she fills the gaps in it with narratives from the perspective of those who have been deprived of subjectivity and voice.